Celentano Morphs Into Biotech Middle School

Seventh-grader Korey Kornegay and his friends were building cars with a rubber band as the only power source.

The instructions said to use putty to attach the wheels, but the kids and teachers found that the parts slipped. Instead they substituted foam and, yes, good old duct tape.

They were learning how to think like engineers.

The demonstration action took place Wednesday night in room 205, the Discovery Room, at the ​“grand reopening” of the newly dubbed Celentano Biotech, Health, and Medical Magnet School.

Hundreds of the K‑8 kids and their families joined officials to mark the official reopening and renaming of the school as an interdistrict magnet that will focus on health sciences themes across the curriculum.

Celentano is one of four schools that last year benefited from a projected $11 million three-year federal grant given to the Board of Ed. Its aim: to transform the curriculum at four city schools, upgrade equipment, retrain teachers and jazz up the local community with support for a new focus on the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) subjects.

(The other three schools that are STEM-ing: The 21st Century Communications Magnet and Lab School, a K‑4, still called the Strong School; Quinnipiac Real World Math STEM School, a K‑4; and New Haven Montessori Magnet School, a pre‑K to 6).

Celentano Principal Keisha Hannans and her staff spent last year and this summer training writing new learning units that integrate science across the curriculum.

“So in the second grade,” she offered as one example, ​“the science curriculum is butterflies. Our teachers acquired non-fiction literacy texts about butterflies across the world. All that transfers into the science curriculum.”

Reworking the rubber-band car designs might be the kind of real-world experiment seventh and eight-graders will do later this year in a unit on ​“forces in motion,” added Linda Malkins (pictured), one of the school’s resource teachers.

Complete with band and chorus performances and speeches of gratitude for grant writers and hard-working teachers, Wednesday night’s event culminated in the doors flung open to parents in a kind of open house to talk to teachers and to spread the STEM gospel.

“We’re really excited,” said Hannans, who’s been at Celentano for seven years. She pointed not only to new equipment, such as specialized folding tables and other (yet to be delivered) equipment to conduct engineering experiments in the Discovery Room; but also to the ten iPads that are now in every classrooms; to the MacBooks that the teachers now have; and to projectors and document cameras in all the rooms.

With the new equipment, the teachers can project the page of a student’s iPad onto any screen. ​“This grant has enabled us to have a 21st century school,” Hannans said.

Board of Ed Science Coordinator Richard Thierrien, who was in attendance along with school and city officials, said this is only the beginning.

With the school’s partners in the transformation, the Yale School of Medicine and the Connecticut Science Center in Hartford, Therrien said, more training and equipment are on the way, Therrien said. For example, down the road kids in the Discovery Room will be able to participate in what he called ​“virtual dissections” to get young kids involved up close and personal in the bio-sciences

“We have Hyde [Health Sciences and Sports Medicine High School] and Career [High School] students who study health sciences but no middle school. So we said, Let’s get kids involved in it early.’”

“STEM is popping up all over,” he added.

Mayor Toni Harp captured the evening’s them when she reminded parents — who were regularly urged to get behind the new curriculum — that ​“we have the fourth largest medical center [the Yale-New Haven/St. Raphael complex] in the United States. It’s really important we prepare our students to work for our largest employer. So it’s consistent we start doing this at an advantageous age.”

Amid all the science hoopla, art was not forgotten. As kids and parents entered the gracious circular vestibule, there was a kind of drum roll and officials also unveiled 13 newly finished murals. The six-by-eight-foot creations in spray paint and oil and acrylic are by Dooley O (pictured), Jahmane, and Alberto Colon.

In its first transitional year, Celentano is currently at full enrollment, about 400 students, reported Hannans.

In its first year as an interdistrict magnet, all the kids, except for kindergartners, have been grandfathered in and all come from New Haven. Only kindergartners number some kids from nearby towns who were selected in a lottery.

Korey, who hopes to become a doctor, and the other kids didn’t have a chance to test, re-evaluate, and maybe redesign their quickly built rubber band cars. They had to get back to practice in the chorus before performing at the grand reopening.