Aliyya Swaby Photo
Fontan oversees dismissal this week.
In the last two years at Hill Central, Lillian Fontan has overseen climbing test scores, decreasing student absentee rates, and a jump off the state list of troubled schools.
Her secret? Loosening her grip on the reins.
Principal Fontan is continuing a school model of distributed leadership, pioneered there by predecessor Principal Glen Worthy. The model encourages teachers to take powerful roles directing day-to-day operations at Hill Central Music Academy at 140 Dewitt St.
The data shows it’s working. And increases in parental requests for slots at the 492-student K‑8 neighborhood school shows that families are taking notice.
But, as is the common concern among New Haven schools officials, Fontan said she needs to keep rallying money and community support to keep going at the same level — with a popular after-school program for English language learners (ELLs) in financial jeopardy.
As a new school year begins, she’s also working on ways to aim even higher academically and in school culture, meaning boosting test scores and lowering out-of-school suspension rates.
Teachers In Charge
When Worthy, now Hillhouse High School’s sole principal, headed Hill Central, the school received a 2010 federal School Improvement Grant aimed at overhauling schools with poor performance. He replaced half his staff and promoted strong teachers to leadership positions to help him run the school. The three teacher-leaders — for academic, school culture, and bilingual missions — organize professional development opportunities for other teachers and lead discussions through the school system on student progress.
Six years after first getting the grant, Hill Central is no longer considered a struggling school by the state, according to 2014 – 15 accountability standards.
And the leadership model is still going strong, Fontan said. Under the three school leaders are five sets of “vertical teams” of teachers, divided by grade. The teams are divided into grades K‑2, 3 – 4, 5 – 6, 7 – 8 and “specials,” which includes any elective teachers, as well as special education and English language learning (ELL). Hill Central is an ELL-heavy school, with a large percentage of Spanish speaking students.
Teacher leaders meet weekly, and teams meet monthly, to come up with quarterly action plans for school improvement, work on content units for the classroom, and ask for help and support, if they need it.
At the beginning of the turnaround, teachers got so much professional development, they “should have gotten college credit,” Fontan said. As the structure continues to solidify, she holds meetings with her teams at a more manageable frequency, once a month instead of once a week, she said.
And the $53.4 million federal Teacher Incentive Fund grant is paying stipends for a handful of teacher facilitators who lead workshops for their peers at the school.
For the first time this year, fifth and sixth grade will be departmentalized, like in a middle school, instead of having just one classroom teacher. And seventh and eighth graders will have individual schedules, instead of moving as a class, just like in the average high school, Fontan said. That’s intended to get students prepared for higher education while they’re still in the safety net of a K‑8 school.
Bridging Bilingual Gap
From her office in a $46 million modern school building tucked in the Hill neighborhood, Fontan rattled off a list of positive changes.
Last year, seventh and eighth-grade teachers, wanting to come up with a way to engage struggling students, created a social justice class, which partly fills the gaping hole in available electives at the school, Fontan said.
Fifth graders jumped 5.8 percentage points on the science section of their Connecticut Mastery Tests, with half of students meeting or exceeding standards.
Student attendance rates were at a high of 94.1 percent last school year, up from 92.7 percent in 2014 – 15, with the help of the bilingual truancy officer in the school every two weeks to check in on parents.
Staff attrition is low, with just two staff members leaving last year for major leadership positions.
Superintendent of Schools Garth Harries called Hill Central’s success in building strong leadership and teaching teams a “core strategy” of the district’s “school change” campaign. He said he hopes to duplicate the success at other schools. “At Hill Central our team really honed in on perfecting instruction and focused on the unique needs of the school – in particular, ensuring that every student who has bilingual needs has access to an educator who has experience and can help, and building a strong model of teacher leadership that maximizes the impact of our best teachers,” Harries said. “Hill Central has also able been able to engage parents on a personal level and the parents there have really taken on a key role and agreed to be active partners in their students’ education.”
Surrounded by a sea of families at 3 p.m. dismissal, Fontan used just as much Spanish as she did English to inquire about students’ days. Wednesday was the first day of school for kindergartners. “Como estan? How are you?” she asked, flagging down parents and guiding students in or out the front door. Her arm around another student’s shoulders, she assured him — in Spanish — that she’d help him figure out how to get home, when he didn’t know what bus to take.
