Paul Bass Photo
Schools Supt. Iline Tracey at WNHH FM.
Show you care. Even when you need to be firm.
Iline Tracey, who retires next week as New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) superintendent, carried that message through 39 years of rising the district’s ranks, when she taught students and then when she supervised teachers. She leaves with a conviction in that message intact.
“You have to show them that you care and the work they do is important,” Tracey said during a retrospective interview Thursday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
Tracey first learned that message at 7 years old when she watched Mrs. Ruddoch teach her class in the farming Jamaican village of Sweetland. Mrs. Ruddoch was “loving, kind and patient” and “made sure that we learned.” Tracey decided she too would become teacher.
That happened earlier than expected: at 16 years old she found herself teaching kindergartners through ninth graders.
She arrived there because she had skipped several grades in a system that moved students along once they showed on tests that they had mastered subjects.
While we more commonly hear concerns about unprepared students advancing grades through “social promotion,” Tracey sees a problem with students stuck below their ability level, bored without challenges.
“I’m a firm believer the we should not hold students back. If they can handle it, they should move forward,” she said.
She and her husband Donovan Tracey moved to the U.S. for higher education. They ended up staying in New Haven, where he had family. After earning her early education degree at Southern Connecticut State University, Tracey started out teaching day care, then third grade at the old Dwight School on Edgewood Avenue.
Her biggest challenge: Tackling misbehavior that would never be countenanced back in Jamaica, where “teachers were revered.”
One student mocked her Caribbean accent and “Jamaican coconut head,” she recalled. She took him aside after school, then met with his parents, who authorized her to take a firm (but also loving) approach. He stopped acting out in class. As an adult he has risen through the fire department ranks and they have remained in touch.
Tracey got to know other students’ families and became one of those revered teachers herself.
She was tapped in 2005 to serve as principal of the then-newly merged King-Robinson K‑8 school in Newhallville. She engaged teachers in a symbolic burial in which they left their written-out school problems in a coffin. They rallied the students: “We’re going to show them that we’re not failures.” Three years of steady test-score improvements brought the school off the state’s failed-school list. Then Tracey introduced the “international baccalaureate” concept to the school; by the time she left, families from 18 school distracts as far as Waterbury and Naugatuck clamored to get their kids into the school.
Tracey encountered an unexpected once-in-a-lifetime challenge when she was named to the district’s top job in 2020: navigating 20,000 students through the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We had to pivot and do things we didn’t know we could do,” she said: Hybrid teaching, for instance. They obtained grants to give separate computers for home and school and for new science and math and after-school programs.
She became the “pandemic superintendent.” As the pandemic ebbed, problems remained: especially the rise in students’ mental health challenges and the resultant disorder in the school buildings.
In some ways teaching has changed since she began her career, with new challenges and different approaches coming in and out of vogue. And in some ways the teacher’s role hasn’t changed. Most important, Tracey said, is for teachers to exude “passion and compassion and show you have interest in people.”
Tracey, who is 68, isn’t done working in education. She said she plans to focus more of her time now on building up an online school of divinity she runs with her husband, who like her is an ordained Seventh Day Adventist minister.
Click on the above video to watch the full conversation with schools Superintendent Iline Tracey on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program. Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline.”
I wish Ms. Tracey all the best in her retirement. She is an exceptional and admirable person. Alongside her farewell message, "Show That You Care," it is crucial to convey to staff, parents, and students that the Superintendent's primary responsibility is to ensure students are learning and excelling at a high level.