Thomas Breen Pre-Pandemic Photo
Board member Larry Conaway: Focus on students not showing up.
Should schools get more dollars based on how many English learners attend? Based on low test scores? The number of chronically absent students?The New Haven Board of Education raised these questions Monday night as part of its first full look at a proposed $198 million budget for the coming fiscal year.
Monday was the board’s first full meeting of a budget season that will end around May, when the board adopts a budget based on the amount of money the city’s Board of Alders decides to hand over.
Next year’s draft budget is $8.8 million, or 4.65 percent higher than what the Board of Alders gave the district for this year. Salary levels negotiated for teachers and administrators drive much of that higher budget.
That $198 million figure does not include $4.5 million in potential new spending items, including more staff to teach English learners and implement new state requirements for Black and Latinx studies.
It also does not include the subject of all the debate — a new attempt to send more resources to the students and schools that need them the most.
District Chief Financial Officer Phillip Penn proposed dividing up $250,000 among students with high percentages of multilingual learners (the district’s new term for English language learners, or ELLs) and another $100,000 among neighborhood schools that don’t get magnet grants or other dedicated streams of funding.
Board member Darnell Goldson said he wanted to hear more about how staff decided on these metrics. He said the district has looked at more metrics in past attempts to budget more equitably.
In an interview afterwards, Goldson pointed out that Worthington Hooker School would qualify for more dollars based on these metrics. Just over 15 percent of Worthington Hooker School students were multilingual learners at the last count. A teacher had written to him that the East Rock-based school was doing fine with the resources it had.
“If we’re using ELLs, it’s not the best metric. It could be one of the ways, but it is not the best or only way,” Goldson said. “We know for a fact that a lot of students have barriers. Single-parent families have barriers. Foster children have barriers.”
Goldson would like to see assessments on which students are academically behind guide the extra resources.
English learners do lag behind other students in most indicators, according to the Connecticut State Department of Education profile on New Haven. Despite relatively low absenteeism rates, New Haven’s multilingual students struggle on standardized tests and graduate and go to college at lower levels than most other student groups in the district — except for students with disabilities. Poverty does not seem to affect New Haven students’ success as much as language proficiency, based on scores and graduation rates from students on the free and reduced-price lunch program.
Board member Larry Conaway highlighted chronically absent students as a population in urgent need of more resources.
“There is a population that is wreaking havoc in the community, close to home on several occasions. Let’s make sure we don’t forget that there are some New Haven Public Schools students for whom an intervention or a relationship could save lives and turn kids around,” Conaway said. “There are students out there who are finding their own ways to keep themselves busy.”
Assistant Superintendent Keisha Redd-Hannans said this is one gap the second round of school-focused coronavirus relief might be able to address. The state is encouraging districts to use the federal dollars to address learning gaps and disengaged students.
“I do agree that there is a direct link with the crime we are experiencing,” Redd-Hannans said.
She is leading a 75-person task force, including parents and community members, on what to put that $37.7 million in relief towards. The district plans to put all ideas on their application to the state and will let the state approve or deny the ideas.
Vouchers for tutoring, extra-engaging summer schools, credit recovery programs and associate degree programs for high schoolers all came up as ideas for the $37.7 million at Monday’s meeting.
