*Read about our new HS Facility at left.

Empowerment Academy Charter High School

At Empowerment Academy, our plan is to continue adding one grade level per year until, in 2026, we offer all grade levels K-12. As our grade level span stretches through high school, our mission will not change, but our curriculum and extracurricular offerings will broaden dramatically and instruction will become much more customized to each individual scholar’s needs and interests.

Our High School is located at 70 Claremont Avenue, the former Our Lady of Sorrows School. For 2024 - 2025 it serves 9th & 10th grade and will add a grade each year until it is a 9-12 High School in the 2026-2027 School Year. 

The new, permanent high school facility will be located on a large tract of land adjacent to the current school. 

Charter schools receive less taxpayer funding than traditional public schools, and don’t get a penny of taxpayer money for school construction. Locating two high schools next to each other creates cost-sharing efficiencies that will be making it affordable for Empowerment Academy and BelovED to enjoy the most modern, and also the most beautiful, high school facilities in Jersey City.

Co-location will also make it possible for the schools, through shared services agreements, to share some teachers and offer an expanded selection of elective, advanced placement, and college-credit-earning courses, plus an expanded selection of extracurricular activities and sports programs.

High School Academic Program

College Preparatory | Empowerment Academy is a college-preparatory school. Its academic program is designed to prepare the school’s scholars to succeed at college and to enable them to begin earning college credits while yet in high school so obtaining a college degree becomes less expensive. 2 Not every Empowerment Academy scholar will choose to attend college – but we are convinced that every Empowerment Academy scholar will need college-level skills to succeed in the economy of the future, no matter what career a scholar pursues. At our sister charter school, BelovED, as of early November 2022, over 90% of seniors had applied to college and over 70% had already received early admission acceptance to a least one school. More of their scholars will apply and be accepted by colleges in the months ahead. We expect that our statistics in these regards will be similar.

Rigorous Customized Instruction | Our high school will customize learning. One high school scholar’s writing skills may be above grade level while their math skills are below grade level. A second scholar’s skill levels in these two subject areas may be the reverse. Rather than teaching to the mean, Empowerment Academy’s high school education program is designed to provide rigorous instruction that consistently meets scholars where they are in a particular subject area and then supports each scholar making the most rapid learning gains possible. Scholars with college level skills in a particular subject area will be able to receive college-level instruction in that subject area. Scholars with below grade level skills in a subject area will receive instruction targeted towards helping the scholar catch up to grade level as rapidly as possible.

Mini-Course, Online and Off-Campus Learning Opportunities, In grades Eleven and Twelve, Empowerment Academy will offer scholars opportunities to choose from among an extremely extensive range of Elective, Honors, and Advanced Placement classes: some lasting half a semester, some a whole semester, and some a whole year. Some will be taught in Empowerment Academy classrooms, some online, and some off-campus. All will be for high school graduation credit and some will be for college credit, as well, while others are for the sake of personal interest, career investigation, or general knowledge/ horizon expansion.

Empowerment Academy Mini-Courses will enable scholars to enroll in a succession of on-campus, half-semester courses targeted to providing scholars with enormously valuable, horizon-expanding introductions to diverse important subjects and principles and possible careers. For example, a scholar thinking about a future in business might choose to enroll in a 10-week Personal Finance course, followed by a 10-week Budgeting and Accounting course, followed by a 10-week Enterprise Finance course (in which scholars learn how small and large businesses get financed), followed by a 10-week Portrait Drawing course that enables the scholar to explore his or her artistic side. Most of these Mini-Courses will be taught by Empowerment Academy teachers with “Visiting Professors” (such as area academicians, business people, or artists) regularly making presentations to help students get a real world understanding of the subject related career opportunities  

Scholars interested in studying a subject not offered at Empowerment Academy will be able to enroll in a course offered online, or receive off-campus instruction once or twice a week at an area high school or college that offers the desired instruction.

Research indicates that the academic intensity of a scholar’s high school curriculum provides momentum that helps the scholar successfully complete college. Nothing better prepares a student for college success than taking rigorous, college-level courses with actual college professors in actual college classrooms (physical or virtual) while in the process earning college credits that will lower the scholar’s cost for completing college.

