Adult Ed Eyed For Vacant Bassett Building

After nearly a decade of vacancy, the former state social-services building on Bassett Street might soon take on new life — not as an employee-owned laundry, but as an adult education center.

Officials brought the idea to a community meeting held Wednesday evening in the Lincoln-Bassett School cafeteria. Three dozen neighbors attended.

State Rep. Toni Walker — who’s also an adult education assistant principal — secured $20 million for New Haven’s adult education system from a state Covid Capital Projects fund designated for projects combining adult education, healthcare, and job training. The city hopes to use that funding to rehabilitate the empty building at 188 – 206 Bassett St. that once housed an outpost of the state Department of Social Services, transforming the space into a new hub for New Haveners aged 17 and up to pursue high school diplomas, job training, higher education, and English language proficiency.

City leaders convened Newhallville neighbors Wednesday evening to gather feedback on the proposal. 

“We’re really open to what you think,” said Mayor Justin Elicker. ​“At the end of the day, if the community says, ​‘We don’t want it,’ we won’t do it.”

The Harp administration had taken steps to create a worker-owned laundry facility in the building, which has been vacant since the Department of Social Services moved to James Street in 2013. But the plans didn’t pan out. According to City Engineer Giovanni Zinn, the building at 188 – 206 Bassett St. would not have been able to accommodate the space needed for a laundromat while remaining structurally sound. The city still hopes to jumpstart a worker-owned laundromat elsewhere in the city, Elicker said.

New Haven’s adult education program, an arm of New Haven Public Schools, currently operates out of 540 Ella T. Grasso Blvd., where the program has struggled to meet rising rents from its new landlord. Meanwhile, ​“the building started crumbling underneath us,” said Walker.

New Haven Adult & Continuing Education currently serves 1,300 students each year. The number is expected to rise to previous enrollment levels of about 1,600 as families adjust to pandemic life. The school offers free tuition to New Haven-based students seeking high school degrees. Principal Michelle Bonora said she hopes to expand free tuition for the program’s growing vocational classes if she can secure additional funding. 

A move to the Bassett Street building would allow Adult Education to expand its offerings in technical and pre-professional courses, Bonora said. She envisions bolstered operations in Certified Nursing Assistant training, phlebotomy, manufacturing, restaurant management, customer service, building trades, and digital literacy. The new building would allow the program to acquire laboratory space for medical career training, she said, as well as space for mental health services and arts education.

“The whole inside needs to get gutted,” said Zinn. ​“It’s a blank canvas in that sense.”

Construction will cost about $20 million, he estimated. The city is focusing on the building’s first floor to circumvent the need for an elevator, he said; the first floor is 46,000 square feet.

Adult Ed would share space with the American Job Center and would host vaccination pop-ups from Cornell Scott Hill and the Department of Public Health, qualifying the proposal for the capital projects funding.

The city also plans to set aside either one large room or two small rooms that would be ​“community-owned,” a multi-use space with a separate entrance and operation system that neighbors themselves could govern.

What About Our Kids?

The plan received some positive feedback from Newhallville residents, especially for its potential to bring job training, continuing education, and digital literacy opportunities to neighborhood residents.

Still, many in attendance stressed that Newhallville is in dire need of youth services and mental health care, especially since the start of the pandemic — resources they characterized as more urgent than adult education.

Raymond Jackson, a Newhallville resident and neighborhood specialist with the city’s Livable City Initiative, pointed to a wave of gun violence that has affected the neighborhood. ​“We’ve been at hospitals. We’ve been at funerals.”

“We need some therapy,” said Shirley Lawrence, who said she knows young people who feel afraid to walk outside.

“Our neighborhood is traumatized,” said Barbara Vereen. ​“We need social services. We need mental health services,” she said. She said the neighborhood needs a ​“doorway” — a place where residents can walk in and seek out the resources they need, without having to navigate a web of government and medical systems on their own.

“That’s what this is,” Elicker replied. He said that adult education is a service that would be available to Newhallville residents along with the rest of the city, helping boost economic mobility.

Elicker said the adult education project is currently the most realistic plan for the building given its guaranteed funding. ​“In an ideal world, we’d have a Q House every ten blocks, but that’s just not the reality,” he said.

Young people in particular are struggling, neighbors emphasized, sharing stories of their own kids’ declining mental health and academic motivation.

Ngola Santos spoke about his daughter, a former A‑student who has struggled to keep up with classes since the pandemic, and whose mental health has suffered. ​“There is nothing that says, ​‘We’ve thought about these people here, these kids here,’ ” Santos said of the city’s proposal.

Carlotta Clark suggested that the community-owned space in the building be larger than the proposed 1,600 square feet — and that it be dedicated to children. ​“We need things for them to do after school,” she said.

Maybe the former school at 794 Dixwell Ave., recently purchased by the APT Foundation to outrage from neighbors, could provide additional space for adult education and youth programming, suggested Latoya Agnew.

If the adult education idea goes through, neighbors asked for commitments to ensure that opportunities go to Newhallville residents.

Vereen asked if the city would consider a community benefits agreement, a contract that can secure guarantees such as affordable housing, parks, and hiring metrics from developers.

“What would be the percentage of guaranteed jobs for Newhallville and Dixwell?” asked Kim Harris, a preschool principal who chairs the neighborhood’s management team.

A majority of staff would be teachers, who would have to fulfill certification requirements, said Bonora. As for other jobs, Bonora expressed openness to a local hiring commitment: ​“I can’t promise anything standing here today, but I’d like to give that thought.”

Toxin Transparency

A number of neighbors raised concern about the possibility of environmental toxins in the building. Zinn and Elicker said they don’t know whether the building will need to be abated of any noxious materials.

Jeanette Sykes pressed city officials on how they would inform neighbors about each step of the environmental assessment and cleanup process, predicting, ​“When the [assessment] survey comes, we don’t get that. When the transit comes, we don’t get that.” 

“What are we doing to protect those neighbors?” asked Harris.

Addie Kimbrough recalled closely following the environmental cleanup of the former nuclear factory at 71 Shelton Ave., which entailed transporting toxic waste through the neighborhood. 

“We don’t expect radioactive material like on Shelton,” said Zinn. 

Ward 21 Alder Steve Winter noted that even though the Bassett Street building was not a nuclear factory, it might still contain materials such as asbestos. The developers of 71 Shelton attended neighborhood community management team meetings for a year to update neighbors about the cleanup’s progress, Winter noted. He asked for a similar level of communication about the former state building, which Zinn said could be possible.

Would it be possible to keep the internal structure of the building and save costs on the total rehabilitation? asked Amy Chai, an Independent/Libertarian candidate running to replace U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro.

“I don’t think it’s wise from a long-term perspective,” Zinn replied, given the building’s current shape.