Camden children and families require an equitable future. There's more work to do.

If you paid attention to the back-to-school news this fall, you may have noticed a theme in Camden: the opening of more new and fully renovated school buildings.

On Sept.18, Camden City School District and state officials came together to announce plans for a brand new Eastside High School building. In late August, Uncommon Schools Camden Prep opened their brand new high school and KIPP Hatch Middle School welcomed students to a fully renovated building — both serving neighborhood students under the city’s renaissance school model. These openings all come after a brand new Camden High School opened in 2021.

We join with the sentiment shared by Camden City School Superintendent Katrina McCombs at the Eastside announcement: "I am grateful that our collective efforts have demonstrated and revealed that all of Camden's children, all of them, are valued. Because we're not just building a school, we're building a stronger, more sustainable, and equitable future.”

When looking around at federal, state and local governments across the country in recent years, it can be easy to get discouraged. Very often it has felt like our government and school districts were unresponsive or overwhelmed by challenging events. But it is precisely because of the challenges we’ve faced in recent years that it is important to celebrate and encourage progress where we see it, and Camden is a great example of what happens when state and local leaders put egos aside and come together to plan for a future that puts students and community members first. Our leaders at the state and school district levels, along with thousands of staff, contractors, and tradespeople who do the work everyday deserve credit for this.

And while new school buildings will not solve all of our children’s challenges, as McCombs points out, they are a powerful statement about our values — and in particular, they show how much we value our students in Camden.

With this latest announcement, nearly $600 million will be invested or committed to new school buildings in Camden over the last 10 years. This investment has resulted in six brand new school buildings and nine fully renovated buildings, which together will serve over 7,500 students when they are all completed and full (this is out of 16,000 students total who attend public schools in Camden). This means that nearly half of all Camden students will have the opportunity to walk into and experience vastly improved and more modern learning environments than students in the same schools and neighborhoods experienced just ten years ago.

The new Eastside High School builds on this momentum and symbolizes another positive step in the right direction as Camden City School District works to both modernize facilities for Camden students and be responsive to what families say they want more of — which in this case is a school with facilities equipped for a focus on new career training and pathway programs that will expose and prepare students for successful future in college or a career.

More:Eastside High School ceremony celebrates building's planned demolition

New facilities like the one coming to Eastside and recently completed at Camden Prep complement the many innovative school models in our city and are being combined with new partnerships and programs designed to better support Camden students and educators as they work to improve academic outcomes. Support we know is much needed as we continue to help our students catch up coming out of the pandemic, to regain the momentum and learning growth they were making in previous years.

And while we have a long way to go to provide an education that helps all Camden students fulfill their vast potential long-term, these continued facilities improvements directly benefit thousands of students right now and show more and more people that Camden is a city on the rise.

In our efforts to move forward, let’s look proudly on what we’ve accomplished in the very recent past, and use it as motivation to build on this work to accelerate our children’s learning. As we do this, we can help continue to grow toward a reality where Camden isn’t just a city on the rise, but a community that prioritizes and values our youth, and is one of the best places to raise children in our region.

Victor Carstarphen is mayor of Camden and Giana Campbell is executive director of the Camden Education Fund.