MEMPHIS, Tenn. — A thousand miles from Newark, in a tiny old school building tucked behind a Christian church, Cary Booker delivered the bad news.

It was spring of 2011, and Omni Prep Academy, the Tennessee charter school co-founded and led by U.S. Sen. Cory Booker’s older brother, could no longer pay its kindergarten and first-grade teachers, the elder Booker announced, according to former teachers who were in the room.

The financial woes weren’t a shock — when the school opened the previous fall it provided no books, no curriculum and almost no training for its novice educators, former teachers said in interviews with NJ Advance Media. But now the charming and charismatic face of the school offered no solution.

Instead, Cary Booker cried, former teachers said. The staff was largely unmoved and began quitting weeks later.

Five years after that — with the school consistently ranked near the bottom of state rankings — Omni Prep was ordered to close.

“They had no idea what the hell they were doing,” said Donnie Houston, a former Omni Prep principal who criticized Cary Booker, now 52, and his co-founder Marc Willis. “They had no clue, and it was really just, for lack of a better word, a clusterf---. Excuse my French, but it was.”

Omni Prep, which primarily served minority children in one of America’s poorest metro areas, was ordered to close by Shelby County Schools in 2016. Its appeal to the state was rejected, with a top Tennessee education official writing the school “continually failed to meet the most minimal of performance standards.”

But rising from these ashes the following year was Cary Booker, who would go on to land a top education job in New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration.

After working as a policy consultant on Murphy’s campaign in 2017, Cary Booker became the administration’s senior education adviser in 2018, earning $120,000. This June, six days before Murphy stumped for Cory Booker’s presidential campaign in Iowa, the Democratic governor’s administration awarded Cary Booker a new $150,000 position leading the state’s Division of Early Childhood Education, which focuses on birth to third grade.

Yet Cary Booker has never worked in preschools in any capacity, and his primary experience with young elementary school students was at Omni Prep, according to a resume obtained through an open records request. His tenure as an administrator at the small charter school should raise questions about how qualified he is to lead a department shaping pre-K and early elementary education for an entire state, former employees said.

“The only reason he got that job is his brother,” said Houston, who said Booker let him go for financial reasons during Omni Prep’s inaugural year. “I don’t know who would entrust him with that kind of authority, autonomy and responsibility.

“Why on God’s green earth would you give a guy that kind of responsibility?”

Cary Booker declined NJ Advance Media’s request to interview him for this story. In a statement, he said the first year at Omni Prep was “admittedly the most challenging” of his career.

He previously blamed Omni Prep’s financial problems on low enrollment and acknowledged teachers received “40 percent” of the planned training before school opened, according to reports in Memphis newspapers.

“Although our school eventually closed, I’m proud of our hard work,” he said in his statement to NJ Advance Media. “Since returning to New Jersey, I’ve had the privilege of being part of a team that has strengthened public education from pre-K through an associates degree.”

A resume provided to New Jersey’s state government made no mention of Omni Prep’s closing. Murphy’s administration did not answer questions about whether Cary Booker informed the state that the school he co-founded was ordered to shut down.

In a statement, Gov. Phil Murphy expressed confidence in Cary Booker, who has worked in education-related jobs for 30 years, primarily at the college level, including a stint as an administrator at Rutgers-Newark.

“Cary’s commitment to public education comes without qualification,” Murphy said in the statement. “He brings a vital perspective on how early childhood education will influence a child’s potential and an enthusiastic vision to his work."

State Education Commissioner Lamont Repollet offered Cary Booker the position because he thinks he has the skillset, policy background, and leadership skills to lead Murphy’s expansion of preschool, Repollet said in a statement.

Those who knew Cary Booker at Omni Prep remain skeptical.

NJ Advance Media interviews with six former school employees, a meeting with former students in Memphis, and a review of Tennessee state documents reveal a school wholly unprepared to open and nowhere close to achieving its lofty goals.

“When Cory Booker made a name for himself, all the Omni Prep teachers that I still talk to and am friends with, we all looked at each other and said, ‘This is going to come back. We are going to have to talk about Omni, because Cary is going to get some special treatment because of his last name,’” said Madison Major, a former Omni Prep teacher who resigned in 2011 and became an attorney.

“And here we are,” she said.

Omni Prep Academy principal Donnie Houston and fifth-grader Savanna Hulbert during the 2010-11 school year.

A TROUBLED BEGINNING

There was a time when Nicole Gates-Hulbert couldn’t wait to send her children to Omni Prep.

The family had recently moved from Illinois to Memphis, and Gates-Hulbert’s second-oldest daughter, Savanna, wasn’t challenged by the fourth-grade class in her Memphis neighborhood school. So, when a representative from Omni Prep visited Gates’ church in the summer of 2010 to pitch a charter school with an emphasis on music and technology, the mother of four was sold.

“Everything seemed on the up and up,” Gates-Hulbert, who then worked in county government, said in an interview. “I was really impressed with what they were saying they were going to offer.”

