From left: 5th-graders Tylon Watkins, Tyreese Sheats, Jamie Middlebrook, and Malik Brown pick up summer reading material.
Melissa Bailey Photos
Kids borrowed thousands of books. Reading scores rose. Parents feel their children are safer. The longer school day didn’t work out as well as planned at the city’s first in-house “turnaround” experiment.
As an inaugural school year draws to a close, the principal overseeing one of the city’s most-watched reform experiments offered those observations.
The principal, Karen Lott (pictured) of K‑8 Brennan/Rogers in West Rock, took a moment to share results and draw lessons from her first year seeking to to turn around a struggling school with unprecedented latitude in hiring and rule-making.
Those lessons will not only guide Lott as she embarks on year two of an ambitious school reform experiment in the fall. They offer guidance for another principal, Sabrina Breland, as she launches the second such experiment at Wexler/Grant Community School in Dixwell.
Both schools were chosen for overhauls because they ranked near the bottom in the district in student performance. As part of a citywide school change initiative, a few “failing” schools are being tapped each year as “turnarounds” to undergo restructuring. Brennan/Rogers and now Wexler/Grant are experimenting with a particular kind of turnaround that doesn’t call for shutting down a school or calling in private management.
Lott shared some early signs of progress in literacy and school climate, and some challenges in getting parents involved, in an interview amid the end-of-year bustle at the school at 200 Wilmot Rd.
School Day Shortened; Parents Advised
As the leader of the city’s first in-house “turnaround” school, Lott got unprecedented authority last year to hand-pick a new crew of teachers and set new rules allowed for by a new teachers contract. Brennan/Rogers opened last fall with a slate of new teachers and a longer school day for students and staff.
When kids showed up to Brennan/Rogers last fall, the biggest change was schedule: Their day stretched out from 8:20 a.m. to 4:15 p.m., an extra 1 hour and 25 minutes compared to the previous year.
As the school undergoes yet another transition, Lott announced she’ll be scaling back that extended schedule for students — and making sure parents know about the schedule far in advance.
The reason for scaling back is transportation, she said. Brennan/Rogers landed a multimillion dollar grant to become a magnet school in the fall, accepting students from the suburbs as well as New Haven.
Lott said only a handful of suburban kids have enrolled for next year in grades 1 through 8, in part because there were few open seats. The numbers are higher in pre‑K and kindergarten. But the change in the student body means the school must adhere to the timetable of other magnets. District school buses make only one sweep through the suburbs to deliver kids to New Haven’s 17 other magnet schools.
Besides that transportation hurdle, Lott said there were other reasons that the extended day didn’t work out as she had hoped.
“I am a proponent of a longer school day, but we had some real problems with it,” Lott said.
For example: Teachers, as part of their new labor contract, had agreed to work the extra hours with commensurate pay. But other staff in the school had no such arrangement, so the paraprofessionals and clerical staff did not stay for the whole day.
“It’s hard to run a school when the office staff leaves” before students do, Lott said. Students found the hours taxing, and some parents protested as well, she said.
Lott said she originally extended the day because the students were so far behind where they needed to be academically. “It’s hard to make gains in the same time frame,” without extra hours, she said.
However, the new schedule at Brennan/Rogers did not add instructional time on core subjects, which is the key for catching kids up. Kids got hour-long classes in art and gym, but no extra class time on reading and math. Instead, the longer day allowed staff time to collaborate and train in new teaching methods.
Next year, students will return to a more standard school day, with classes running from 9:20 to 3:30. Teachers will still come in an hour earlier for professional development, Lott said.
Lott said she made parents aware of the change in newsletters sent home Monday and during school on Tuesday. She said she learned the importance of early notification from experience. Last year, as she hustled to pull together the turnaround plans, Lott waited until the end of the summer to let parents know about the longer school day.
For some parents who live across town, that meant their kids wouldn’t be home until 5:30 p.m. — a major change to the daily routine. Some parents weren’t too happy about the short notice, she said.
