Aliyya Swaby Photo
Toll and Cicarella continuing discussing the proposed Elm City Imagine after Monday night’s board meeting.
A “huge step backward”? Or a way for traditional public schools to team up with charters to experiment with new ways for kids to learn?
Teacher’s union President David Cicarella and Achievement First (AF) CEO Dacia Toll very publicly offered those competing views Monday night about the benefits of a proposed partnership between New Haven’s school board and AF to create a new charter school.
They and a few other charter advocates and critics gave prepared speeches at Monday’s Board of Education at Martinez School in Fair Haven meeting about the proposed experimental Elm City Imagine charter school, which could be open by August 2015.
Toll said AF is working on a memorandum of understanding with the district to outline shared responsibilities and project parameters of the financial partnership.
The proposal for the school includes an extended academic year with a calendar alternating eight weeks of regular classes with two weeks of “expedition” career engagement; longer school days with staggered teacher schedules; and small-group instruction with more focus on technology. Achievement First has been researching and developing the school design for two years.
The partnership would be primarily financial, Toll said in a previous interview, with the New Haven school district providing a “modest” amount of about $2,000 per student, $500 in operating funds and the rest through in-kind services such as nursing and food. The state provides about $11,000 per child, she said. AF would be responsible for hiring and day-to-day management of the school. The benefit to the city would be to ease overcrowding in existing schools, reduce the burden of mid-year transience, and add another educational option for families, officials said.
At Monday’s board meeting, Superintendent Garth Harries briefly mentioned the plan for the pilot school as one of various initiatives to “deepen and extend school change.”
According to the handout he distributed detailing these initiatives, the partnership was being proposed with the goal of “supporting the creation of an innovative and progressive school model, reinventing the schedule and program for students enrolled, ensuring fair share and retained enrollment across the AF network, and enabling early grade class size reduction in New Haven’s most challenged schools at significantly lower cost.”
The board did not discuss Elm City Imagine further, deciding instead to listen to community members’ comments for discussion at future committee meetings.
Teachers union President Dave Cicarella started off the public comments by calling the proposal for a new charter school “a huge step backward.” He criticized charter networks like AF for refusing to take in students who want to transfer schools in the middle of the year—a major cause of academic and behavioral disruption at neighborhood schools.
As part of the partnership, Elm City Imagine would be used to reduce class sizes at over-enrolled neighborhood schools, by taking in transient students who change schools after October 1, Toll and Harries have said. But Cicarella said AF is getting more out of the relationship than the district.
“We shouldn’t have to give AF or any charter school operator a school for them to do what’s right,” he said.
Toll said that she “understands why there might be skepticism” about her stated desire to collaborate with the district, but that the school is another step toward improved discussion between the two. She said she agrees with Cicarella about “the need to wrestle enrollment questions to the ground” and that she has tried in the past.
“Contrary to the myth, we do not want students to leave in the middle of the year,” she said. “We are willing to take students mid-year … It’s not something that we are required to do.”
Cheryl Brown, principal of Ross/Woodward School and president of the New Haven School Administrators Association, said she worries that AF will bring bad practices to the new charter school. She cited articles in the Hartford Courant presenting high rates of suspensions and expulsions at AF schools in Hartford and New Haven.
Toll said she accepts responsibility for “suspension rates that had gotten too high.” Those rates are now “down by 40 percent,” she said. She said she “couldn’t be more excited about working with the district.”
The leaders of the city’s newest charter school weighed in on the discussion Monday. John Taylor, executive director of Booker T. Washington Academy (BTWA) on Greene Street, said the school could not have opened without the help of both AF and the district.
“Coming from Albany, where the relationship between the school district and charter schools is adversarial … it was refreshing to come to New Haven” and see the two collaborating and sharing best practices, he said. When Taylor thanked them for their help in opening BTWA, “they both said, ‘We didn’t do it for you. We don’t even know you like that. We did it for the kids.’”
The school’s founder, the Rev. Eldren Morrison, sent a statement to the Board of Ed expressing his support for the collaboration behind Elm City Imagine. “I urge you to support Elm City Imagine because our community needs high quality options to be made available for every child,” his e‑mail stated.
Harries said the proposal requires further public discussion and agreement to go forward.
More than a year ago, the Board of Education selected the least qualified candidate to head New Haven Public Schools. Given that, this person should hunker down and focus on the performance of his schools. Instead, he keeps trying to show how 'innovative' he is without focusing on academic performance. Can we please see the massive amount of tax dollars we pay be focused on those students in the NHPS system? Before you can be seen as 'innovative' and all the other buzzwords you like to use, first find some evidence of success.