A New Eastside High Is Rising in Camden, and the Freshmen Who’ll Walk Its Halls Are in Grade School Right Now

CAMDEN — Here is a fact that will do something strange to you if you sit with it: the first freshmen to walk through the doors of Camden’s new Eastside High School are, at this moment, in grade school. Some of them are losing baby teeth. They don’t know yet that a building is being planned for them, that bids are being opened on their behalf, that grown-ups in meeting rooms are arguing over square footage and sightlines and shop-class ventilation so that one September morning years from now, those kids can show up as freshmen to a school that didn’t exist when they were learning cursive.

The New Jersey Schools Development Authority, which is building the school for the Camden City School District, has a public bid opening set for October 14 on the new Eastside High construction project, with the school anticipated to open its doors in September 2029. Read quickly, that’s a scheduling note. Read slowly, it’s a promise made to children who can’t yet understand it — the longest, most patient kind of promise a community makes.

A headline about what’s coming

I love these stories, honestly, because they’re the opposite of how we usually talk about cities like Camden. The headlines tend to be about what’s wrong, what’s been lost, what needs fixing. A new high school is a headline about what’s coming. You don’t pour concrete for a building that opens in 2029 unless some part of you believes in 2029 — believes there will be a Camden worth building for, and students worth building it.

You don’t pour concrete for a building that opens in 2029 unless some part of you believes in 2029Max Cedar

What struck me most about the plans is the emphasis on career and technical education — the new Eastside is designed to expand hands-on CTE programming, the kind that teaches a kid to wire a panel, run a welding bead, write code, read a blueprint, cook on a line, fix an engine. That’s not a small thing in a city that knows exactly what happens when the work dries up. It’s a school built on the idea that a diploma should come with a skill in your hands and a door it opens. For a lot of Camden families, that’s not an educational philosophy. That’s a lifeline, and a bet on the next generation making it right here instead of somewhere else.

Picture the people in it

A building is just a building until you picture the people in it. So picture it. Picture the kid who struggles with a textbook but comes alive at a workbench, finally in a room designed for how she actually learns. Picture the shop teacher who’s spent years making do, finally handed tools and space worthy of the students. Picture the parent at a 2029 orientation, looking up at a brand-new school in a neighborhood that’s been told too many times to wait its turn, thinking: this one’s ours.

That’s a long way off. There will be delays, because there are always delays. There will be budget fights and construction headaches and all the unglamorous grind of turning a plan into a place. But the most important work on the new Eastside High right now isn’t happening at the site at all. It’s happening in classrooms across Camden, where the Class of 2033 is currently in sixth grade — and has no idea a school is being built just for them.

Somebody’s thinking about those kids’ futures before they’re old enough to think about it themselves. In my book, that’s about the best thing a community can do.

Based on reporting from the Camden City School District and the New Jersey Schools Development Authority.