Shuttered School May Have New Tenant

A Wooster Square school closed down by budget cuts may fill up with students again next year — this time, by a local charter operator that’s bursting out of their current space.

John Taylor, Booker T. Washington Academy’s executive director, made the pitch to rent out the former New Light High School on Wooster Place at the Board of Education’s Finance & Operations Committee meeting, which took place on Monday evening in the district’s Meadow Street headquarters.

Taylor said that his growing, five-year-old school has run out of room at the old St. Stanislaus Church’s parochial school on State Street. He said Booker T. Washington, which serves 360 students from kindergarten through fifth grade, can’t fit a planned added grade next year.

On State Street, ​“we’ve renovated the space so that even the cafeteria can be used as a classroom,” Taylor said. ​“We’re literally out of space.”

Taylor suggested that, starting next school year, Booker T. Washington’s fifth and sixth graders would move in to New Light’s former location on Wooster Place.

New Light was cleared out last year. Amid a $19 million budget shortfall, the alternative school was consolidated with New Horizons and Riverside Academy. It’s now being used as a storage facility for warehoused boxes of records.

Taylor proposed fixing up New Light’s building over the summer, by completing over $155,000 in capital improvements. He said, for the first year, Booker T. Washington would cover the entire renovation bill, in lieu of rent. After that, he added, the school would pay approximately $100,000 in rent each year, along with utility and maintenance fees.

“We don’t want to add any additional expenses to New Haven,” Taylor said. ​“The only thing we ask is that it would be broom-clean.”

The solution is ​“just temporary for a couple of years,” Taylor added, as Booker T. Washington searches for a permanent home that can fit the entire school. He thought the school had located a space (he wouldn’t disclose the address), but the deal fell through.

The leaders at Varick AME Zion Church founded the school in response to frustrations of many in New Haven’s African-American community over what they saw as limited public-school options.

In 2014, the group received a state charter, meaning the school is mostly publicly funded and mostly privately operated. Students are admitted, tuition-free, in the district-wide lottery, with a priority going to kids who live in the Newhallville and Dixwell neighborhoods.

Booker T. Washington’s scores have been mixed. In its early years, it far outperformed other schools across the state on a standardized measures of ​“proficiency,” which tells whether its students are on grade level. But last year, it stumbled on a standardized measure of ​“growth,” which tells how much individual students learned from year-to-year, regardless of how much they knew when they started.

School board members Monday said they are open to the lease idea. Board President Darnell Goldson said it could be a ​“win-win for the district.” But they asked to see the details on paper.

At the meeting, the Finance & Operations Committee also reviewed proposals for where to move Riverside Opportunity High School, the consolidated alternative school that’s being pulled from its current rented space on Ella T. Grasso Boulevard.

After initially proposing a plan to move Riverside into Strong School’s current location on Orchard Street, district officials said that they actually thought it would be best to put Riverside back into New Horizons on Hallock Street.

Board members asked for a final recommendation at their next Monday meeting, along with an analysis of the financial costs and academic impact of yet another move for the alternative school students who’ve been shuffled around the district.