Nora Grace-Flood photo
Randi Weingarten (right) helps a student laminate and cut a school sign in the Wilbur Cross print shop.
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten returned to New Haven — a decade after helping turn the city into a national model for school reform — and lauded Wilbur Cross High School as a potential leader in hands-on schooling amid a new era of learning loss.
Over the course of Wednesday morning, Weingarten watched as students pumped mannequin chests, printed bathroom passes, baked pastries, and spoke in small groups about emotional well-being. She did so as she sought to pick up in her own hands-on fashion on programming that public schools are successfully employing to make school productive and fun in the post-pandemic age.
She opted to visit New Haven as part of the American Federation of Teachers’ “Real Solutions for Kids and Communities” campaign, a year-long $5 million project focused on finding scalable solutions to what Weingarten called the three educational “problems of today”: Literacy, learning loss and loneliness.
That school tour drew attention to the problems facing inner city schools ten years ago versus today, while crediting New Haven as a case study in building on personal progress in preparation for unprecedented challenges to public education.
Weingarten with Superintendent Madeline Negrón Wednesday.
“Wilbur Cross is a gem,” Weingarten told the Independent after touring the school Wednesday. “What makes it that way is educators working together to create opportunities for kids and kids here are seizing those opportunities.”
Weingarten said the “Real Solutions” project launched this year as a rejection of “toxic attacks” from politicians who she said are inserting political divisions, cutting resources and diverting funding from already underfunded public schools and promoting school vouchers as a means of undermining the public school system rather than seeking to strengthen it.
“While they smear and take down public schooling, we’re trying to scale what works, to sustain what works and seed potential strategies that we believe will help kids thrive,” she asserted.
Weingarten last came to New Haven in 2010, while New Haven and other school districts reported struggling with ineffective teachers and poor standardized test scores, to help the local teachers union broker a unique contract that encouraged more intensive teacher evaluations in exchange for higher salaries and benefits. That trade-off saw unions working in tandem with administrators rather than against them, and ultimately yielded apparent pay-offs in both teacher and student performance. Read about that contract in detail here, here and here.
At the time, New Haven made national headlines as a model for public school reform.
On Wednesday, Weingarten further credited that contract as paving the way for New Haven’s sustained success in a new age of educational woes.
That contract, she said, improved relationships between teachers and high-up administrators, holding educators more accountable for their individual performance while also empowering them to rewrite curricula and experiment with diverse teaching strategies in the classroom. It also bettered public education’s status in the eyes of the community and philanthropic partners that pushed more funding into school programming.
New Haven Teachers Union President Leslie Blatteau listens to other teachers speak to their classroom experiences Wednesday.
Leslie Blatteau, the president of the New Haven Federation of Teachers, said that “what remains” from that contract “is the collective understanding that we have to make sure when decisions are made, they’re made with everybody at the table — unions, educators, and administrators agree that decisions have to be generated from the bottom up.”
Blatteau joined not just Weingarten but Meriden State Sen. Jan Hochadel, New Haven Public Schools Supt. Madeline Negrón and Wilbur Cross Principal Matt Brown in jumping between classrooms Wednesday morning to talk to teachers and students alike about what learning initiatives are helping kids make a comeback from the mass isolation and learning loss imposed by pandemic-induced remote schooling.
The crew shadowed students earning Emergency Medical Technician certification at the Yale-EMT training center on Willow Street; producing bathroom passes, laminated school lock-down guidelines and New Haven Public Schools signage in the Wilbur Cross print shop; cheffing award-winning pastries through the school’s culinary program; and training to become teachers by discussing tactile learning techniques over the course of the morning.
Those are just a few of the programs Wilbur Cross is championing to give students work options besides pursuing a college degree after high school — while also finding ways to center experiential learning that actually engages students reeling from years restricted to screen-based schooling.
Culinary Teacher Nathaniel Bradshaw and students present their work — including pastries pictured below — to Weingarten.
Wilbur Cross senior Adam Sharqawe, for example, told Weingarten about how he and his peers worked together last year to bring home gold in a national culinary competition. Read more about that here.
Beyond learning the basics of what it takes to run a successful restaurant through that experience, Blatteau reflected on how the students’ investment in the project taught them life lessons that extended beyond the food business: “Maybe you’re gonna become a union leader one day, and you’ll need to problem solve and collaborate!”
Weingarten, meanwhile, extended an invitation to Culinary Coach Nathaniel Bradshaw to present at a national convention of the AFT in Houston this summer to speak about hands-on learning.
Across the hallway, Weingarten also sat in on a class about social emotional learning, where teacher Danielle Storey-Carson and students Haylie, Genesis and Beatrice discussed the importance of homeroom.
Weingarten happens upon a class of student journalists wandering the hallways in search of a story Wednesday — and eager to take a photo of Weingarten herself for class credit.
At Cross, teachers pair up to provide daily small group check-ins for students during the school day, known as “homeroom.”
“You walk in and you feel like home,” Haylie commented. “Some days it’s crazy, people will be jumping around and having fun — other days it’s like, okay, leave me alone. I’m currently having one of those days,” she said, gesturing to the barrage of cameras pointed at her face, a surprise she said she wasn’t “expecting” to encounter in her classroom.
“Especially in such a large school, there’s always something going on,” a junior named Genesis Correa chimed in. “Homeroom is a separation from all that,” she said, a chance to connect with a familiar teacher and reflect on how to emotionally adapt to challenging days.
Another student named Beatrice, who just started school at Wilbur Cross after moving from North Carolina, said that she hadn’t experienced homeroom before coming to Connecticut. “It offers a feeling of family,” she said. “If anything’s wrong, [my homeroom teacher] can tell — she really knows me.”
Homeroom teacher Storey-Carson, meanwhile, said leading homeroom has strengthened her own relationship with her students and work.
She had a rough start to the school year when her grandmother passed and she had to take time off from work to travel to North Carolina for the funeral.
“My students could tell I was not on my game,” she said. During her leave of absence, she said she received emails from many of her students: “I hope you’re okay, I miss you,” some of them read.
Something as simple as homeroom, she said, has helped preserve her own sanity as a teacher and person following a hard few years: “I’ve built bridges with my students. They know I’m here for them, and in return I know they’re here for me.”
See below for other recent stories about the 2023 – 24 school year at Wilbur Cross.
• At School Year’s Start, Wilbur Cross Keeps Growing
• Cross Duo Seeks To Repair Disrupted Educations
Weingarten should be on an apology tour not this phony baloney tour with a $5 million price tag. She engineered her three educational catastrophes of Learning loss, loneliness and literacy were created by Weingarten and her local union reps together with the mayor who irrationally ignored what other states were doing, what other countries were doing with respect to education. 87% of our kids can't read at grade level. This is higher than last year. Maybe if Weingarten had spent less time in the White House cooking up schemes and excuses our kids wouldn't be so far behind.