Before she was 10, Harley had already made her way through some of the Twilight Saga and other books. But she faced daunting challenges. No one in her family had gone to college. Her mother, a home health aide, moved yearly to flee gang violence. They depended on food stamps and subsidized housing. Harley suffered from a spine ailment and later, migraines, anxiety and depression.
Harley’s new school focused on helping her recognize her professional potential. Starting in eighth grade, she spent time every summer at Rutgers University, where she built paintball guns, pinball machines and solar heaters in an engineering program.
North Star rewarded good students with college trips. At 11, Harley visited Washington, where she saw Georgetown and George Washington universities. The next year, her class went to the Florida Everglades and to nearby college campuses.
By the time she was a high school senior, Harley had visited dozens of schools. All along, in addition to tracking its students, North Star closely studied success rates for first-generation students at various colleges in preparation for sending more alumni.
After her junior year, Harley joined an additional program, All Stars, which featured an internship in the Newark office of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Glenessa Gordon, an executive and one of the few female civil engineers there, saw her promise. Like Harley, Gordon is Black.
“I had to create a budget and interview other engineers,” Harley said. “She pushed me on college and career. She made me write a paper on why I wanted to be a civil engineer.”
In part, North Star encouraged such interactions to prevent a common feeling from plaguing underprivileged students: a sense that they don’t belong.
Stanford University sociologists Gregory Walton and Geoffrey Cohen coined the concept of “belonging uncertainty.” When Black students at an elite college have a bad day, they tend to assume that they’re in the wrong place, whereas White students shrug it off.
No one played a bigger role in helping Harley gain a sense of herself than Anna Taylor, a former teacher assigned by North Star to be her mentor and coach. (Taylor now oversees a staff of such coaches.)
“Anna’s my second mother,” Harley said. “I don’t know where I’d be without her.”
In 2014, Harley won a full scholarship to the New Jersey Institute of Technology, where Gordon, the Port Authority mentor, had earned her degree.
In an earlier era, Uncommon Schools would have declared its mission accomplished—not so for Harley and her cohort of classmates.