The school district is eyeing two low-performing city schools for potential state-funded “turnaround” efforts next year.
Lincoln-Bassett School in Newhallville and Hillhouse High on Sherman Avenue are the latest schools being considered for overhauls, school Superintendent Garth Harries announced at Monday’s school board meeting.
The announcement came in response to a request from the state for letters of interest from school districts seeking to send applications to the Commissioner’s Network of low-performing schools. The state created the network two years ago to send extra money, oversight and support to failing schools that agree to undertake certain reforms.
In 2012, High School in the Community, a teacher-run magnet school on Water Street, became one of the first four schools in the network. It launched a “turnaround effort” in which all the teachers except those in leadership positions had to reapply for their jobs.
In 2013, Wilbur Cross High School, the city’s largest comprehensive high school, joined the network as well. Instead of a traditional New Haven turnaround, where all teachers in the whole school have to reapply for their jobs and face different work rules if they stay, Cross launched a smaller experiment. It created two self-contained schools-within-a-school, one for English-language learners, and another for freshmen. The effort followed a three-year, $2.1 million effort to “transform” Wilbur Cross by splitting it into four “small learning communities.” Harries has acknowledged that the effort failed to create “strong and viable” small learning communities.
The school district is now considering making similar changes at its second-largest comprehensive high school, James Hillhouse High School, Harries said Monday. Like Cross, Hillhouse received a federal School Improvement Grant that called for splitting up the school into four small learning communities, or academies.
“There’s significant opportunity to strengthen the academy structure” at Hillhouse, Harries said.
“We also think it’s important that we address issues of transience, which we know are significant challenges,” Harries added.
Harries said the district is considering nominating Hillhouse or Lincoln-Bassett to take part in the Commissioner’s Network.
Major changes are already afoot at Lincoln-Bassett, a neighborhood school on Bassett Street. The school got a new principal this fall, and eliminated its 7th and 8th grades right before school started due to low enrollment and a budget crisis.
Harries stressed that the district has not yet determined whether or not to make those two schools into turnarounds. But he said he wanted to be open with the board and public about the possibility, because the state is asking for letters of interest from districts seeking to join the network. Once a district writes such a letter, the state must then invite the school to apply for a grant.
The state’s biennial budget includes $27.5 million to expand the Commissioner’s Network from four to up to 21 schools over two years. How much money each school gets will be “based on the model chosen, number of students served, and selected strategies as outlined in the schools’ turnaround plans,” according to state education spokeswoman Kelly Donnelly.
And now that Kermit is back on board, maybe Hillhouse can indeed "turn around"