New Haven Independent

Until last year Bartlett-Josie was commuting to New York, where she served for years as vice counsel to the counsel general of St. Lucia to New York. The daughter of a politician from that Caribbean island, Bartlett-Josie said her husband as well as her kids — two at Worthington Hooker and one at Sacred Heart Academy in Hamden — are much happier that the commute is over.

Bartlett-Josie sat musing Saturday with about 150 other community people in the Dwight Community Center on Day Street, as she participated in the proceedings at the Ward 2 meeting: discussions on education, and youth violence, the inequities of the justice system. Her thoughts kept returning to the differences between the life of kids on St. Lucia and those in New Haven.

“My whole country,” she said, speaking with a lilting island accent, “is not all that much bigger, by population, than New Haven. We have maybe 170,000 people, and New Haven, the whole city, has what, 125,000? But our kids do well in school, and when they move on, or leave the country, their education and upbringing serve them as well.”

What brought her to attend Alderwoman Gina Calder’s state of the community address?

“Oh, I’m always involved in my community,” she said, making the point that she has served previously on the Dwight Management team . Until recently, when she took the job at LEAP, she also served as Dwight’s representative on the board of Empower New Haven.

She said, as Alderwoman Calder listened approvingly nearby, that all the anger that was being expressed at the city government and at Yale is not necessarily unjustified, but still it is misplaced. “It has to be redirected. Has to be directed at pride in the community and what we want to accomplish here.”

Expectations, she said, are really what separate school life in St. Lucia from the life of the kids she sees in New Haven’s classrooms and streets. “We need to have kids who get a message that a lot is expected of them, and then they will rise to it.”

One aspect of the meeting that caught her attention was the animosity toward Yale. “I think, from my perspective, that this feeling toward the university is much stronger in the ward than the feeling toward the city. My own experience close to home bears it out. In my house, I rent an apartment to two Yale students. The neighbors said, ‘Why do you rent to Yale kids? ‘What’s wrong with that? I told them.’”

It’s puzzling to Bartlett-Josie. “I’m going to try to figure it out, because you know this area has so much intellectual capital, you can’t push that away. You need to use that.”

In the meantime, how else was she going to respond to her alderwoman’s call to take on the issues of prison re-entry, kids’ needing mentoring and direction and in general better education?

“Look, I understand the frustration of people here. But it saddens me greatly in New Haven that not more of these kids should be aiming from this neighborhood to get into Yale. Instead, sometimes it seems they’re aiming to get into the jail on Whalley. I’ve just signed up to be on Gina’s ward committee,” she said.

“We’ll get more people to vote, we’ll redirect the energy from this misplaced animosity to Yale, and things will get better. You’ll see.”

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