Build Trust Early
Short notice of major changes in the school may have contributed to a rocky start to the year, Lott added.
Students who had attended Brennan/Rogers for years returned in the fall to a slew of new faces. Of the 35 teachers at the school last year, only 12 got hired back. Lott chose another 30 teachers from as far away as South Carolina. Lott, who was in her second year as principal, was the only person some students recognized in the building when they came back in September.
Students were “resistant” to the new authorities, Lott said. Some “didn’t like the longer school day” or the higher expectations. They spent three months “testing” the new team. That led to an uptick in suspensions during those months, she said.
To curb this problem, Lott suggested that schools like Wexler/Grant give kids advance notice of the changes that lie ahead. As she launched her school’s turnaround last year she never directly informed kids about what would happen when they returned in the fall. “That fell off my radar,” she said.
“While the adults are excited” about changes in the school, “for kids, it’s a big emotional response.” Lott suggested a more intensive summer orientation, where new teachers could get a head-start building relationships with kids.
“Kids need to be able to develop trust,” she said. “And kids need to know what will lie ahead.”
Lott said the school is now in a much better position for next year: On a school survey, 82 percent of students reported having at least one adult in the building they can trust — a number that stayed the same despite the drastic teacher turnover. And kids won’t have to start from scratch next year, because 100 percent of teachers plan to return to the school.
All teachers made a two-year commitment when they signed up to work at the school. The few who were identified as struggling teachers by a new evaluation system have improved enough to keep their jobs, Lott said.
Parents: School’s Safer Now
Lott showed one early sign that Brennan/Rogers has made progress in improving the school climate.
In an annual survey, 94 percent of parents at Brennan/Rogers said they feel “my child is safe at school,” compared to only 14 of 20 parents last year.
Those results came on a School Climate Survey distributed annually to parents, teachers and students citywide earlier this year. Principals have been combing through the results, which have not yet been released to the public.
Lott said she looks to the survey as “a read on relationships” in her school community. Her school showed improvement across the board.
Brennan/Rogers showed a leap in participation on the surveys this year: 81 percent of parents took the survey, the highest rate in the district, according to Lott. That’s quite an improvement over last year, when only 20 parents, or 10 percent of the school, offered feedback.
The safety category posed a red flag last year, when 18 percent of students said they did not feel safe in the school. That number dropped to 11 percent this year.
The survey was taken by 103 students, 96 percent of the kids in grades 3 to 8.
Lott said the school environment has been much improved by a new “code of conduct,” which aims to establish clear language and expectations around proper behavior. While there were many disruptions in the fall, kids’ behavior calmed down after winter break, and teachers were able to focus more on learning, she said.
Mine That Library
One of the biggest challenges Brennan/Rogers faced this year was finding ways to help students catch up in their reading skills, which lagged several grade levels behind their statewide peers.
According to district test scores, 68 percent of Brennan/Rogers kids were reading below grade level when they came to the school in September. In kindergarten, 79 percent of students scored below grade level, and in 3rd grade, 91 percent.
Lott detailed two efforts to reverse that trend. One involves a new style of tutoring: In the past, kids who fell behind were pulled out of class for literacy interventions, but they were grouped in only one way — based on their reading comprehension. For some kids, the interventions weren’t working. Brennan/Rogers staff decided to break up kids into groups in a different way, according to their fluency levels. They also brought in extra tutors for more small-group work.
The results appear to have paid off, based on test scores on the District Reading Assessment, according to Lott’s staff. Math scores also showed significant improvement, she said.
The real test—the test that local, state and federal accountability watchdogs are waiting for — is the Connecticut Mastery Test, the state’s standardized test for all public schools. The DRA is “not always predictive” of the CMT, Lott acknowledged, “but we hope it would be.”
She shared one other result she can already count on: Students and teachers took out 8,266 books from September to May of this school year. That’s compared to only 689 books that circulated last year.
The reading boom came thanks to a new librarian, Susan Martinez Sendroff. The library was essentially dormant when she joined the school last fall. Sendroff started book clubs. She brought in whole classes to take out books. And she gave tailored advice to kids on which ones to read.
