New Haven Independent

Nathan Hill was one of the workers putting finishing touches on the outside of Barnard, which sits at the corner of Derby Avenue and Ella T. Grasso Boulevard in the West River neighborhood.The school, with an environmental studies theme, is the second largest solar-powered public building in the state. All the teachers wear stylish and practical khaki shirts embroidered with the school name.

After the solar song, Drucker led her students outside to the courtyard, where each child helped turn some soil in preparation for planting a butterfly garden.

“Why do we call it a butterfly garden?” she asked. “Because it’s for butterflies,” one little girl explained.

Another first grade class was getting a tour of their new environment, as their teacher explained joyfully that they would now have an art room, which they lacked in their old temporary school building.

On to John C. Daniels School on Congress Avenue in the Hill. It combines the student bodies from Welch Annex and Prince School, two very old schools several blocks away. It’s a bilingual school, where the kids learn both Spanish and English. About 60 percent of the students are Latino, said Gina Wells, the principal.

One teacher is giving her class a tour, explaining the words for everything they pass, like “elevator” and “gym,” in Spanish.

Assistant Principal Dr. Marlena De-Naclerio says kids in pre-school through first grade learn to read in their first language while being exposed to the other as a second language. Starting in second grade, they begin the formal dual-language curriculum, with everything taught in the morning in one language, everything in the afternoon in the other. “And by fourth grade or so, the kids are pretty fluent in both languages,” De-Naclerio says.

A quick stopover in a light-flooded teacher’s lounge, where four veterans of Welch Annex and Prince are gathered around a table. They are uniformly delighted with the new digs and grateful to be out of the old ones, which were much darker with fewer amenities. “Now I feel like a person,” says Pat Kowalski (on the right). The students seem to feel that way too.