A Republican candidate for governor made a campaign stop on the unlikely terrain of a Fair Haven backyard, where he got a lesson on family childcare and how to create jobs.
Call it another chapter in the continuing New Haven education of Tom Foley, this time about an approach to training urban single parents for jobs while boosting home-care for young children.
Foley, a Greenwich businessman and the Republican candidate for governor against Democrat Dan Malloy in a Nov. 2 election, has been taking an interest in the uber-Democratic Elm City of late, learning about its educational pioneers and quests to punish traffic scofflaws.
His education started with a visit to Amistad Academy, which is run by the New Haven-based Achievement First. He got interested in what the charter group has done to close the achievement gap — and made it a basis for an education plan he announced this week, emphasizing school choice.
Foley’s education continued last week when he paid a visit to the University of New Haven and learned about state three legislative priorities on which New Haven Mayor John DeStefano has come up against Democratic opposition at the Capitol. Foley vowed to allow cities the option to create a so-called “local-option tax,” such as the “penny sales tax” DeStefano has pushed for. He said he’d grant cities the OK to create their own “entertainment tax” in order to tax downtown bars. For the first time, he fielded a question on New Haven traffic-calming activists’ pet issue, allowing cities to use red-light cameras to catch speeding cars. Foley said he’d give cities the power to do that.
Foley’s latest New Haven lesson took place Thursday afternoon in the backyard of 80 Exchange St., where Illeana Gonzalez runs a daycare program called Caritas Felices (“happy faces” in Spanish).
It was an unlikely spot, far off the typical GOP campaign trail: a low-income, largely Spanish-speaking section of town, with no Republican voters in sight, in a city that last elected a republican mayor in 1951.
“Hello, honey, how are you?” Foley asked a young tot named Yanetley who was playing at the top of a plastic slide.
“Díle ‘Hola,’” instructed a daycare consultant named Tanya Michaelson. (“Tell him hello.”)
“Now, does she not speak English?” Foley inquired. “Do some of these kids not speak English at all?” (Click on the play arrow to watch the exchange.)
Michaelson replied that the kids were between birth and 3 years old, and are still developing language skills. Most are bilingual, she said.
Foley came to that plastic slide by invitation of an unusual conduit: Jessica Sager, a graduate of the liberal Yale Law School, which is not a hotbed of Republican political support. Sager is a co-founder of All Our Kin, a Fair Haven-based not-for-profit that trains low-income women to run their own daycare programs.
Foley said he met Sager at an event arranged by Janice Gruendel, one of the founders of the advocacy group CT Voices for Children. Foley said he heard Sager speak and asked if he could visit her offices sometime. He met with her privately in her office Thursday, then paid a visit to Caritas Felices, where five 2‑and-3-year-olds awaited him, their hands smudged with paint.
Foley rolled up the sleeves of his dress shirt and chatted in the sun to Gonzalez, who runs the daycare program out of her home.
She said she used to make flashlights in a nearby factory. When the plant closed down, she lost her job. She heard through her church about All Our Kin. The group helped her set up her own daycare. Within three months, she was accredited and ready to go. Gonzalez said the children she takes care of belong to single moms who work during the day. If they didn’t have child care, she said, they wouldn’t be able to work.
Foley liked how that sounded. He said All Our Kin is a three-fold benefit: It creates jobs for the daycare providers, it provides a “nurturing environment” for the kids, and it “also enables some parents to go into the job market.”
Asked if he would be interested in replicating the program as governor, he said yes.
On his second campaign stop in New Haven in two weeks, Foley was asked what he thinks of the city.
“I like New Haven,” he said. “My wife went to college here.” Leslie Foley graduated from Yale College in 1990 — though, he quickly added, “that has nothing to do with why we’re here.”
His remarks about New Haven focused on one man: Democratic Mayor DeStefano.
“I admire Mayor DeStefano for what he’s doing. He’s made some very bold steps I think in trying to improve the city schools here in New Haven. We’re going to be watching carefully how well those changes are working here in New Haven, and those are things that we certainly hope other cities, to the extent that they prove best practices … adopt as well.”
“Other than that, I really don’t know much about what he’s done in New Haven,” Foley said. “But I do admire what he’s done on changing the public schools here.”
He's lost my vote. Anyone who admires JDS is obviously too stupid to be governor.