Supt. finalists Viviana Conner, Warren Morgan, Madeline Negrón.
Earlier this week, the New Haven Board of Education announced three finalists in its search for a new Superintendent, one of the most consequential roles in local government.
The Board has a long and unfortunate history of hiring at all levels based on the trading of favors between adults, rather than objective standards of professional experience and performance delivering outcomes for kids. The children and families of our beloved city have paid a steep price for this insider trading.
Some of our children have not learned to read, write, or do basic math, when they absolutely could and should have. Too often they have experienced trauma in school that exacerbates the trauma of life outside school, rather than find support and experience healing. There have been near-constant shifts in frontline staff, curriculum, and initiatives that suck precious time from teaching and learning. Parents and guardians who seek to be involved and help our schools are largely rebuffed rather than embraced as resources to tap. Encountering these challenges, families with the ability to do so overwhelmingly depart for private, parochial, and charter schools – just ask the two Board of Education members and one Superintendent candidate who send their children and grandchildren to private schools.
There is also excellence, brilliance, creativity, and genuine love for children and families in our system, which are all the more remarkable for the internal opposition they often face. And the hiring of family and friends is certainly not to blame for every challenge in our system. But who and how we hire is one of the factors that is entirely within our control. To lifelong city residents like me, the practice of hiring friends and family within our schools has been in place for so long that we have come to expect the mediocrity and incompetence that comes with it – and which has inflicted harm on New Haven children and families. But this practice and its consequences are neither acceptable nor inevitable.
The selection of a new Superintendent is a moment when we can reverse this trajectory and course correct. Despite the rumor mill that the “fix was in,” a performative and superficial community engagement process, and a search firm that botched a recent search in our own state, I was hopeful that the many features that make New Haven a wonderful place to live and work would draw strong candidates and, ultimately, a good outcome and fresh start. Even the Board’s own discussion of their ideal candidate included the hopeful assessment that New Haven is not a “training wheels district” and requires someone who has been Superintendent before, and whose work in that role can be fully and objectively assessed.
We do not know how many such candidates applied. But our new Superintendent will need training wheels after all, since none of the finalists have served in this role before. More concerningly, two of the three candidates have extensive personal ties to members of the Board of Education and New Haven area politicians. While personal ties should not disqualify anyone, our district’s track record with this practice should give us considerable pause.
One important step can be taken to give the public confidence that the Superintendent selection is based solely on an assessment of which candidate can best meet the complex needs of our children, families, and staff. Members of the Board of Education who have close personal ties to any of the finalist candidates should disclose these ties and recuse themselves from voting. They should have done so as soon as those candidates applied. Yet it’s not too late to take this important step, and in doing so establish a clear break from past practice and declare that, from here on out, our school system does not pass out jobs to friends and family and is entirely devoted to meeting the needs of children.
Please join me in calling for this critical decision to be made with integrity and clear purpose
Sarah Miller is a New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) parent and the current alder for Fair Haven’s Ward 14. She originally sent this message out on Tuesday as a public email to constituents. The Independent has reprinted this writeup with the author’s permission.
Question for the author: Birks was assistant superintendent of the Hartford public schools. Does that qualify her or does someone have to have been The superintendent? I don’t know when the training wheels are needed in her opinion.