Experimental School Rediscovers The Magic

To the sounds of ​“Pomp and Circumstance,” 50 members of High School in the Community’s senior class marched in to the middle of Wooster Square. Wearing caps and gowns of turquoise and white, they took their seats in the middle of the park for their graduation ceremony.

That scene would have been hard to imagine just five years ago, when almost as many students were dropping out as were making it through.

This graduating class, bigger than any before, arrived to celebrate a moment that had been four years in the making.

For years, High School in the Community had the lowest graduation rate in the district. In 2014, an HSC student’s chances of finishing in four years were no better than a coin toss, at just 45.8 percent.

Now the school has pulled off a feat that years of extra funding and staff shakeups hadn’t been able to produce. When HSC’s most recent class walked up to the stage in Wooster Square Park to receive its diplomas, close to 92 percent of its members were there.

History Of Experimentation

Always experimenting, HSC was founded in the early 1970s as a teacher-led school. Starting in an auto garage, it was meant to be a ​“school without walls,” where students would take their learning out into the Elm City.

Teachers went by their first names. They picked their own leader. Class periods were longer, and disciplines commingled. Civic engagement was always emphasized.

“Since its inception, it has been completely racially integrated, democratically organized and educationally progressive,” a reporter from The New York Times wrote in 1996. ​“What other schools would consider revolutionary, High School in the Community has had for decades.”

Over the last decade, something went awry. Test scores bottomed out. Dropout rates climbed. In 2012, the state named the school a ​“turnaround.” That meant it needed extra help to turn around from a challenging place.

The district handed the school over to the teachers union as part of its ​“portfolio model,” where schools are treated like a diverse array of stocks, doubling down on high-performers and selling off low-performers.

Across the country, unions had generally opposed those kinds of takeover, which were often done by charter management organizations. New Haven’s teachers union defied the trend, deciding to take part. Building leaders would not have to report to Central Office for staffing and budget decisions. Those decisions would all be approved by the teacher’s union president, vice-president and secretary.

Three years in, though, not much changed, at least by the state’s metrics. In 2015, then-Superintendent Garth Harries decided to boot the entire leadership team. The union said it would open up the search for an outside principal. Faculty and students worried that would mark the end of HSC’s experiment.

Dave Cicarella, the teacher’s union president, said that if HSC hadn’t started improving right away, the district might’ve shut it down altogether.

“We had been the perfect candidate for a school closing. We had declining enrollment, downward test scores and an aging building,” he recalled. ​“They had been working hard, but none of the tangible markers were improving. They were either flat-lining or going down, even with all the Commissioner’s Network money.”

Cicarella eventually brought in Matt Brown, a founding principal at a Brooklyn high school that focused on ​“expeditionary” field trips, as the building leader, along with Cari Strand as curriculum leader and Michelle Cabaldon as school culture leader.

They narrowed the focus to a law and social justice theme, and they changed the evaluation of student work from standard report-card grades to mastery-based portfolios. They allowed students to set their own pace for learning, while doing their best to keep it within four years.

Brown said that the school’s improvements really began when it shifted focus from the ​“thousand different things” HSC had been asked to do to earn the state’s turnaround dollars to the actions that they thought should define the school.

For HSC’s new leadership, that meant elevating student voice and easing the ninth-grade transition.

“When we started to get successful as a school was when we leaned into what we were good at,” Strand said. ​“We were really great at listening to kids and making them leaders who can strengthen the academic programming and the college-going culture. We were always good at tapping into what they want to be. Now we’re applying that in project-based learning in the capstone, in our day-to-day work with them.”

“Make-Or-Break” 9th Grade

Brown said a big part of HSC’s success was rethinking how to ease into ninth grade, which experts describe as ​“the make-or-break year.” The school did that largely by meeting up, as a staff, to talk about what kids need.

Students at HSC regularly hear administrators and teachers nudging them towards engagement opportunities. ​“They’re continuously told, ​‘This is here for you,’ very directly and very specifically,” Strand said.

The advice isn’t just for students who are failing classes or skipping school. Brown set up an ​“MMMT Team” for ​“Moving the Mass in the Middle,” where the faculty ​“talk about those kids that don’t get talked about,” Strand said. ​“Someone seeks them out, takes that quiet kid and asks, ​‘What do you want and how can we help you get it?’”

Doishellys Rodriguez, a senior who is heading to Southern Connecticut College next year to study nursing, was one of those students who felt adrift during her freshman year, even though she didn’t realize it much until later.

She had transferred between two schools, before she landed at HSC. During her junior year, as she assembled a portfolio of all the activities she’d been involved in, she said she realized just how different HSC had been.

She’d gone on a trip abroad to Nicaragua, interned at ​‘R Kids Family Center, taken college-level classes at Gateway and voted in the Citywide Student Council.

“When I did my defense last year, I included a lot of the things that I’ve done at HSC. I realized I was never involved in anything at Career. I felt lost. I wanted to join things, but I didn’t know how,” she said. ​“At HSC, the teachers come up to you. They find you in the hallway. It made me feel important, like I belong in this school and I belong in this community. It made me feel like I can make a difference.”

Each year, graduation rates climbed upward. Beginning in 2016, the rate made just a small jump of less than 5 points, but after that, it shot up by 18 points. According to the school’s numbers, which haven’t been vetted by the state yet, the rate went up by another 7 points last year and then 17 more points this year.

Looking Beyond Graduation

Along the way, HSC’s administrators don’t just want students to pass their classes. They’re trying to foster leadership that prepares students for life after graduation.

