nothin Hamden Magnetizes, With Wary Eye | New Haven Independent

Hamden Magnetizes, With Wary Eye

Christopher Peak Photo

Hamden School Superintendent Jody Goeler answers questions from council members at Tuesday’s meeting.

Hamden’s Legislative Council decided not to rush headlong into erecting new wings that could compete with New Haven’s portfolio of shiny school buildings, instead deciding to distinguish itself with a guarantee of pre-kindergarten for every child.

That scale-back to the footprint of a massive schools reorganization and magnetization plan happened during a four-hour meeting of the Legislative Council held Tuesday night at Hamden Memorial Town Hall.

The last vote was cast just minutes before the building had to be closed up at 11 p.m., after one council member had already left in a huff.

Will this tank” like New Haven’s schools?” one member asked during the debate.

In a series of motions, the council crossed out line items from the funding application they plan to send to the state, reducing the total price tag by more than a third from $48.5 million down to $29.8 million. But their votes largely left the 3R Initiative” intact, even if one school won’t have space to build out its science and technology theme.

The 3R” school reorganization plan was developed by the Hamden Board of Education to correct a racial imbalance and adjust for declining enrollment. It set out to close two elementary schools, turn four others into intra-district magnet schools, incorporate the Wintergreen school building into the district, move sixth-graders to the middle school and introduce universal pre‑K.

At Tuesday night’s meeting, elected officials got an earful about that plan during an hourlong public comment.

They heard about the price of cross-town transportation, the place of arts and sciences in every curriculum outside specialized schools, the need for mainstreaming special-educations students, the high price (and payoff) of early childhood education and the implications of selling off a building to a charter school.

But the council wasn’t giving an up-or-down vote on 3R directly. The appropriations votes did matter, though, for the district’s universal pre‑K guarantee.

Hamden’s school administrators said they wouldn’t have room for all the newly guaranteed pre-kindergarten slots without moving sixth-graders out of the elementary schools. That required money to build a new wing at the middle school and redesign the drop-off for pre-kindergarteners at Ridge Hill School, they said.

Outside those items, the council mostly had to consider whether to take on tens of millions of dollars of debt to pay for other changes within the existing buildings. Some are related to 3R, like a new wing for a magnet theme build-out at Dunbar Hill School; others are not, like the like-new” renovations at Ridge Hill School, where the roof is leaking and the entrance is crumbling.

Marjorie Bonadies and Elizabeth Wetmore.

In the end, the legislative council squeaked out the minimum number of votes to send a $29.8 million bond package to the state’s Office of School Construction Grants, which town officials had previously said committed to paying at least two-thirds of the renovation cost for any plans submitted before the month’s end.

Ten members present voted for it, and Elizabeth Wetmore, one of the six at-large representatives, voted against it.

The final package includes $16.9 million for renovations at Ridge Hill, $11.2 million for an addition to Hamden Middle, $1.0 million for a pre-kindergarten addition and $700,000 for accessibility and lighting improvements at Wintergreen. The council voted down $17.6 million for renovations and expansion at Dunbar Hill and $1.0 million for renovations at Church Street.

Magnet Construction Repels

Brad Macdowall: New Haven regrets all that construction.

Throughout the meeting, council members ragged on New Haven’s magnet schools, saying the fancy new buildings constructed throughout its neighboring city in recent decades hasn’t changed the instruction inside.

They said that the city’s $1.7 billion school construction boom had loaded a generation of New Haveners with debt and destabilized current budgets with unreliable state funding for its 16 inter-district magnets, which are open to suburbanites.

Two at-large representatives laid into New Haven’s schools. Berita Rowe-Lewis called them failing.” Elizabeth Wetmore said she worries what would happen if this tanks like New Haven’s magnet schools are doing.”

Berita Rowe-Lewis: This failed next door.

Overall, several council members said Hamden, whose credit card is nearly maxed out already, shouldn’t go down the same path of adding new wings to its buildings.

We watched New Haven rack up debt building luxurious buildings and developing a magnet school program that I’m an alumni of. We watched over the past decade as we’ve seen New Haven have diminishing returns. And we’ve seen public opinion sort of turn against it,” said Brad Macdowall, representative for District 9 in northwest Hamden. They wish they hadn’t done it, and they’re saddled with all this debt for another 20 or 30 years for buildings that weren’t necessary.”

Data Says Different

While Hamden’s lawmakers said the buildings didn’t make any difference, researchers who’ve studied New Haven’s building boom came to a different conclusion.

A study by two Yale economists treated New Haven’s 15-year construction schedule as a natural experiment.” They found that, for at least six years after each new building was opened, flat-lined reading scores for elementary and middle school students had climbed steadily upward — at about the same pace as if the students had enrolled in a top-performing charter school, the authors said.

