New Haven Independent

The proposed deal: After nine decades as an anchor of the Hill neighborhood, the 226-bed Jewish Home for the Aged is eyeing a move to Woodbridge — with Amistad Academy negotiating to buy the 169 Davenport Ave. building and convert it into a K-8 school.

The deal reflects the new ways society is looking at both how to take care of the elderly, and how to run schools.

The
Jewish Home for the Aged, formed in 1914 by a group of women known as the Sister of Zion, has put its Davenport Avenue building up for sale. The board wants to move the Home to the campus of Jewish Community Center (JCC) in Woodbridge, but in a new form — as a series of homey 10-bedroom stand-alone “greenhouses” rather than a single large institution.

New Haven’s Jewish community was centered in the Hill when the Home was founded. The community drifted away (largely west) beginning in the 1960s. While the Home serves a broad population, the location has proved problematic for families of the Jewish patients at the core of its mission.

Meanwhile, Amistad Academy, a charter school known for dramatically lifting the test scores of urban students, has been negotiating with the Jewish Home to buy the full block-long property, according to Amistad founder Dacia Toll.

Amistad hopes to move both its elementary school (currently in leased space on Prince Street) and its middle school (currently in a building it owns on James Street) to the Davenport Avenue building. Then Elm City Middle School — a separate charter school run by the same organization, Achievement First — would move into the James Street space, Toll said.

For the deal to proceed, the state legislature must pass a special law OK’ing it. Then the Department of Social Services (DSS) must approve the details of the Jewish Home move to Woodbridge. New Haven’s state legislators plan to meet with representatives of the Jewish Home and Mayor John DeStefano at 4 p.m. Wednesday to discuss the proposals in the Capitol office of State Sen. Martin Looney.

Sen. Harp, the senior New Haven legislator on the bill because the Home sits in her district, said she has concerns about the loss of nursing-home beds in the city and about the process by which the bill has emerged, but needs to know more before formulating a position.

A New “Greenhouse” Effect

The goal of the Jewish Home move is not just to move many of the patients closer to their families, but to put them in smaller, more comfortable home-like settings.

“The plans are really not firm at this point,” said Louis Goldberg, the Home’s chairman. The basic idea is to build five new 3,500-square-foot stand-alone homes on undeveloped land at the campus of the Jewish Community Center in Woodbridge. Each home would have 10 private bedrooms, a shared kitchen, and a family room. The licensed nurses and aides wouldn’t wear uniforms; they’d be “dressed as regular people,” Goldberg said.

The idea is to feel like “you’re walking into a house,” not an institution. “Residents,” not “patients.” The JCC and all its services for the elderly would be right next door. The Home would also boost outpatient services for the elderly to help infirm older people stay in their own homes longer rather than move into a nursing home.

The state has a moratorium on new skilled-nursing-care beds. So the Home needs special permission to make the move. First it needs the legislature to pass a law cosponsored by State Sens. Gayle Slossberg and Joe Crisco specifically permitting the Home to move. Then it needs a certificate of need from the state Department of Social Services (DSS) detailing how many beds it can move where.

The Home is unionized, one of two reasons it has a reputation as a valued, important local institution. (It’s also been known over the years, despite the financial pressures facing all nursing homes, as a desirable place for older folks to live if they unfortunately need to be in a home.)

Deborah Chernoff, spokeswoman for the union at Home, District 1199 of the SEIU, said her group “hasn’t taken a position on the bill. We need more information from them on what the situation is. We don’t want the alternative to be, ‘Then the place has to close.’”

Some Beds Will Stay

Chernoff said the union isn’t assuming it faces loss of jobs for the Home’s 200 workers (like custodian Joy McNeil, pictured on the facility’s third floor with Vinette Wilson). The Home has promised to transport its workers to the Woodbridge campus if they can’t get there on their own.

Rather, the union worries about the loss of nursing-home beds in the city of New Haven, Chernoff said. Since the summer of 1996, New Haven has lost 446 beds, 240 of them at the former Atrium Plaza.

State Sens. Harp and Looney expressed the same concern. “To take more beds out of the community has an impact,” Harp said. “I don’t understand what they’re trying to do. They’ve never explained it to me. What about the people you’re serving who won’t be able to go to Woodbridge?”

According to both Goldberg of the Home board and State Sen. Slossberg, any final plan will include keeping some beds in New Haven. The Home has been speaking with the Hospital of St. Raphael, for instance, about assuming the licenses for 75 beds, according to Slossberg. DSS would determine how many beds need to remain in the city as part of any final approval for the move.

“Whatever the state says, that’s what we’re going to do,” Goldberg said.

“Either they move their campus — their site isn’t working out for them,” or the region faces the prospect of losing all those beds, argued Slossberg, who knows the Home well from her days visiting her late Great Aunt Belle every week before she passed. “Do they close their doors, lose all the jobs, all their beds, or do they reinvent themselves?”

The union’s Chernoff said the proposed deal reminds her of when the JCC moved from downtown New Haven to Woodbridge in the early ’90s: “I have the same feelings that I had about the Jewish Center. I understand why they did it. But it is a loss for New Haven.”

New Neighbors?

While the notion of keeping a Jewish-oriented nursing home in the Hill may have passed its prime, Amistad’s Dacia Toll said a different notion fits right in: developing charter schools that enable students from disadvantaged urban neighborhoods to perform as well as or better than kids from tony suburbs like Westport on standardized tests.

That’s been the track record so far for Amistad. New York City’s Bloomberg Administration was so impressed with the New Haven model that it lured Toll to the Big Apple to launch, at last count, five schools since the fall of 2005.

“In New York, we get free facilities. They also pay for maintenance,” Toll said. “They have a different attitude [from Connecticut’s]. Their basic outlook is, ‘We want to create as many public schools that work for kids as quickly as possible.”

In Connecticut, Achievement First has battled with the teachers union and local politicians and school officials over the growth of charter schools. Still, the state legislature passed a bill last year allowing Amistad to obtain bonding money for new or renovated school buildings on the same formula as public schools (78 percent of costs paid for by the state, 22 percent raised by the school).

Amistad plans to make use of that new law to obtain state money to buy and renovate the Jewish Home into a new four-acre campus for the K-8 school, including building an athletic field and a gym and converting the private patient rooms into educational facilities. If it’s all approved, Amistad will probably need to raise between $6 and $8 million for its end, according to Toll.

“The community is right for us,” Toll said. “My impression is they do not have a lot of commercial bidders on the site. We are very excited about being in the Hill neighborhood. It’s a beautiful old building with a great community history.”

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