The school launched with kindergarten, first grade, fifth grade and sixth grade in its first year. (It is typical for charter schools to open in this fashion, and then have a natural expansion as kids from the lower grades move up.) That August, Savanna, a fifth-grader, and her twin kindergarten sisters, Brooklyn and Bheanna, were off to Omni Prep Academy, a two-story rectangular building with a single hallway lined by classrooms on both sides.

Almost a decade later, Gates-Hulbert is still upset about what happened next.

“Every time I hear the name of that school, I just cringe,” said Gates-Hulbert, who served as a parent liaison to the charter school’s board. “Our girls missed out on a lot of basic education, a lot of things that they needed at that time. For that, I absolutely resent that school and I resent Mr. Booker.”

Cary Booker, who is named after his father and resembles Cory Booker (he has been called his brother’s doppelgänger), largely has kept a low profile despite his brother’s celebrity. A 1989 Amherst College graduate who took doctoral courses in social psychology at the University of Texas, he’s made a career in education beginning with his first job at IBM, where he designed programs to expose teachers to technology.

He first arrived in Memphis in 1999 to teach at Lemoyne-Owen College, a historically black private college, according to his resume. He was an assistant professor for three years and became an assistant dean of academic affairs before leaving in 2002, the same year Cory Booker made his first, unsuccessful bid for Newark mayor.

As Cory Booker rose in stature, Rutgers-Newark hired Cary Booker as an associate dean of academic affairs in 2003. After four years, he returned to Memphis to become chancellor of the Soulsville Charter School, a well-regarded college prep high school just a block from the Lemoyne-Owen campus.

Charter schools like Soulsville had sprouted up throughout the country as an alternative for parents hungry for choice and desperate to give their kids get a fair shot, especially in cities with high poverty and low graduation rates like Memphis.

Publicly funded but operated by unelected boards with little oversight, charter schools have been highly controversial. The best push students academically and send them to college. The worst fail students and get shut down, sometimes exposed as money-making schemes in the process.

In Tennessee, anyone can open a charter school as long as the organization is a non-profit, non-religious school and gets authorized by the local school district.

While at Soulsville, Cary Booker developed a vision to launch a charter school with Willis, the son of prominent Memphis civil rights leader A.W. Willis.

Omni Prep was intended to be the first in a new chain of Memphis charter schools, according to a 43-page strategic plan obtained by NJ Advance Media. Willis, who did not respond to multiple interview requests, and Booker imagined eventually opening 11 schools serving 4,000 students across five campuses.

Problems began when plans to open the first school near the heart of Memphis fell through, and Omni Prep had no building until right before it opened, Houston, the former principal said. Having no address to advertise made it difficult to recruit students, Houston said, even as the school put together its teaching staff.

“The goal was to get high-achieving (graduates) from good schools who have no training and experience in teaching,” said Felice Ling, who was recruited from Amherst College to teach first grade. “More or less, the whole school was based off that.”

The young teachers expected to get training from their new employer, they said. But weeks of scheduled professional development sessions were instead cut short to solve a major crisis: The school had enrolled fewer than a dozen students by the summer, Houston said.

Though Omni Prep would eventually settle on a location in a residential area on the outskirts of Memphis, teachers said they were ordered to knock on doors to recruit students about 15 minutes away in Frayser, one of the poorest zip codes in the city, they said.

The lack of a building nullified the groundwork the founders had laid for recruiting, Cary Booker said in a 2011 interview with The Commercial Appeal. Door knocking is a common tactic for charter school recruitment, but sending a predominantly white teaching staff into largely African American neighborhoods seemed futile, teachers said.

“These were young kids, fresh out of college, 21-years-old, 22-years-old,” Houston said. “We are in the inner city of Memphis… knocking on housing project doors.”

The recruiting trips seemed to yield few new students, teachers said. One teacher had a weapon pulled on her, though Houston and others couldn’t recall if it was a gun or a knife.

“I know (she) was shaking to her core,” Houston said of the teacher.

The school eventually enrolled about 175 students in 2010-11, far short of the planned 320, according to The Commercial Appeal. Cary Booker’s resume says he “supervised the opening of the campus and the ongoing implementation and refinement of school systems and procedures.”

But the school opened with no textbooks or reading books (the goal was to be a digital school) unless teachers bought them personally, they said. And while Omni Prep was supposed to have a teacher-designed curriculum, its teachers were given little direction or guidance on how to create one. In addition, promised coaching and training rarely happened, teachers said.

Cary Booker characterized planned training as “truncated significantly” in a 2011 interview with the Memphis Flyer, a large weekly newspaper.

Ling, who majored in English and anthropology in college, resorted to searching for curriculum on the internet, she said. She walked into her classroom feeling “very unprepared” and “had no idea what was going on,” she said.

Eventually, Omni Prep purchased a curriculum when it “became obvious” plans for a teacher-created curriculum needed more support, Cary Booker told the Memphis Flyer. However, he rejected the notion that the school opened with no curriculum, saying ‘From one perspective you could accept that… I just really don’t.”

Cary Booker was also responsible for “overseeing the daily campus operation” at Omni Prep, according to his resume, and former employees described him as smart and articulate with good intentions. But teachers said it seemed he was mostly absent from the school unless he was giving a tour to prospective donors or making an announcement.

