Principals Add Honors Track, Summer School

As parents decried cutbacks to a ​“talented and gifted” program, Principal Iline Tracey quietly crafted a solution in the back of the room — and saw a recruiting opportunity.

Tracey (pictured above), who runs the King/Robinson Magnet School, was one of two principals who showed up at the Board of Education’s regular meeting Monday to reveal plans to shake up the way they run their schools.

King/Robinson and the Edgewood Magnet School were among a first batch of schools to be graded into three tiers this year as part of the city’s nascent school reform drive. Monday night they detailed new initiatives they plan to launch this summer and fall.

Tracey, who lifted her school off of a federal ​“failing” list after four years of double-digit gains on test scores, was graded in the middle tier. That means she’ll make changes to the curriculum and staffing, with permission from central office, and within the constraints of a union contract.

On Monday, she revealed a handful of new plans that aim to reallocate staff time, give students more academic choices, and get behavior under control.

Plans include introducing a new honors program for grades K to 8.

The new program aims to supplement, or replace, the district’s Talented and Gifted program (TAG), which recently fell prey to budget cuts. TAG is an enrichment program for qualifying creative kids in grades K to 8. Students are taken out of their classrooms and bused to central location for weekly TAG sessions.

TAG got the axe when Mayor John DeStefano slashed $6 million from his budget proposal for the fiscal year starting July 1 in response to outcry from taxpayers over rising tax bills. He proposed cutting the program in half, a $800,000 reduction. School officials announced they would eliminate the program for grades K to 3, but keep it intact for grades 4 to 8.

Parents mobilized to rescue the program. Then the Board of Aldermen passed a final budget that cut school board funding by $3 million. Aldermen urged the school board to preserve TAG, but lawmakers have no power to control line-by-line education spending.

Fourteen TAG parents showed up to Monday’s school board meeting to make their case, a second time, for saving the program. Superintendent of Schools Reggie Mayo said he was not swayed: The district would go ahead with the cuts, but the TAG director would work hard to keep as much of the program intact as possible.

While the parents decried a loss, Principal Tracey set to work on a backup plan.

As a mom approached the podium with her daughter in tow, Tracey chatted with TAG teacher Doris Suarez (pictured with her back to the camera at the top of the story), who was standing in the back of the room. Five of the 11 TAG teachers who run the program will be reassigned to classroom duty, according to Mayo.

“Come work with us,” Tracey urged.

She gave the teacher her name and her number at the school. Suarez, who teaches grades two and three, eagerly accepted the paper.

“I was recruiting — right on the spot,” Tracey said afterwards. ​“You always have to look out” for opportunities, she said.

In a subsequent interview, Tracey said she sees her honors program as having more of an academic focus than the TAG program. She said about 10 of her students currently attend TAG, and they love it. The honors track would serve both TAG and non-TAG kids, she said.

Tracey stepped up to the microphone with an aura of determination and a huge smile. (“I’m always pumped up,” she later explained. ​“If you can’t motivate yourself, you can’t motivate anyone else.”)

Before laying out plans for the future, she shared how far the school has come.

She became principal in the fall of 2005, when the school was formed through the merger of Martin Luther King and Jackie Robinson.

Test scores had hit rock-bottom: only 9 percent of students scored ​“proficient” at reading and math on the Connecticut Mastery Test. Under Tracey’s watch, the school posted double-digit gains for the past four years. Last year, 59 percent reached proficient in reading, and 79 percent in math, she said. Also last year, after nine years on the federal government’s ​“failing” school list, the school proudly shed that label.

Tracey’s task will be to continue to boost scores for her school, without incurring more costs to the city’s $173 million general fund contribution to the education budget.

As she looks ahead, she sees one challenge in the lunch room.

Next year, her school is growing to 600 students, with three classes per grade level. She’s planning to break them up into four lunch waves and bring in more staff to keep behavior under control. Currently, Tracey and only one other staffer supervise about 100 kids per lunch wave — too many kids per adult, she said.

The lunch room is a key part of a school’s culture, she argued: It’s worth having order there, even if it means spending extra staff time.

“If it’s crazy in the cafeteria, it will be crazy in class,” Tracey reasoned in an interview outside the board room. She proposed reshuffling teachers’ schedules so they spend time supervising their students in the cafeteria. According to union work rules, teachers would still be guaranteed their own, child-free lunch break, she said.

The idea was inspired in part by the new plans for a Tier III school, Barnard Environmental Magnet School, which will require teachers to eat lunch with their students.

Another challenge Tracey faces is in curbing the number of suspensions, which she said have been on the rise.

“Even though it brings some peace of mind if Johnny isn’t there,” she argued, suspending a kid from school isn’t the answer: ​“We’re playing with people’s lives.”

She said kids are ​“confused” about discipline, because rules vary from classroom to classroom. The school needs a uniform language to talk about behavior, she argued. To that end, she’s turning to a new point-based rewards system that’s gaining popularity in other city schools. The program is called Positive Behavior Support. Click here to read about how the method is working at the Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School.

Tracey also rolled out a couple of ideas to prepare kids for high school and college, one of the school reform drive’s major goals. She plans a college prep course for grades seven and eight. She plans to invite alumni back to the school, so staff can reconnect with them and see how they’re doing.

Tracey also plans to bring in rigorous math classes based on the national Singapore curriculum, and a ​“data day” every marking period where staff analyze student test scores, based on a model at the Achievement First charter schools.

Across town, Edgewood Principal Bonnie Pachesa (pictured at right with Assistant Principal Medria Blue) aims to infuse more creativity into her classroom of high-performing kids. Edgewood was one of two schools that ranked the highest, in Tier I, when the city graded seven schools earlier this year.

That distinction gives Pachesa more autonomy and a freedom to do less teaching to a test. She’s bringing in an arts enrichment program for grades K to 2. The program will be run by Yale’s British Art Center (BAC), which has already worked with several schools outside of New Haven and is piloting a program at Edgewood this year.

The BAC won a grant to expand the program to four city schools next year, including Edgewood. The program, called Visual Literacy, uses art to get kids writing and reading. The BAC will welcome students on field trips, and train teachers on how to integrate the arts into everyday classroom learning. Students will learn how to read a painting, discuss what it means, and write about it. The program aims to activate kids’ senses, teach them to think critically, and make learning more fun, Pachesa said.

For the first time, the arts-inspired fun will spill over into the summer, she revealed. Edgewood is planning an optional, one-month summer program at the school. The program will be a first-ever collaboration with the Davis Street school, the other top-performing Tier I school. Students from both schools will get together for the month of July and focus on reading, jazzed up with lessons in music and dance. The program will be geared to students who read on a ​“low-proficient” level, she said.

Other plans include a workshop for parents on how to help kids transition from middle to high school, and a career day for students in grades 6, 7 and 8.

With each proposed change, principals had to provide a ​“rationale for change,” research that supports that change, and a way to measure the impact.

After the presentations, teachers union Vice President David Low issued a note of caution: If these changes are made without teacher input, he said, teachers could feel ​“bought out.” In order for the plans to work, he said, school leadership needs to ​“make sure teachers are empowered to make decisions.”