New Haven Independent

But today post-civil war Freetown schools have 80 kids in a class, no pencils or paper. A teacher’s chalk is like gold. New Haven has plenty of pencils and computers,.

New Haven schools’ relationship with Freetown counterparts (see related story here) was the subject of a part of Monday night’s Board of Education meeting.

It began with a moving presentation of a gift plaque from the Henry Fergusson Junior Secondary School in New Haven’s sister city, Freetown, to schools Superintendent Dr. Reginald Mayo and the New Haven Public Schools. The gift was in gratitude for New Haveners’ longtime material support of area schools. The presenters were (left to right in the picture at the top) retired NHPS arts supervisor Mary Boyle and current Hillhouse Assistant Principal Althea Norcroft. They were members of a 16-person delegation recently returned from Freetown, New Haven ‘s most active (of six) sister cities.

They presented 5,000 pencils and individual erasers, which were collected by Hillhouse and other New Haven schools and given to the kids at Fergusson and other schools in Freetown , which has been utterly decimated by the recent civil war. There is no electricity, few if any school supplies. Furniture has previously been provided by New Haveners through the Sister Cities Program.

The Sister City delegation’s journey was timed to coincide with the pulling into port of the schooner Amistad at the midway point of its voyage highlighting the end of the transatlantic slave trade. Norcroft, who is also a member of the Amistad American Foundation, said, “The people are so poor, they didn’t have anything to give back by way of gift exchange, so they gave us ribbons from their uniforms. But the key thing to remember is that these people are so happy their terrible war is over. They’re full of hope and are eager to learn.”

They do so, apparently sitting quietly and in an order with up to 80 kids to a room. And all parents pay for school.

The New Haven-Freetown relationship runs deep. The image of Sengbe Pieh is on the currency; his story of throwing off the yoke of slavery is well known.

Norcroft and Boyle described to board members a visit to a school for girls who were raped during the civil war and subsequently ostracized by their families. New Haven’ will be involved with this school — it purchased the land that the newly built Fergusson school sits on — and also with a health clinic that is desperately short of supplies. According to Boyle, Sierra Leone ‘s child mortality rate is one of the worst if not the worst in the world.

“The key thing to remember,” said Norcroft, “is that these children have little, really nothing at all, and yet the hope is there and the desire to learn. Our kids, by contrast, have so much, and yet sometimes the desire is not there. That’s what we need to focus on, and learn from.”

And sometimes it is not the desire that’s amiss among New Haven school kids, but lack of coordination of resources, which, compared to sister city Freetown, make New Haven a school system that Croesus might have endowed.