Christopher Peak Photo
Students leave Amistad High School at dismissal.
Suspensions have plummeted at Amistad High School to only 30 students so far this school year, reported Principal Simon Obas.
That came as news to students, who said the principal suspended almost twice that number of students — in a single day.
Those competing versions of reality are the latest installment in an ongoing debate over discipline at Amistad, part of the Achievement First charter school network.
Principal Obas took over the school this academic year with a charge to improve discipline policies, including a past record of high suspension rates that the state said it had to lower.
Obas offered an update last week at a meeting of an Achievement First oversight board. Obas reported he has cut suspensions by 75 percent, with only 30 students having been removed from class this school year for a suspension.
That statistic can’t be true because Obas suspended almost twice as many students in a single day early last October, nine students and a school employee subsequently told the Independent.
They said Obas kicked roughly 60 students out of school for skipping a detention in a mass suspension. Students said they talked about it on social media, overheard teachers’ whispers about it, and noticed all the empty desks.
Several of those students said it’s now routine for Amistad High School administrators to mark suspensions as absences to make the school’s numbers look better, after the state premised the charter renewal that will be voted on later Thursday morning on reducing its reliance on suspensions.
The Independent reviewed attendance records from the school’s Infinite Campus system as well as letters sent home to parents that back up the claims of two students who were suspended but marked absent.
The students’ names in this story have all been changed, because they said they fear Amistad’s administration would retaliate against them or their siblings.
Achievement First declined to answer any questions about the students’ claims. Spokesperson Amanda Pinto copied the school’s code of conduct into an email, then wrote, “I don’t have any other information.”
Sent Home
Simon Obas reports to charter oversight board.
On the first Friday in October, when Amistad let out at 12:45 p.m., nearly 60 students skipped the two-hour-plus detention.
“Usually with juniors and seniors, they have jobs,” said Caleb, a junior who skipped that day. “They’re ready to go home.” Especially for Bridgeport students like him, “it’s already an hour going from New Haven to Bridgeport,” he added.
When students returned to school on Monday morning at 7:25 a.m., Amistad’s behavioral team immediately started pulling kids out of class, he and others said.
The team told the students they were not supposed to be in school because they’d been suspended. Three of the suspended students who spoke to the Independent said no one had previously told them or their parents.
That group was sent to the school’s “independent study center.” That’s the space where students do in-school suspensions, a “structured, silent room [where] students are given supports to help them understand the long-term impact of their choices,” according to the school handbook.
By 8 a.m., almost 60 students had come through. They were told to call their parents, to leave campus and to stay home for two more days on an out-of-school suspension.
Caleb walked all the way down Dixwell Avenue toward Union Station with a group of students catching the train back to Bridgeport.
“I had to pay out of pocket,” he said.
Olivia, a sophomore, had her mom come pick her up.
She was “really frustrated”; her mom, equally “upset,” Olivia said. “I hardly ever miss a day of school so to be sent home for three days without an explanation really bothered [my mom].”
Later that week, her mom came to the school, but administrators wouldn’t talk to her, the student said.
The family fretted about how Olivia would explain the suspension on her college applications. Administrators later told her not to worry about that, it would be recorded as an absence, Olivia said.
Numbers Don’t Add Up
Board members question Obas at last week’s high school committee meeting.
Obas made his presentation last week to the Amistad High School Committee, the nine-member group with representatives from Amistad Academy, Elm City College Preparatory and Bridgeport Academy that oversees the school.
The school has roughly 650 students. That 4.9 percent suspension rate Obas reported would mean he had removed only about one-quarter of the students that his predecessor, Morgan Barth, did with his 19.3 percent suspension rate at the same point in the 2018 – 19 school year.
It would also mean that Obas had removed only about two-thirds of the students that New Haven Public Schools had with its 7.3 percent suspension rate for the full prior school year.
While the dates don’t match up for an exact comparison, that would put Amistad’s current suspension rate lower than most of the city’s high schools, including Cooperative Arts & Humanities (6.0 percent), Metropolitan Business Academy (6.3 percent), Hill Regional Career (12.1 percent), Wilbur Cross (13.9 percent), James Hillhouse (14.5 percent), and High School in the Community (15.6 percent).
Several students told the Independent that Amistad is a lot more fun this year. They said they enjoy that the school has more organized activities, including a recent school-wide game of capture the flag.
“There are some changes in the system, but not as much,” one junior said. “As students, we still get points taken away, which will make us have detention, stuff like that are still there. However, we have some fun times now. Like the new principal said, if we behave well, we are going to get rewarded.” She added that those positive incentives make the students “become more mature” and behave better than in previous years.
Another student said that it seemed like teachers weren’t issuing as many demerits and sending as many kids to detention, winnowing a list that used to sometimes run three legal-pad pages long.
Other students said that the school feels stricter under Obas this year.
“A lot stricter,” Kiana said.
