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After two more young men connected to his congregation died of gun violence, Rev. Eldren D. Morrison concluded the need for a new charter school in Dixwell and Newhallville had grown all the more urgent: “the need is between life and death.”
Morrison, the 31-year-old pastor of Varick Memorial A.ME. Zion Church, has been working for several years on a plan to open a new school in the neighborhood called the Booker T. Washington Academy.
In a letter submitted to the state earlier this month, Morrison (pictured above with a portrait of Washington) announced plans to apply for state approval to create a charter school serving grades pre‑K to 4. The letter came in response to an invitation from the state seeking ideas for new charter schools — public schools that operate on their own founding documents, funded and sanctioned by the state.
Twenty-four groups across the state responded. Four of them proposed schools in New Haven.
The three other ideas for New Haven would create a math and science high school, a “life skills academy for brown boys” run by the Urban League, and an unspecified charter school run by SmartStart Education, LLC.
The applicants for those proposed schools chose to give the state a heads up by filing a letter of intent to apply for a charter. More applicants may enter the fray when the official request for proposals goes out later this month.
Morrison (pictured), who joined Varick in October of 2007, expanded the church’s camp into a more academically rigorous summer school. He assembled a board community members and educators to build that program into a full-fledged school. He said he sees the school as a key solution to a “sense of hopelessness” in a community rocked by gun violence.
Over the past two months, Morrison said, two teenagers from Dixwell/Newhallville were shot and killed in the city. Both had children, he said. Their moms attended Varick.
“Too many of our kids are locked into this cycle” of violence, poverty and incarceration, he said. “Education is the way out of this mindset and this way of life.”
Looking at the test scores of kids in Dixwell and Newhallville’s three nearby schools (King/Robinson, Lincoln/Bassett and Wexler/Grant), Morrison’s group concluded that by the 3rd grade, less than a third of kids are reading and doing math at grade level.
“Our children are being left behind,” Morrison wrote.
In drafting a proposal for a school, Morrison drew inspiration from Booker T. Washington, a freed Virginia slave who rose to be an early national African-American leader. Washington founded the Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Teachers in 1881 in a shanty building next to a church; by his death in 1915, it had grown into a formidable African-American teachers college with a million-dollar endowment, Morrison recalled. Washington gave his final public speech from Varick’s pulpit in 1915, when the church was already 100 years old.
Morrison proposes following Washington’s footsteps by opening a Booker T. Washington Academy in September with 36 kids in grades pre‑K and K. The school would then add one grade level each year until a maximum size of 216 kids in grades pre‑K to 4. Kids would enjoy a smaller classroom — 18 kids instead of the 26 or 27 in New Haven’s public school district. The school year would run 210 days instead of the traditional 180. The school day would run from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., with extra child care before and after.
The academy would be located in the neighborhood, in a church-owned property either on Sperry or Charles Street. Applicants from the neighborhood would get preference in the admissions lottery.
In effort to maintain “flexibility of services,” the teaching staff would not be unionized, according to board member Chaka Felder-McEntire (at right in photo with board member Belinda Carberry). The estimated first-year budget would be $1.4 million.
Felder-McEntire knows that figure cold because she already worked out the exhaustive details of the school last year, in a proposal that measured hundreds of pages long. The group drew up that document when it applied to become a charter last spring. After all that, the state didn’t end up approving any new charters. Only two have opened in the past seven years.
State education chief Stefan Pryor, a founder of Achievement First’s flagship charter school in New Haven, is giving charter proponents hope that the state will open more charter seats. Getting state approval is only half the battle, however: Each school still has to get the state legislature to fund the school through a special line item in the state budget based on a per-pupil fee, which was recently cut to $10,200.
Even if Booker T. Washington Academy gets state funding as a charter school, it would need to supplement that money to pay for the longer school day and year. Board member Belinda Carberry (pictured), an assistant principal at Hillhouse High School with 35 years’ experience in education, plans to hold an upcoming fundraiser at her home. The board also includes Varick Chief of Staff Jesse Phillips; local elementary school teacher Zania Collier; and Kanicka Ingram, associate director of admissions for Quinnipiac University. Felder-McEntire currently works on college access programs at Southern Connecticut State University.
Math & Science High
Across town, another group of education advocates is also making a second attempt at landing state approval for a charter school. The group is led by Ismail Agirman, a senior engineer at Otis Elevators. She has been seeking to open a math and science high school for years. Agirman got approval in 2006 for one such school in Hartford, but the state legislature didn’t pass funding for new charter schools that year, according to board member Fatih Mercan, a Yale molecular biologist currently researching cancer.
Mercan said he got hooked on biology early on, in high school, when he took part in a biology Olympiad. He wants other students to catch the science fever, too, so they can enter the fast-growing field of medical, academic and industry jobs that require a math and science education.
A lot of students “don’t want to choose math because they feel unprepared and they are afraid of it,” he said.
The Connecticut Academy of Math and Science (CAMS) would be a new math and science school for grades 7 to 12 in New Haven. The proposal is similar to New Haven’s district-run Engineering Science and University Magnet School, which is in the process of expanding to serve grades 6 to 12. Mercan said he doesn’t see a problem in having two similar schools in the same town; he said there’s plenty of need for math and science education.
CAMS would feature a longer school day and a 200-day school year. It would start small and grow to serve 250 kids in four years.
As with the Booker T. Washington Academy, CAMS’s founders already drew up an extensive proposal for the school for last year’s application. The school has assembled a nine-person board, including: Agirman, the lead applicant; Mercan; state Deputy Speaker of the House Kevin Ryan; Yale Police Chief Ronnell Higgins; Ahmet Gunay, a postdoctoral research scientist at the Worchester Polytechnique Institute; New Haven attorney Gregory Gallo; local parent Kimberly Alicea; Unilever financial analyst Mehmet A. Basaran; and Diane Ariza, a top executive at Quinnipiac University.
All Boys
A third proposal came in from the Stamford-based chapter of the National Urban League, a New York-based civil rights organization with 98 local affiliates. The Whitney Young Leadership Academy for Boys would serve 150 boys in grades 9 to 12. The Urban League runs several schools across the country; would be the first in Connecticut, according to Valery Shultz-Wilson, president and CEO of the Urban League of Southern Connecticut.
Shultz-Wilson said the school would target African-American and Latino boys — a group that suffers from higher dropout rates and lower performance in New Haven and nationally. These boys “have been left out,” she said.
“We have not been able to develop, or to come up with the appropriate formula for, success. From where we stand, this is a group of our students who we are not willing to let stand by and wither on the vine.”
Like Morrison’s, the Urban League’s proposal talks about ending the school-to-prison pipeline that traps urban kids. Shultz-Wilson said the New Haven school would be based on a similar all-boys school in Baltimore.
All three proposed schools would be traditional state charter schools, not local charters, which would require approval by the New Haven school board. A fourth letter of intent to open a charter school came in from Isaak Aronson at SmartStart Education at 59 Elm St. Aronson could not be reached for comment, and the proposal provides no details.
I remain dismayed that education seems to be the one area where we are comfortable allowing people with limited expertise run such an important endeavor. I once worked in a Medical School library but I can't imagine anyone thinking that would qualify me to oversee a medical program. New Haven doesn't need more charter schools run by private entities with limited interest and proficiency. We need to focus on strengthening the schools we have, supporting the communities from which those children come, and returning to the ideas where we valued teachers and respected their expertise. It's maddening that there's a national debate about arming teachers with guns, yet little discussion of arming them with the resources they need to be effective in their chosen profession. Ridiculous