Aliyya Swaby Photo
First-graders work with counting blocks at BTWA.
After an uphill battle to launch, Booker T. Washington Academy is settling into its building on Greene Street with plans to stay longer than planned. Leislani Nunez, meanwhile, has plans of her own — to stay at the school each day longer than her mom needs her to.
The new charter school opened on Wooster Square’s Greene Street last fall, with plans to move this year into a new home on the west side of town. The school now aims to stay on Greene Street for another year, until the board figures out future plans, according to Executive Director John Taylor.
The school, which currently has 91 students in kindergarten and first grade, features an unusually long day. Students start at 7:40 a.m. with a free breakfast; instruction begins at around 8 a.m. The school day ends at 3:30 p.m., and an optional after-school program can stretch the day to 6:30 p.m. Right now, the after-school program is voluntary, Taylor said. Eventually, the school wants to use it to provide extra instruction to students who are academically struggling.
It turns out some kids don’t want to leave, even after all those hours.
Leislani and Anais Nunez.
Anais Nunez arrived at the school soon after 5 p.m. the other day to take her kindergartener Leislani home early from the after-school program. (They’re pictured above.)
“It’s not that I don’t want her to come [to the program] every day. My husband doesn’t want to overwork her,” she explained.
Anais Nunez said her daughter picked up on the curriculum quickly. Leislani missed 10 days of school in November because of a health problem that hospitalized her. But she got back to school and caught up, because she is “used to the rhythm.”
The family lives in the Farnam Courts public-housing development a short walk away. Anais Nunez finishes work at 2 p.m. every day and picks her other daughter up from Zigler Head Start. She would have picked Leislani up right after school, but Leislani wanted to stay.
“I don’t want to go, Mommy!” she said, heading back to the table with the other children.
“It’s snowing outside,” her mother said, firmly, eventually persuading her to put on her coat and leave the building.
Working Fast
Main and Taylor.
Taylor, executive director of the charter school, said he never expected to get the school up and running successfully in just four weeks. He said he is proud of the progress Booker T. Washington Academy (BTWA) staff and students have made. Test scores are up, staff morale is high, and parent involvement is steadily increasing, he said.
The next step: figuring out how and where to expand.
Not too long ago, BTWA — brainchild of Varick Memorial AME Zion Church pastor Eldren Morrison, who wanted to give his congregants a public-schooling option — ran into trouble getting those doors open.
Just months before its planned launch last fall, BTWA fired charter management organization Family Urban Schools of Excellence (FUSE) after news broke of the CEO’s hidden criminal record and false education credentials. When Rev. Morrison appealed to the state Board of Education in July, the school got the green light to proceed with consulting firm Yardstick Learning as partner instead. State Board of Ed members expressed concern in July that the school administrators were trying to do too much too quickly.
Taylor sat down with the Independent the other day to discuss how the first five months have gone. He called it “a bit of a challenge” to start up a school in four weeks.
When Rev. Morrison asked him June 25 if he thought they could pull it off, Taylor recalled, he was skeptical.
“I said to him, ‘Literally it will take Jesus coming down from the heaven and sitting here ready to orchestrate this,’” Taylor said. “Three to four weeks later, things were falling into place.”
Originally from Pittsburgh, Taylor has run charter schools for more than 15 years, including Green Tech Charter High School in Albany, as well as spearheaded turnarounds at low-performing schools.
Morrison’s original plan was to enroll 225 students. The state decided to cut that number in half because of the last-minute shift in administration. Ninety-one kindergarten and first-grade students are now enrolled at BTWA. Morrison intended the school to primarily serve kids in Newhallville and Dixwell neighborhoods. Enrolled students are dispersed throughout the city — 90 percent are from New Haven and 10 percent from Hamden and West Haven, Taylor said.
One upside of the fast-tracked opening is that “the sense of urgency bonded the staff really well” during their three weeks of training before the school opened Sept. 15, Taylor said. “Now we are 100 percent on track with where we would have wanted to be as a start-up school.”