Kiana argued that some of the new rules are “nonsense.” For instance, Kiana said, early on this year, students couldn’t keep their cellphone in their pocket, only in a book bag, and they still can’t have them visible in the cafeteria at lunch.
She choked up as she said that she feels down whenever she thinks about Amistad.
“They sweat the little things. Some of the stuff we get in trouble for is unnecessary. We can’t take more than five minutes in the bathroom or it’s a detention the next day. Especially in class, we can’t talk for nothing,” Kiana said. “We don’t have no freedom all day. I don’t like this school at all. They say it’s to get us ready for the real world, but in the real world, they don’t even do half of this stuff.”
A New Mindset
Simon Obas at Amistad.
At last Tuesday’s meeting in Amistad High School’s Room 126, board members pushed their desks together in a square and talked about the school’s disciplinary policies.
The committee’s chair, Jane Levin, asked how Obas had reduced the numbers “so substantially.”
Obas cited a “different way of thinking,” “a level of patience” and “more of a restorative piece.”
It’s “trying our best to define what’s a non-negotiable,” like fighting, that threatens other students safety, he said. “How a kid reacts to an adult is a little bit different.” He said he has “minimized” the punishments for misbehavior that students had been telling him were “petty.”
Outside in the hallway after the meeting, he told the Independent that he hired more staff to deal with behavioral issues, trying to address rule-breaking before it got to the point that a student had to be removed from class.
He cited statistics showing that, on average this school year, every other student had been removed from class once, for a total of 0.58 removals per student, while on average the year before, each student had been removed from class about once a month by the same point in January, for a total of 5.35 removals per student.
Unexcused Absences
Amistad’s building on Dixwell Avenue.
Students within the school said that’s just because their suspensions aren’t being documented.
“It wasn’t tracked,” said Caleb, the junior who, along with the mass suspension last October, said he has also been suspended two other times without it being logged. “There were more than 30 suspensions this year.”
The policy is so pervasive that teachers bring it up now when kids return to class, assuming that they were out because of a suspension, Caleb said.
“Obas isn’t really making a change,” argued Ciara, a sophomore who was also reported being suspended without it being logged. “They act like suspensions are to fix problems but they actually make it worse.”
The Independent reviewed attendance records for both those students, Caleb and Ciara. The records showed they’d been marked absent on days when they’d been told they were suspended.
In January, Caleb walked through Amistad’s hallway during a class period with a hall pass from his previous period. Obas spotted him, told him to go back to class, and followed him the whole way, Caleb said. When they got to the classroom, Obas asked if the teacher had given Caleb permission to leave, which he hadn’t, according to the student’s recollection and the principal’s email to staff.
Caleb said Obas told him to step outside to talk to him. Caleb stayed put; he pulled his phone out and started texting. Caleb said he felt frustrated: “You told me to step in; now you want me to step out,” he remembered thinking about Obas’s directions.
Obas said he wasn’t going to argue with Caleb anymore and gave him a four-day out-of-school suspension that he later eased up to one day, according to Caleb. That was marked as an absence anyway.
The letter sent home said that he was being suspended for “insubordination [and] disrespect” for “egregiously not following the directions of the principal.”
Caleb said he thought the punishment was unfair, missing a day of school in a “hard” quarter. “I didn’t get disrespectful with [Obas],” he said. “Usually, with most altercations, I do. This time, I wasn’t at all. I didn’t insult him in any way. It was basically just me ignoring him.”
The letter added, “Year-to-date, this is your scholar’s 1st suspension.”
It was actually his third, according to Caleb, after Caleb was also given a two-day in-school suspension last winter when administrators suspected that he was smoking in a bathroom, along with the mass suspension in October for skipping detention.
Also in January, Ciara wore her gray Nike hoodie underneath her blue school button-down. Administrators had repeatedly told her that wasn’t allowed by the dress code, and that day she was told she’d used up her last chance. She took it off when a behavioral specialist asked, but she refused to let him take it to keep.
She said she was sent to the independent study center for about two hours and given a one-day out-of-school suspension the next day that was also marked as an absence, during which she missed a test.
(Her mom said that the school told her, in a phone call in Spanish, Ciara could not come to school and that she and her husband needed to show up for an after-school meeting with Obas the next day.)
When she returned to class, Ciara kept wearing her uniform the wrong way. Obas showed up in her chemistry class and told her to take off her sweater. Ciara ignored him. “Like when did me wearing a sweater have anything to do with my learning abilities?” she remembered thinking.
Obas picked up her book-bag and wallet, and she flipped out and got into an argument with another student about a sweater, she said.
“I started cursing at [Obas] because he had no right whatsoever to have my belongings,” Ciara said. “He just kept on pestering and it didn’t seem like he was understanding that I wanted him to leave me alone.”
The letter sent home said that she was being suspended for two days for “behavior” for “scream[ing] profanity.”
Ciara’s mom pulled her daughter out of Amistad altogether, according to Clara, and Ciara started classes at another New Haven high school this Monday.
What a surprise! Thank goodness NHPS doesn't fake their numbers............................