Beloved Community Charter School

Beloved Community Charter School

Only about half of the incoming freshmen in Jersey City’s public high schools pass New Jersey’s high school proficiency test four years later and graduate. Beloved Community Charter School is being established to change this tragic, all too common urban reality.

The education model at the School's heart wraps powerful values and character development protocols, rooted in Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s concept of the “Beloved Community,” around the most sustainable and scalable best-practices of America’s top-performing charter school operators and a proven education program (licensed from Sabis Educational Systems) that is exceptionally effective without over-stressing school leaders and teachers.

Dr. King affirmed the historic American notion that justice requires the securing of each individual’s natural rights, and he believed that securing such rights facilitated individual and societal well-being. But Dr. King said, “Our ultimate end must be the creation of the Beloved Community,” by which he meant a society where people care about one another and perceive their well-being as intimately connected to every other person’s. "We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality," he said. “The ‘I’ cannot attain fulfillment without the ‘Thou.’”

The founders of Beloved Community Charter School share these convictions and believe that an education which makes children feel loved, that leads them to care about one another and to want to develop their minds and potential to positively contribute to their communities, and that successfully teaches the high level skills and knowledge necessary to make such contributions, will work to advance societal goals as diverse as individual happiness, social comity and national prosperity.

Thus the mission of Beloved Community Charter School is to develop values, skills, knowledge, confidence and character in its students that will lead them to care not only about themselves but about their peers and humankind; will propel them to success at the school, in college, and in their careers; and will help them realize the fulfillment of a socially contributory life.

The School's Board members will be seeking to refine their model in a way that facilitates its adoption by district-operated public schools and spur improvements in public education far beyond the Beloved Community Charter School network.