The Transition to a Grade 9-12 High School

To grow from a K-8 school to a K-12 school, Empowerment Academy will pursue the same model successfully implemented by our sister school, BelovED. 

In SY23-24, we launch a Ninth Grade Academy with its own facility at 70 Claremont Ave. with its own leadership team, student support professionals, academic programs and systems, uniforms, student culture systems and extracurricular activities, etc. The academy will intensively focus on readying students to succeed not only in high school, but also in college and/or career training programs of interest.

Each year, as we add an additional grade level, we will expand the academic options and extracurricular activities offered. A particularly big jump in courses and activities offered will occur in the near future when both schools co-locate to the new, adjacent high school facilities for which construction will begin in 2023.

The exceptional new facilities that our high school students will occupy will support exceptionally high level programs that our current facilities, and most Jersey City school facilities, simply cannot. For example, to offer top-flight science programs you need fully outfitted Biology, Chemistry and Physics Labs. To offer cutting-edge design programs you need a Technology Lab and Maker Space outfitted with CAD-technology. To offer top-level Music, Dance, Theater and Performance programs, you need not just a music classroom, but instrumental practice rooms, dance practice spaces, an acoustically excellent theater, and an audio and film recording studio. Our current facilities do not have such spaces. Our new high school will. (Read about the facility by clicking at left.)

But it’s not just the quality of our new facilities that will make a difference. Having an increased number of high schoolers on site will also increase the breadth of courses that can be taught inperson. Were Empowerment Academy’s 480 high schoolers at a separate site, students interested in less popular electives might need to take some such courses online with a teacher located elsewhere. With the addition of 480 BelovED high schoolers next door, it will become economically viable for teachers of such subjects, working half-time at each school, to provide instruction to our and BelovED’s students in-person.

Co-location will also enable Empowerment scholars to enjoy a broader array of sports programs and afterschool activities at the high school level. For example, we might not have enough students interested in fencing or judo to field a team. But with permission from the scholastic leagues to which we belong, we may well have enough athletes between the two schools to field a combined team.

Admission to Our High School

Empowerment Academy currently serves grade levels K-8. It has received state approval to offer ninth grade in SY23-24 and anticipates receiving state approval to offer tenth grade in SY2024-25, eleventh grade in SY2025-26, and twelfth grade in SY2026-2027. All grade levels will have approximately 120 students. Any Empowerment Academy student enrolled at one grade level will automatically be able to continue with us to the next if it is offered. If, after admitting SY22-23 Empowerment Academy eighth graders, our SY23-24 Ninth Grade Academy still has spaces left to fill, admission will be by lottery.

We encourage all current Empowerment Academy students to stay with us from one grade level to the next so as not to lose their automatic high school seat. You will be able to indicate your interest in doing so this Spring when Empowerment Academy reaches out to you about next school year. We encourage those from other schools who want to attend Empowerment Academy’s high school to consider transferring to Empowerment Academy in this current SY22-23, so as to be able to gain an automatic high school seat. There are presently some open seats at a few grade levels available to be filled immediately. You can apply for SY22-23 admission to Empowerment Academy at https://www.eacsnj.org/admissions/. If there are not seats available at the relevant grade level, you will be put on a waiting list and if a seat opens up, we’ll reach out and offer it to you.

For non-Empowerment Academy students who don’t want to leave their present school before the end of this school year, you can apply for SY23-24 admission to Empowerment Academy at https://www.eacsnj.org/admissions/. Apply now – it only takes a minute – or at the latest by January 14, 2023, as this is the cutoff date for entry into Empowerment Academy’s admissions lottery. Those who apply after this date will be tacked onto the end of what could be a very long wait list.

NOTE: There are not many charter public or private high schools in Jersey City. Our sister school, BelovED, receives more applications for its Ninth Grade Academy than for any other grade level, as scholars from traditional public, charter public and private K-8 schools seek admission. But most Ninth Grade Academy seats at BelovED are automatically taken by BelovED eighth graders who are moving up. This creates a lottery where there are far more outside applicants looking for a seat than there are remaining seats to fill.

We expect that it will be the same for Empowerment Academy’s Ninth Grade Academy. The only certain way to gain admission will be for a student to be enrolled at Empowerment Academy before the end of the student’s eighth grade year and then to stay with us as one moves up from one grade level to the next.