New Haven Independent

Students pulled out shovels and banged on drums to honor their principal Wednesday afternoon, rolling a new dogwood tree into place outside the pre-K to 8 school at the edge of Beaver Pond Park.

The dogwood tree, planted with the help of the Urban Resources Initiative at Yale University, recognizes Tracey’s 23 years of service to New Haven Public Schools, during which she rose from classroom teacher to principal.

“Don’t worry, I grew up on a farm,” said Tracey, breaking into a smile as she tossed a scoop of soil onto her new tree. Before she moved to the U.S.A. at the age of 24, she lived among the mango trees and potato patches of a family farm in the Jamaican countryside.

She started her career in New Haven’s schools in 1984 as an elementary school teacher at the Dwight School. She taught in the classroom there for 13 years before moving on to teach reading at the now-defunct Jackie Robinson School, and rise up into administration.

A teacher at heart, Tracey said she still spends a lot of time in the classroom while ushering a newly merged school — King/Robinson, formed of the Martin Luther King and Jackie Robinson schools — through a cultural and academic change.

The shining, three-year-old structure on Fournier Street has about 330 students in grades pre-K to 8. It’s a magnet school with a focus on the International Baccalaureate model of education.

The approach takes students away from a “monotone mindset” of learning, explained eighth-grader Anthony Draper, who came to the school at the same time as Tracey. He’s an advocate of the method: “How does what I’m learning affect the world, not just me and myself?”

Taking over a school whose poor testing grades had landed it on the NLRB “bad list,” Tracey has been credited with turning the school around by espousing the Board of Ed’s hot-topic method of “data-driven learning.”

“We’ve been trying to teach everybody to do that over the past few years,” said schools chief Reggie Mayo, who showed up to congratulate the principal. “She’s been a pro at that.”

The school started off in need of help: Both pre-merge schools, MLK and Jackie Robinson, made the federal Not Making Adequate Yearly Progress list. King/Robinson has remained on the list, but posted double-digit progress in most areas of testing between the ‘04-‘05 and ‘05-‘06 school years.

“If I had to vote a principal of the year last year, I would’ve voted for her,” said Mayo. “She’s capable, caring, and consummate… If every principal were like her, I wouldn’t need to be here!”