Next year, BTWA will add a second grade. The year after that, it plans to expand in both directions, adding a third grade and pre‑K. Taylor said BTWA hopes to stay in the current building next year, but first it “needs to get approved by the community.” BTWA has “lofty plans for where” it wants to move next, he said, but declined to say more. In the past, the school has considered permanently moving to facilities on Blake Street.
A Long Day
Charter network Achievement First subleases the two-story building at 240 Greene St. to the school; the original lease ran through January. BTWA spent about $100,000 renovating it. Kindergarten classrooms are on the first floor, first-grade on the second, with a gym/theater in the basement of the building next door.
Sharon Morrison (pictured above) was recruited to run the program last summer. A congregant at Varick church, she offered Taylor her volunteer services as a licensed teacher at BTWA. He offered her a paid position as program director.
When she started on Sept. 22, she had two students in the after-school program. Now she has about 30, she said.
Around 4:30 p.m. this past Wednesday, kindergarten and first-grade students who stayed in the building later were getting homework help.
Jennifer Steanfield, grandmother of a first grader, said her granddaughter usually has all her homework done by the time she leaves BTWA at the end of the afterschool program. “She can eat, take a bath and go to bed,” back at home, Steanfield said.
Though her granddaughter enjoys the program, she sometimes wants to leave early, Steanfield said. An 11-hour day, she said, is a lot for a 6‑year-old.
Tracking The Trends
At a meeting of the BTWA board last Wednesday evening, Taylor detailed the trimester’s gains and targeted points for improvement.
Students are meeting the midyear benchmarks for math, he reported. To be on track, kindergarteners have to be able to count to 20 by the end of the year. A third of BTWA’s kindergarteners could at the beginning of the year; now almost 90 percent can count to at least 20, according to the report.
Laura Main, director of academics, said the school’s curriculum aligns with the state’s Common Core standards. Each classroom has two teachers. One teacher focuses on small-group hands-on activities. The other takes students aside one on one to focus on individual academic weaknesses.
In Erin Kimball’s first-grade classroom (pictured at the top of the story), students attempted to replicate an image of a stack of cubes using their own counting blocks. Doreen Spears, an assistant teacher, quietly worked with a student in the back of the room.
Student attendance decreased from 95 percent in November to 91 percent in December; staff attendance increased to 99 percent in December. Dertain students are missing the bus to school, and do not have access to other means of transportation to the Wooster Square neighborhood.
“I worry about those kids; they’re missing too much school,” Taylor said. He suggested a solution: “flex time” to allow students who miss class at the beginning of the day to make up for that lost time at the end of the day. “They would have to be getting 30 real minutes of instruction,” he said. “It would be difficult.”
The board discussed that trimester’s disciplinary actions. The number of “major infractions,” which land students in the school office, doubled from November to December, from eight to 16, according to the report. Eight students were responsible for all of the infractions, the majority of which were for “gross insubordination and dangerous behavior,” the report said.
Additionally, two students were suspended for physically fighting. All students referred are receiving support from staff. One first-grader who has been chronically misbehaving is also academically struggling, Taylor said. Board members agreed it would be a good idea to keep an eye on him.
Parents have been “on board” with the disciplinary actions. “In all cases, both parents are involved, whether or not they are together,” Taylor said.
Building A Parent Base
BTWA is slowly building a cadre of loyal parents. Parent involvement has increased slowly over the last three months; 23 parents attended December’s PTO meeting.
Stephen Soares (pictured above) is active in the PTO and at board meetings. Though BTWA “started off rocky,” Soares said, he is happy with its progress and with his son’s in reading, writing and math.
Soares said he put his son through the lottery systems at various local charter and magnet schools, but could not get him in. He went to an open house at BTWA, skeptical about its ability to hire quality teachers. The closest local school to his house in the Hill neighborhood is Roberto Clemente Leadership Academy, which Soares described as a “failing school.”
“Everyone is going to want to put their kid in this school,” he said of BTWA. “When they hit third grade, they do the testing. They’ll be testing at high levels.”
Soares said Taylor impressed him as a director. When the school buses lacked a bus monitor, he said, Taylor volunteered to take over the job for about a month: “We both know when you make six figures, you’re not doing the job of a bus dude.”