The researchers also found that the construction increased local student enrollment and neighboring home prices in the surrounding attendance zone.

Why did that happen? The authors didn’t say, though they speculated that it might be the direct effects of new facilities on pedagogy, effects on student and teacher motivation during school hours and effects on students’ and parents’ motivation to invest in academic production at home.”

Other research from across the country about the effectiveness of capital campaigns, however, is mixed. Three studies comparing how local school districts in Texas, California and Ohio fared after voters either narrowly passed or narrowly rejected bond issues found little impact on student achievement.

But another study of Los Angeles’s $10 billion investment in school construction showed the boom lifted standardized reading and math test scores modestly and increased average daily attendance by four days.

Macdowall said that, from his own education in New Haven, he’d seen that magnet schools can offer incredible things.” But argued against using magnet schools as a tool for racial balance.” He added that he doesn’t believe Hamden officials had considered the ongoing operational cost of keeping the magnets running, including the increased cost of transportation to go to school outside the neighborhood.

To move forward with a program that we are not ready for, that we don’t have a plan for does not make sense. To ask people to foot that bill doesn’t make sense,” Macdowall said. Every school we have is in need of significant fixes, but $17 million is not smart for residents and for the town. At the end of the day, some of these changes don’t end up educating students better.”

Justin Farmer negotiates for Dunbar Hill.

After the discussion, southern Hamden District 5 Rep. Justin Farmer motioned to strike $4.5 million from the proposed capital outlay for Dunbar Hill, which would have been used to build a new science and technology wing for its magnet theme.

But that motion couldn’t get enough votes, failing 7 – 3, with three abstentions.

That ended up sinking the entire project. Only four members voted for Dunbar Hill’s full renovation and expansion: Michael McGarry, an at-large member who serves as the council president; Jody Clouse from District 1; Eric Annes from District 4; and James Pascarella from District 8. The nine others present voted in opposition.

As the meeting neared its end, Farmer asked for a two-minute recess to poll other council members about possibly bringing back a cheaper version of Dunbar Hills’s renovation request at a later meeting. But he said he doubted it would be put together by a June 30 deadline.

Choice Still Coming

Hamden Legislative Council members, including President Michael McGarry at left.

Later that night, Mayor Curt Leng said he felt disappointed” that the council voted down renovations for Dunbar Hill. Even giving up the magnet program’s expansion there sounded like a reasonable compromise” to him. He called the vote unfair, saying it was a missed opportunity to collect state reimbursement for much-needed fixes.

Overall, Leng added that a system of school choice would be coming to Hamden, as the Board of Education has recommended converting Helen Street, Ridge Hill, Dunbar Hill and Bear Path Elementary Schools into intra-district magnet programs.

He said that allowing Hamden parents to voluntarily sign up for those schools, even if they live outside the attendance zone, would allow the town to avoid forced busing.”

This effort, along with … what I believe will be a very attractive parent choice program the BOE is recommending, will ensure a more dynamic set of educational opportunities, while assisting with racial imbalance problems at some of our schools,” Leng said. I don’t want to see forced busing. It is harmful to students and adds too many challenges for our parents.”

Pre‑K Attracts

James Pascarella: Waited 14 years for this vote.

Even though the bond package was pared back, Mayor Leng heralded the vote as an enormous step forward strengthening our town’s education system.” He pointed especially to the introduction of universal pre-kindergarten, calling it a game-changer” that’s been proven to close achievement gaps.

While parents remained undecided on Hamden’s magnetization, many came out to support the expansion of pre-kindergarten, saying that finding a private provider was costing a small fortune. One speaker said her daycare bill was close to a mortgage payment.”

Dinesh Singh, a urologist at Yale School of Medicine, said that the lack of early childhood education in Hamden is creating a school brain drain.”

It’ll be a more attractive community in Hamden if we have this,” Singh said. When people look at property, one of the major things they look at is the schools. It doesn’t have to be just high school or middle school. I think Hamden should have that preschool option.”

Pascarella, the District 8 representative, said he’s been working to guarantee universal pre‑K since he was first elected 14 years ago. I’ve learned opportunities like this don’t come along very often,” he said. I hope we don’t squander it.”

It’s a proven way to close the achievement gap, added President McGarry. He counted off statistics about how offering pre-kindergarten could not only improve academics and college-going but also reduce incarceration and single parenting, though some critics say the research base for those claims is weak,” especially given the wide variation in program quality.

Pre‑K is one of the things that we can do that we know works,” he said. It is expensive, but it is an investment. It’s a reason to come to this town and have faith in the future of Hamden.”

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