That’s what happened for Rocco DeMatteo. When he arrived as a freshman at HSC four years ago, DeMatteo always kept his hood up. He didn’t talk much, and he could fly into a rage. He said he didn’t trust the people around him, even as teachers kept trying to get him to open up.

“It was a big adjustment. You’re so used to, in middle school, walking in a straight line with your teaching, but now you’re walking to your own classes and joining in one big lunch wave. You’re so used to teachers telling you what to do, but now you get into a school where there’s student-based learning, where the teachers let you do what you have to do with all different ways to learn,” DeMatteo said. ​“You’re not a baby anymore.”

DeMatteo wondered whether he was cut out for school. He didn’t see himself going to college. He planned instead to go to trade school, where he could learn to be an electrician, until he was old enough to apply for New Haven’s police force.

But DeMatteo started to open up after performing in the school’s jazz and rock bands, as his teachers helped him learn to play guitar.

Figuring he ​“might as well try to get as much done” as he could, he started doubling up on math and science classes.

“I don’t like school. I just wanted it to be done. All your teachers talk about is college this and that. I always wanted to say, ​‘Stop talking about it: If I go, I go,’” DeMatteo said. ​“Senior year, I said I wasn’t going to go. But as more and more time went on, I realized that while I need to be 21 in order to join the Police Academy, I could do four years of work at a bad job or I could get my degree in criminal justice.”

Eventually DeMatteo was so far ahead that he didn’t have any more math classes to take. So he started assistant teaching an Algebra II class. He said that the experience taught him what leadership means.

“If they’re having a problem, I could say, ​‘I know how you’re feeling. I’m still a teenager too.’ I want them to know that there’s somebody that’s been through all this,” DeMatteo said. ​“That’s my main goal in being an officer to show that there’s police you could trust. I use that as a guide to where I am now. If I find out a student is doing things in their life that they shouldn’t be, I don’t tell them, ​‘Don’t do this or that,’ but I give them pointers that I’ve done things in my past that I regret.”

Trusting The Student Voice

Strand said that having upperclassmen share their academic experiences, as DeMatteo did, can often get through in a way that adults can’t. For instance, ​“at an SAT prep class, a senior can say, ​‘This is something that matters,’” she said. ​“It helps students see why, as opposed to saying, ​‘This is a thing I have to do because the grownups told me.’”

She added the type of leadership role Dematteo took on is exactly what they’re trying to encourage, making students trust in their voice and abilities.

That happens throughout the school year.

“All the time, you’re seeing at pep rallies and at lunches, there’s always kids going up and speaking,” said Emily Lucke, another senior. Especially compared to her small Catholic middle school, ​“it was a little weird seeing kids with a megaphone on stage. I thought, ​‘Oh my god, are you going to make me do that?’ But you get to a point where you’re so passionate about something that you kind of want to go up there and get people involved, see what they think or put yourself out there.”

At the start of every week, students lead a ​“Motivation Monday” meant to inspire their classmates, whether it’s playing a set like DeMatteo did or practicing motivational speaking like Nia Jones did. Strand describes it as a ​“high-stakes experience in a low-stakes environment.”

Students also hold workshops, whether on boxing for anger management, guided meditation and voting in the American electoral system. During the school day, students go to clubs, and after, they join discussion groups, as Dante Wiggins and Matthew Perez did on the topic of masculinity.

“People will tell you that teenagers are lazy, but the feeling when they do something inspirational is the most powerful feeling that there is,” Strand said. ​“It does tend to bring it back to academics. I can’t say everyone is a student earning all 4’s,” the top mastery score, ​“but we saw a good drop in our chronic absenteeism, and I really think that’s because of the environment around them.

“They might think that school is hard, but it’s something that they like,” she added. ​“It’s a space where they feel seen or respected or heard, and that matters to them. There’s an adult who they know will miss them if they’re not here.”

Reaching A Milestone Together

On that mid-June evening, as the setting sun filtered a dappled light through Wooster Square’s trees onto the soon-to-be graduates, just a few blocks from their Water Street school, Brown gave his last words to his first class. He said this was a special group.

“I am always so excited at our graduations, but this year I’m particularly so because of the respect and admiration I have for this class of students,” Brown said. ​“We all started together here at HSC. Their beginning as a class marked my beginning as a staff member at HSC and therefore I feel, in some ways, as if we are both reaching a milestone together.”

Brown recounted stories of students who he’d watch grow in ways that even some of their classmates hadn’t seen.

Everyone had heard Rocco play riffs on the guitar. But who knew that he had also helped lead Algebra 2 classes as a teaching assistant ​“and learned how incredibly annoying it can be when you are trying to teach and kids take out their cell phones”? Brown said.

Everyone had known Nia as ​“the kindest, sweetest person.” But who knew that she had such a ​“powerful, inspirational and confident voice” that had uplifted arriving freshmen adjusting to the rigors of high school?

Everyone had seen Dante and Matt as the ​“cool guys” on campus. But who knew they would found a group whose conversations would redefine ​“what it means to ​‘be a man’”?

“In the long road of life, we know it is the stories you tell yourselves about who you are and what you can do that make all the difference,” Brown said. ​“Use the power of this evening, the magic of this moment, to look up at this stage, to look into these stands, and see the eyes of someone who knows some of your stories: of you being strong, being courageous, being tough, being loving, being wise, being someone the world needs.”

“Know that when this day fades,” Brown concluded, ​“we are always here for you: ready to help shape, support and edit the stories about yourselves that you have yet to write.”