Ex-School To Become Winter Overnight Shelter

The vacant former Strong School on Orchard Street in the Hill will reopen its doors to the public this winter as a 47-space warming center — thanks to a Board of Education vote in support of creating more cold-weather shelter options for the city’s homeless.

School board members took that unanimous vote Monday night during the latest full Board of Education meeting, which was held in-person at Barack Obama School on Farnham Avenue and online via Zoom.

The Board of Education voted to enter into a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to let the Elicker administration and the city-hired contractor Upon This Rock Ministries convert part of the former Strong School, also previously known as Vincent E. Mauro School, at 130 Orchard St. in the Hill into an overnight warming center. 

The school board-city agreement to turn the former school into a shelter runs from Nov. 1 of this year through April 30 of next year. City Director of Community Resilience Carlos Sosa-Lombardo said that the city is hoping to open the new warming center no later than Dec. 1.

The warming center will operate seven days a week, from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. It will have a single entry point on the Legion Avenue side of the building. The MOU states that ​“this requirement is intended [to] maintain the security of the building and to minimize activity on the residential side streets.”

The site will be open to unhoused people 18 years and older only. It will be open on a first-come, first-served basis for those who line up each night before the shelter opens. According to Sosa-Lombardo, the United Way of Greater New Haven is covering 100 percent of the warming center’s operating costs with funds from the state Department of Housing.

The vote comes as the city is also in the process of purchasing and converting the 56-room Days Inn hotel on Foxon Boulevard into a non-congregate homeless shelter, and as the Amistad Catholic Worker House has set up six new tiny houses in a backyard encampment on Rosette Street.

The agreement gives the city access to the school’s gymnasium to set up the 47 sleeping spaces. It also gives the city access to a small room adjoining the gymnasium, the kitchen, and adjoining bathrooms and hallway. The kitchen and small adjoining room will be limited to warming center staff, which will use the small room for overnight storage of clients’ personal belongings.

The city school district’s Office of Youth, Family, and Community Outreach and Science Department currently occupy parts of the ex-school building on Orchard Street.

Upon This Rock Ministries, which will be contracted to run the center, is required to manage, staff, and maintain safety at the site, as well as clean all indoor and outdoor spaces. Upon this Rock Ministries already works with the city and Columbus House to staff a 50-bed homeless shelter at 209 Terminal Ln. in the Hill. 

In addition to the ex-Strong School site on Orchard, other warming centers around the city this winter will include The 180 Center at 438 East St, Varick Memorial AME Zion Church on Dixwell Avenue, and the city’s overflow space at 209 Terminal Ln. 

The school board-city MOU states that the city will support the contractor in deploying sufficient staffers to ensure clients do not access other parts of the building; provide staff and security at the entry to the gym as necessary to ensure safety; clean up litter, trash, detritus, and drug paraphernalia accumulated at the entrance to the building or around the building; keep all interior and exterior areas clean; and ensure that people do not encamp outside the building.

Click here to read the now-approved MOU in full.

The Board agreed unanimously on providing support for the homeless community but struggled to agree on how to run the center. 

Board of Education members Darnell Goldson, Yesenia Rivera, OrLando Yarborough lll, and Abie Benitez pushed for proactive safety standards to be set through a state-certified security guard who would be dedicated to ensuring student safety, given that Career High School is right across the street. They called for a certified security guard to be present particularly when the warming center’s clients line up to enter the Orchard Street building in the evenings and when they vacate in the mornings when students will be arriving for school. However, Board members Justin Elicker, Matt Wilcox, and Ed Joyner argued that safety standards have already been considered and implemented into the MOU, which states the contractor will dedicate a staffer as security when needed. 

City Director of Community Resilience Carlos Sosa-Lombardo said the site’s leaders will have open lines of communication with community members and city staff in case issues arise. He added that education will be provided and behavior agreements will be signed by clients to ensure they are taking care of the neighborhood hosting them.

“I understand the struggle, I just don’t want to put the struggle ten steps away from the high school where at 7 o’clock in the morning when those guys are being pushed out the door, these students are arriving in their school,” Goldson said. ​“And at 4 o’clock, 3 o’clock when these students are leaving their school, these guys are gonna be lining up to get into that shelter.”

Goldson proposed an amendment to the MOU requiring the center to have a state-certified security officer on site at the center on school days before 7 a.m. when students arrive at Career and again hours before the center re-opens as the school dismisses its students. After nearly two hours of back and forth on Monday night, the Board of Education voted 4 – 3 in favor of the amendment to require a state-certified security officer at those times.

Wilcox noted that the New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) district has hundreds of homeless students. ​“We own part of this issue with our own student population,” he said. ​“Our schools are not wrapped in bubble wrap. They’re wrapped in a city where there is all manners of issues that our students have to encounter on their way to school.” 

Sosa-Lombardo added that security has been rarely needed at other warming centers around the city in the past. ​“Violent incidents have been almost nonexistent,” he said. At around 6 p.m. staff will greet clients and ensure they enter and leave in an orderly fashion.

He added that the city’s homeless population has been shifting to seeing more elders and professionals who recently lost their jobs. Nine out of ten individuals facing homelessness are in hard time dues to the loss of a job, he said.

Before Monday night’s vote, Elicker raised concerns that Goldson’s amendment would keep the center from opening due to the restriction it puts on the city to afford a certified security officer or get a staffer certified by the state in the next two weeks. 

“These are some of the most vulnerable people in our community and we have struggled in our community because we’ve had people overdosing, because we have people that are sleeping outside in the middle of winter,” Elicker said. ​“We will lose more people if we do not do this.”

See below for more recent Independent articles about homelessness, activism, and attempts to find shelter.

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