New Haven Independent

A regional magnet high school recruits not only from the city but from the surrounding towns of greater New Haven County. Two-thirds of NHA’s 160 total population of 9th to 12th graders are from New Haven, one third from surrounding towns like Ansonia, East Haven, and Derby.

“A lot of our kids,” said Gavrin, “come from suburbs where there is only a single high school, and that might be very large. They’re drawn to our smaller school (classes are on average sixteen to eighteen), where we get to know each student well, and many are also drawn to our magnet program.”

NHA’s magnet theme comes out of the nationally famous Facing History and Ourselves curriculum, in which Baldwin and Gavrin both trained as young teachers in New York City, where they met in the early 1990s. They wanted ultimately to establish their own school, also based on themes of tolerance and diversity and critical thinking, but to do it in a place that was a little greener than 50th Street in Manhattan and a little closer to their Northeastern roots. So New Haven called. They arrived in 1999, worked with Ed Linehan, the father of New Haven’s magnet schools; NHA was established in 2003.

“It’s a big year for us,” Gavrin said. “Our first class of 30 seniors is graduating!”

Among them are Ayesha Champlain (left) and Crystal Torres, who have been at NHA since the beginning. Among many other requirements, each senior must research, design, and implement an independent project that addresses a social issue or community problem, and the project must include taking the step from study to action.

“I chose to work on police brutality,” said Champlain, “after I read about the shooting of Sean Bell outside a social club in New York. Fifty bullets shot into a man who had no weapon. There was something really not right about that.” She has contacted MALIK, a police watchdog organization in New Haven set up in memory Malik Jones, who was shot by police in New Haven in 1997.

Crystal Torres hasn’t decided which organization she’s going to take her work to, but the subject will be HIV-AIDS among Hispanic teens. Certified to teach on the issue by a course she already took with the AIDS Project New Haven, she will like be mentored by AIDS education professionals in the months ahead to hone her curriculum before she presents it to the middle school kids that are her target audience.

“The best thing about this school,” she said, as Gavrin and Baldwin dashed out of the room so as not to prejudice her judgment, “is that the teachers push you to do things you didn’t think you could do. That’s really great. And they become your friends.”

“We have kids,” said their teacher Rachel Seher (kneeling), “working on global warming, the war in Iraq, and dozens of other subjects.” Seher, who is in her first year at NHA, said she was drawn to teach in a school committed to activism and diversity and that she wants, ultimately, to run a school of her own. Among the Facing History and Ourselves-inspired seminars and courses that Seher and NHA’s other 15 full-time teachers conduct are, in the 9th grade, one on Weimar Germany, that focuses on what a democracy needs to succeed, or fail; a sophomore seminar that looks at the Armenian genocide, apartheid in South Africa, Rwanda, and ties in with Darfur today, with a focus on how groups are divided against themselves, but ultimately can rebuild; juniors have a unit on the eugenics movement and race; and the seniors, their independent social action projects.

“Recently,” added Gavrin, “I had a student in my office make the call, in front of me, to [U.S. Rep.] Rosa DeLauro in connection with his project on Darfur. He had never done anything like that, and he turned to me and said, ‘Wow, I can do that.’”

Each senior project requires that the student write a letter to a newspaper editor on their issue; make a phone call to a legislator; and go downtown to use a government office to secure or review documents.

“We figure,” said Gavrin, “if we get our kids to have these kinds of experiences before they graduate, we are preparing serious citizens, future leaders, and people with critical thinking skills.”

Rachel Seher was teaching her second-semester humanities course for seniors when a reporter visited. Its theme was crime and punishment, and like all NHA courses, it embraces the whole curriculum in an interdisciplinary manner that is another reason she wants to be teaching at NHA.

Kelly Russell, one of her seniors (who has already been accepted at North Carolina Central University in Durham) is one of the lucky students to be starting Seher’s reading list this morning with a writing prompt — that is, writing in his journal in response to her question: Have you had any experience reading mystery or crime novels, and how did you respond? Among the books they will read this semester, as they discuss youth crime in New Haven, mandatory sentencing laws, and other pressing local realities, are The Maltese Falcon, A Lesson Before Dying, The Inferno (Dante), and Macbeth.

Anyone want to sign up? Baldwin and Gavrin say they will be in their temporary building at 130 Leeder Hill Rd. in Hamden for another two years, and then move into new space at the site of the current Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School at Orange and Bradley when that school moves in 2009. The school, however, will be kept small, with, ideally sixty students per grade. New Haven Academy is having an open house Saturday, Feb. 3, from 10 to 12. Lottery applications for all the regional magnet schools (which include Metropolitan, Hyde Leadership, High School in the Community, Cooperative Arts and Humanities, and Career) are due Feb. 23, and the magnet lottery is March 6.Interested families are asked to be in touch with the New Haven Public Schools Magnet Schools Office (946-7415).