Blatteau calls out NHPS for failing to keep teachers on staff.
With three weeks left until the start of the 2025 – 26 school year, teachers union President Leslie Blatteau is speaking up about New Haven Public Schools’ ongoing “retention crisis.”
Are educator salaries to blame? Decaying school buildings? A lack of transparency around the Board of Education’s budget?
Blatteau raised those concerns last Monday during the school board’s latest meeting, held at John C. Daniels School and online via Zoom. She reserved the teachers union’s right to speak on agenda items during public comment without the three-minute time restraint the board sets for other members of the public.
Blatteau focused during her remarks on the latest New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) personnel report, which included 18 new hires and 16 staff resignations and retirements. She questioned what the district will do to not only recruit educators, but also retain them.
NHPS “can’t get out of the zone of not being fully staffed,” Blatteau said. “We are stuck in that zone and we don’t have a recruitment problem, we have a retention problem.”
She listed off some reasons for staff departures, like the lack of competitive salaries for long-tenured staff, unsafe building conditions making it hard to teach, and the increasing dependence on itinerant hires.
“People new to the district are making significantly more than people who have dedicated years of service to our city,” she said about district salaries.
She said that, in an attempt to address the issue several months ago, the New Haven Federation of Teachers (NHFT) proposed that the district “cap new hire salaries at the equivalent of what they would make if they had started their career with us,” but the school district reportedly rejected the union’s proposal.
She continued, “It was frustrating that that opportunity to save was disregarded, and we’re not able to move forward with a solution that would honor people who have dedicated their lives to this city while at the same time offering competitive salaries to new hires.”
Blatteau also spoke up about the lack of preventative maintenance at NHPS facilities contributing to retention issues. She pointed to a contract with Tucker Mechanical costing $24,000 to service 11 schools with partial or no air conditioning, as well as a $150,000 contract with EnviroMed Services Inc. to provide on-call asbestos and mold remediation services.
She said this type of reactive rather than proactive maintenance “interrupts the core central work of students and teachers, which is academic learning.”
“We are still dealing with mold in our buildings and we need to get out from the reactive and back to the preventive so our buildings can be safe, welcoming, and well maintained for everyone.”
A third retention-focused concern Blatteau raised focused on the increasing number of hires for itinerant positions.
“It is becoming increasingly common for New Haven Public Schools to hire new people and put them into itinerant roles, which means they’re not assigned to a building. They can be moved based on the needs of the district and creates a separate job class for those people,” she said. She stated that people apply to work for NHPS to be connected to a school community and the lack of that has impacted staff retention.
Blatteau also pointed out that the district still has not publicly shared an updated and accurate budget breakdown for FY25-26. “Are we having a retention crisis because we still lack transparency when it comes to the budget?”
Blatteau wasn’t just critical during her remarks at last Monday’s meeting. She also spoke about positives on the board’s agenda, including the recognition of New Haven’s 2025 teacher of the year, an Extended School Hours Grant for after school-programing, collaborations with IRIS to support student needs, and social work services for Metropolitan Business Academy.
She concluded by requesting again that the school board remove its rule of only allowing 60 minutes of public comment during meetings, “in the name of democracy.” She also pointed out that the rule is only specific to the Board of Education and no other city boards or committee that she’s aware of.
Watch the full board meeting above.