Courtesy Photo
New Head Start Supervisor Mary Derwin.
Columbus Family Academy Assistant Principal Mary Derwin will step into a new role in July as supervisor of New Haven’s Head Start pre-kindergarten program.
The New Haven Board of Education unanimously approved Derwin’s promotion on Monday, along with the rest of this week’s hires and retirements.
“Her attention to detail is such an important quality in a job like this,” said board member Tamiko Jackson-McArthur. “She has fine tuned this skill around early childhood education. I want to congratulate her. This is a great appointment.”
The other board members who spoke agreed.
The Head Start program is a federal, income-qualifying preschool. The most recent director, Liz Gaffney, announced in February that she was taking a new position within Milford Public Schools.
Derwin has worked within New Haven Public Schools for 20 years. She has held a district-level position as school readiness director in the past and stepped in as acting Head Start director for half a year when the district was between official hires.
Superintendent Iline Tracey highlighted Derwin’s experience with play-based learning, where students discover math, reading and other lessons through hands-on activities.
After the vote, Derwin thanked the board and mentioned some of her goals. She plans to support student academic growth by providing health care and connecting families to other resources they need. She aims for consistent quality across all Head Start locations. She hopes to increase enrollment, which has been hit during the pandemic. (Families seem to have delayed enrolling their children in pre‑K and kindergarten statewide.)
“We have a strong Head Start management team. Collaboratively, we can work towards continuous improvement — not just to be compliant, but to build upon our strengths and really make this a premier program,” Derwin said.
Derwin’s starting salary will be $158,880.
Board member and former Riverside principal Larry Conaway also used the personnel report vote to thank one long-time, security officer, Domingo Santiago. Santiago has retired, effective early April.
“He was an unsung hero of the evening, 11 – 7 shift. He saved us many times when there were calls to the building at night,” Conaway said.
Congratulations on the new position. I'm glad that pre-K and K and Head Start will focus on play based learning. It is more developmentally appropriate for children under age 6 to learn math, science, reading and writing through a play based curriculum. When I was in pre-K and kindergarten in the 1960's we had half day classes with a block corner, a play kitchen corner and a book corner and we spent a lot of time doing arts and crafts with letters, numbers, colors and shapes identification built into play activities as well as learning how to line up and raise our hands and get along with others. When I returned to pre-k and kindergarten classrooms in the NHPS as an elementary education student school volunteer as part of my teacher training they expected children as young as 4 to sit still at a desk for all day classes reading and writing and doing math. There was no more block corner or play house corner or even much of a library corner for children to explore learning by doing. Many children would be falling asleep or acting up out of boredom, tiredness, or being unable to sit still for that long. Children under age 7 can still be unready to read on their own, and boys can take longer than girls to be ready to read by themselves. I found that most of the behavioral issues were caused by developmentally inappropriate expectations in the classroom. Having a play based pre-K through K learning will help with letter and word and number and counting skills for reading and math literacy as well as help develop social-emotional and behavioral skills in the classroom setting.