Parents ​“Occupy” School Board

Before parents could storm the Board of Education in search of more transparency in pre‑K admissions, they had to find the hearing room.

Some found the navigation difficult — and a symbol of the point they were trying to make.

Over two dozen parents and aldermen showed up at 5:30 p.m. Monday to the Board of Education headquarters at 54 Meadow St. for a rare showing of public input at the board’s biweekly meeting.

As the clock struck 5:30, a trio entered the front door of the building, which the district rents from a private landlord. They walked by the elevator, then doubled back in confusion.

“Where is the board meeting?” they asked the security guard. He directed them to the second floor, where a paper sign points the way through two glass doors, and down two hallways, to the board hearing room.

When they got there, they were pleased to learn the school board, expecting a crowd of parents with squirming kids, had bumped up the public comment portion of the meeting higher on the agenda.

Tim Holahan (pictured above), a Westville dad who has been leading a grassroots group of parents along with Eliza Halsey, declared the parents were there for ​“Occupy Board of Education.” They spared officials the time-consuming ​“mic check.”

Their purpose was to make specific requests for how the district can make pre‑K admissions a more transparent process.

Holahan and Halsey, who both faced problems enrolling their own children in pre‑K spots in New Haven, have been working on the issue for months. Their research found that city kids are being denied free pre‑K spots in magnet schools — a cornerstone of the strategy to closing the urban-suburban achievement gap — because those slots are going disproportionately to suburban kids.

As parents, they were both unaware of alternative options to pre‑K magnet schools: school readiness sites and Head Start. In response, they created a website and an easy-to-follow guide for parents entering the process; check it out here.

On Monday they asked the district to do its part to make the process easier to navigate.

Halsey and co. have been meeting with top district officials about the matter. The group made specific suggestions about how to update information packets that get sent home to parents, make it easier for parents to schedule appointments, and update the district website.

“While we believe that the program administrators have engaged us with sincerity and have been receptive to our ideas, we have not yet seen any actual changes,” Halsey said.

Halsey (pictured) noted that Mayor John DeStefano made universal pre‑K access a major plank of his reelection campaign, hailing it as a huge leg up in the fight to close the achievement gap between city kids and their suburban peers. Enrollment into the early grades has been a notoriously opaque and difficult process for parents.

For example, Holahan said, parents still aren’t clear on a simple question: If you really want your kid to get into Edgewood School pre‑K, for example, is it better to list only that school on your magnet application? The district line is no. But the word on the street — and from some district officials — is yes, he said.

He asked the district to update its magnet catalog to clearly state the rules by which applications are considered, including neighborhood and sibling preference.

And he asked for a clear picture of a kid’s chances of getting into the school. That means yearly stats on how many seats were open in all grades, how many applications came in, and how the lucky winners were selected (by sibling preference? neighborhood preference? pre-registration from a pre‑K program?). He also asked for the number of seats — if any — that were ​“withheld from the lottery process for administrative disposition.”

Because of the ​“non-transparency,” Holahan argued, rumors still swirl about how the process really works.

“We have no idea whether it is true that seats in certain high-performing schools are reserved at the discretion of senior administrators,” Holahan said. ​“Only clear and frequent statements from the board can dispel this rumor, or clarify the purpose of the practice if it exists.”

Aldermen Justin Elicker, Jessica Holmes, Dolores Colon and Frank Douglass, Jr., showed up to support the parents.

Elicker (pictured), who represents East Rock, said he empathizes with parents’ frustration because he went through the same experience while tackling the admissions process to the popular Hooker School. While the school often has open seats in the later grades, it experiences a crunch in grades K‑2. In light of some past controversies where city higher-ups from other neighborhoods snagged seats for their kids at neighbors’ expense, the admissions process there has caused continual confusion and, sometimes, desperate measures.

“The enrollment process is confusing as hell and it doesn’t feel welcoming,” Elicker told the board. There’s a ​“breakdown in communication” between the people who live in New Haven and the district that serves their kids.

When Elicker approached the district about making the process more transparent, he said, parents practically had to come bearing ​“pitchforks” before the district agreed to revamp the process.

Elicker noted that it was difficult to find the meeting room on Monday — which served to emphasize ​“a feeling in the community that this building is not as welcoming as it could be.”

The aldermen said there’s a lot of good ​“can-do attitude” associated with the district’s school reform effort. He said the district should bring that energy to its customer service department and ​“roll out that red carpet” for parents.

In her remarks, Halsey called for more parental involvement in general in the district’s affairs.

“We are open to engagement,” replied schools Superintendent Reggie Mayo. ​“It’s certainly something we are working on.”

He said the district has a revived citywide PTO that has been meeting monthly. Mayor John DeStefano this year has been encouraging the district to step up its parental engagement, in part by establishing a ​“parent university,” an idea DeStefano floated in his State of the City speech.

As for Elicker’s remarks, Mayo noted, ​“we were very responsive” to East Rock parents who aired concerns about Hooker. The district met with parents and agreed to give seats to people on waiting lists by lottery, so that parents don’t have to return day after day to score an open spot.

Meanwhile, the school board reflected on its relationship with the public.

Big Decisions, Empty Room

Board member Alex Johnston said the board needs to ​“create a space that feels more welcoming to parents.”

“There are times,” he said, — such as the previous meeting, when the budget was unveiled — ​“when this board is talking about really important things, and the room is very empty.”

He suggested the board start with the simple step of setting up an email list to alert parents of the agendas to board meetings.

There was some discussion about rotating the location of the meetings.

Board member Ferdinand Risco, Jr. said he’d like to see more effort placed on the citywide PTO, which was revived in November 2009. He said he has heard the group has poor attendance.

Superintendent Mayo said attendance has been ​“erratic,” but good enough to hold a substantive discussion about the topic at hand.

After the group left, schools Chief Operating Officer Will Clark said if aldermen want the school district to be more transparent, they should give the district money to do the things they ask for — such as updating the website more frequently.

“I’d like to see them [advocate for] increases to our budget,” he said.