He made $76,500 in the first school year and earned a $92,500 salary by the time the school was ordered to close, according to 990 tax forms filed by Omni Prep.

“If it was my school, I would have been in the classroom every single day making sure it was running smoothly,” Major said.

What was Cary Booker doing that first year?

“I have no idea what he did,” she said.

The former site of Omni Prep Academy in Memphis.

COLD PIZZA AND NO PLAYGROUND

Eight years after her mom pulled her out of Omni Prep, Savanna still has one very big complaint about the school: The food.

Omni Prep had no kitchen or cafeteria, so students were left to eat cold lunch meat sandwiches at their desks every day for weeks, according to a list of grievances drafted by teachers in 2011 and obtained by NJ Advance Media.

When parents finally spoke up, the school tried heating up frozen chicken pot pie or bringing in Little Caesar’s pizza, Savanna, now 19, said in an interview.

“That pizza was cold,” Savanna said.

Lunch was far from the only problem.

Special education students weren’t getting required services under their individualized education plans, former employees said. Not all staff members were fingerprinted for background checks. There was no playground, so recess was in the grass outside the school, with no fence or barrier to contain the students.

All the while, there was no reading curriculum until midway through the school year and still no math curriculum in April, according to teachers.

Savanna recalls one teacher bringing in a college math book to guide his lessons.

The promise of a school centered on technology was empty, Savanna said. New SmartBoards were rarely used, and students got in trouble if they touched them, she recalled.

Former employees said there was a set of iPads, but not enough for every student in the school and not enough technology to replace textbooks or a reading curriculum for young students.

“It was a disaster,” said one former teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she still teaches in the Memphis area. “On a scale of 1-10 you couldn’t even rate it. Negative.”

When the paychecks stopped coming, teachers gave Booker and Willis a deadline to make them whole, they said.

Gates-Hulbert, the parent liaison to the school board, remembers sitting at multiple board meetings without hearing a word of financial problems. She didn’t find out until she received an apologetic phone call from her twins’ teacher saying she had quit, along with most of the kindergarten and first-grade teachers.

Gates-Hulbert pulled Savanna from Omni Prep but decided to let the twins finish out the school year because they were only in kindergarten. As many as 40 students were pooled into one class, she said.

When the twins started at a new school the next year, it became a long struggle to catch up with their classmates, Gates-Hulbert said.

“I felt so behind,” Brooklyn, now 14, said. “In reading and writing, I was like, ‘I don’t know what y’all are talking about.’”

Cory Booker, left, gets a hug from his brother Cary after his loss in the Newark mayoral race in 2002.SL

‘SIGNIFICANT UNDERPEFORMANCE’

Despite this tumultuous first year, Omni Prep stayed open and expanded into a K-8 school. The troubled charter school appeared to be back on its feet when it received a visit from a certain celebrity mayor two years later.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker, in a suit and a blue checkered tie, moved from classroom to classroom, asking kids if they called his brother “Mr. Booger” and calling the staff “modern-day freedom fighters,” according to a report in the Commercial Appeal.

The visit from a soon-to-be-senator earned Omni Prep Academy one of its best local press clippings. But the school would be closed within three years.

The charter school couldn’t raise test scores enough to escape from Tennessee’s priority list for the lowest-performing public schools. No more than 36 percent of students in each middle school grade scored proficient on their state reading or math exams in 2014-15.

Plans to open more Omni schools never made it past Shelby County Schools, which had the power to approve or deny any expansion proposals. The district has authorized other charter schools since then and more than 50 charter schools remain open in the district.

In 2013, Cary Booker transitioned to a new role as vice president of Omni, leading external affairs operations and government and media relations, while providing oversight and support for the central office, according to his resume. He was no longer at the school every day, he said in a statement.

Then, in a stunning blow to the school, it was all over.

The Shelby County School District abruptly ordered Omni Prep to close for poor performance in the spring of 2016. Blindsided, Cary Booker and Omni Prep families spoke before the state Board of Education to appeal the closure, which critics called a cost-saving move by the school district.

The charter revocation was upheld, with the state Board of Education’s executive writing Omni Prep “had a continued pattern of significant underperformance toward its achievement goals.”

Cary Booker would soon be back in New Jersey working on Murphy’s policy team during the 2017 campaign.

After the election, he was appointed the governor’s senior education policy adviser, working behind the scenes to develop policy and meet education stakeholders and community members, according to a senior administration official who was not authorized to speak on the record.

The official said his new role calls for overseeing New Jersey’s more than $800 million investment in public preschool, an initiative he worked on as a policy adviser.

“My goal is to make sure we don’t let kids slip through the cracks," Cary Booker said in June.

Gates-Hulbert, who said she watched her daughters suffer academically after their experience at Omni Prep, doesn’t think the fit makes sense.

“From the way he did kids here, I would hate to see him oversee another program and then it drops,” she said.

Correction: A previous version of this article stated Cary Booker has a doctoral degree in social psychology. He only took doctoral courses in the subject.

Adam Clark may be reached at adam_clark@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on twitter at @realAdamClark. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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