Last week she was organizing a summer reading giveaway at the school. Each kid got to take home five books for free. Sendroff pitched Nyquan Hayes (pictured) on “Bibsy” by Beverly Cleary.
“I think you’ll like it,” she told Nyquan. He took her advice and plopped the book into a black bag, emblazoned with the letters READ, stylized like the AC/DC logo.
Sendroff said kids at the school think reading is cool. She even had to hide books out of sight so that students wouldn’t plunder them before the giveaway began.
A group of 5th-graders (pictured at the top of this story) illustrated her point by flashing their texts before a news camera.
Tyreese Sheats chose a book called “Class President,” because “I want to be president of the United States.”
The flow of books home may have helped boost parents’ perception of the academic rigor of the school.
On the surveys this year, 89 percent of parents reported the school “has high academic expectations for my child,” compared to 65 percent the prior year.
The Unsolved Puzzle: Parents
Overall, parents appear pleased with the changes: 87 percent of parents said they would recommend the school to other parents.
That’s a major improvement over last year, when Brennan/Rogers landed second from the bottom of the district on parent satisfaction, according to the surveys. Fifty-eight percent said they would recommend the school to other parents. The only school that fared worse was Wexler/Grant, which 48 percent of parents said they would recommend.
The surveys also offered a candid view of an uphill battle to get parents more involved in the school.
On the surveys, 62 percent of Brennan/Rogers parents reported that they never volunteer at the school.
Lott said she appreciates their candor — and hopes to find new ways to get them involved. She made a push to get parents to come out to report card night, and then to get involved with their kids’ reading.
Parents did come out in record attendance, but Lott said she failed to get them to take on other roles in the school. For example, she envisioned reviving the school PTO and holding a vote among all parents as to whether kids should adopt a school uniform. The PTO never got off its feet. While some parents showed interest, none would commit to taking office.
“No one wanted to be the president,” Lott said. The question of uniforms was never addressed.
Likewise, Lott had difficulty when it came to setting up another parent panel — this one required by a new state law. Brennan/Rogers was one of four schools required to set up a school governance council by a Jan. 15 deadline. The panel is supposed to be made up of seven parents, five teachers and two community leaders, all elected to their posts, who advise the principal on school policy.
A few parents, including a mother-daughter duo from Westville Manor, expressed interest in joining the effort. But when it came time to hold the meetings, Lott said, none of the parents would commit to holding office or attending future gatherings.
Lott said she’s unsure of the future of the school governance council. As for the PTO, she said, she’ll take a different tack next year: Thanks to a private grant, the school will run a monthly food bank for parents at the school. She said she hopes that might provide a new venue to get parents in the door and get them involved in the school.
As she moves forward, Lott will work from a new road map, a “School Improvement Plan. It focuses on improving school culture, the “universal use of rigorous instruction,” and boosting that culture of reading at school and at home.
Sabrina Breland, the principal at Wexler/Grant, said she’ll be calling up Lott this summer as she goes about putting together her own road map for the Dixwell neighborhood school.
Lott said she’d be happy to share what she learned. Meanwhile, she’ll be pushing more families to enroll their kids in voluntary summer school, so the gains they’ve made this school year don’t slip away.
Past stories on the Brennan/Rogers School:
• What “Magnet” Means
• The Evaluation: Episode Two
• Turnaround Task: Fight Fatigue
• Turnaround School Prepares For 1st Test
• Parents Prepare To Help “Govern” 4 Schools
• At Turnaround School, A Reading Push
• In Garden, Teachers Tackle Special Ed Challenge
• Brennan/Rogers Earns Magnet Status
• No Naps For These Kids
• Turnaround Team Sets To Work
• Two Failing Schools Aim High
• West Rock Kids Reap Two-Wheeled Rewards
• Brennan/Rogers Prepares For Turnaround
Kudos to Brennan/Rogers librarian, Susan Martinez Sendroff!!!