Fontan spoke no English when she arrived in Connecticut from Puerto Rico with her family as a child. She started first grade in the Waterbury public school system, without academic support from her monolingual Spanish-speaking mother.
“Not having my mom able to come to the classroom because of not speaking the language” was difficult, Fontan said. She wants to be the bilingual bridge for her school’s English language learners and their families.
That’s why she started her career as a bilingual teacher in Fair Haven Middle School in 1977. After six years there, she became an itinerant ELL teacher for the next 18 years in New Haven Public Schools, before rooting in Columbus Academy as a dual language coordinator. She has spent time in central office as an instructional high school coach in ELL.
She was an assistant principal under Worthy at Hill Central for seven years, before taking over as principal when he left two years ago.
The turning point in Fontan’s career was a training session in Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP), intended to help instructors continue to build on academic knowledge with their English language learning students, while also improving their English. Fontan went to California with a group of other teachers when she was an itinerant ELL teacher.
“That was a turning point for me,” she said. “I learned so much.” And she got the chance to share what she had learned with her peers and superiors, who pushed her to consider leadership roles in New Haven schools. At first, she shrugged off the advice, wanting to remain in the classroom. But she decided to seek leadership opportunities in central office, and then at Hill Central.
SIOP is a respected instructional model now implemented at Hill Central schoolwide.
Planning Ahead
Hill Central is currently overenrolled, which Fontan plans to immediately flag with schools officials. “It’s not an easy conversation” to have to tell students they can’t stay at the school, she said. Kindergarten has the longest waitlist of all the grades.
Superintendent Harries contested the term “overenrolled”: “Hill Central as a whole is not over enrolled at the moment and was not at the start of the school year – the question is the allocation of students between different classrooms, as the grade levels and language of instruction has changed for different students. We are actively working with the school to be sure that students get the optimal classroom for them within the constraints of class size – I expect any residual classroom misassignments to be resolved by Tuesday of next week. Given late arrivals and adjustments to grades and programs, reflecting the reality of our families and community, these kinds of issues happen every year. We have significantly reduced the incidence of oversized classrooms in recent years, and will continue to improve our processes to minimize the ways late decisions cause disruption in schools.”
With greater popularity comes greater responsibility to keep standards high. Fontan knows her team needs to focus on science and math interventions for students, with science literacy just as important as reading. She said teachers are ready to double down.
The turnaround status of the school required teachers to show up at 8 a.m., an hour before the start of the school day, to collaborate on school planning. Though it’s no longer required, that has continued.
One challenge for the year will be stabilizing school culture. Last year, out-of-school suspension rates “peaked a little,” Fontan said, though they had been previously declining. She’s not sure exactly why. Some of the students getting in trouble were repeat offenders, she said. Some were new to the school, and new to seventh and eighth grade, succumbing easily to peer pressure. “We had a lot of new kids last year,” she said. “That impacted our numbers.” The school had 96 out-of-school suspensions this past academic year, up from 84 in 2014 – 15 and 71 in 2013 – 14.
She’s keeping an eye on those numbers. If they keep rising, that’s a problem. “It always helps to get the parents here on our side,” she said. Sometimes “parents don’t understand” why their kids are in trouble, or they need help themselves working through tough situations, she said.
This year, many teachers will get training in restorative justice, which focuses on bringing offenders into the community, instead of immediately punishing them. Already, teachers start the class day with “restorative circles,” where students share opinions and ideas before starting to learn.
Fontan is not sure whether Hill Central can continue to afford the before- and after-school programs offered last year at 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. every day. The before-school program focused on math skills, while the after-school program was specifically an ELL academy, targeting students in lower grades who needed to develop skills, she said.
Whether or not it happens this year depends on funding. If Hill Central gets Title I funds or money for an extended day program, the after-school program might be able to continue.
Fontan hopes she can substitute any funding gap with support from community organizations. “Most who came last year were ELLs,” she said. “ELLs need more time” in the classroom.
Lilian is a great administrator who I know personally and professionally who will go beyond what she is asked to do. She is the beginning of a restructuring of a failing system.