Melissa Bailey Photo
Jeffery Stokes and Tony Trerotola prepare to wax a classroom floor.
After plans fell through to relocate the school next to Hillhouse High, Hyde magnet school has found a new home with science labs, plenty of parking, and a chance for students to get a feel for the college environment.
Hyde School of Health Sciences and Sports Medicine, a small magnet high school housed in a Hamden swing space, plans to move in mid-September to Gateway Community College’s Long Wharf campus, according to schools Superintendent Reggie Mayo. The 150,000-square-foot, state-owned building at 60 Sargent Drive opened up when Gateway moved to a new downtown campus this summer.
The 1971 concrete structure will serve as Hyde’s temporary home for “a couple of years” as the school expands its student body and looks for a new permanent home, Mayo said.
Gateway President Dorsey Kendrick said the college is working out a lease agreement whereby Hyde will take the second floor of the Long Wharf building. Gateway’s automotive technology program and Gateway Technical School, a new vo-tech high school the district plans to open in the fall of 2013 in conjunction with Gateway, will use other parts of the building.
Kendrick called the agreement a “win-win”: Gateway will expand its efforts to expose high school kids to the college environment, and the school district will help defray the cost of maintaining the building.
Kendrick said Hyde plans to move to Long Wharf on Sept. 14 or 17.
On Wednesday morning, workers from William B. Myers moving company moved the last few truckloads of pottery tables, kitchen supplies and vending machines to the downtown campus.
Hyde, which serves about 200 students, plans to start school next Wednesday at the same rental space it used last year, a former Catholic junior high school at 306 Circular Ave. in Hamden, according to Mayo. The swing space has no athletic fields or modern science labs and lacks the equipment and infrastructure to suit Hyde’s new magnet focus on health sciences and sports medicine, school officials have said.
The city earlier this year unveiled a plan to seek state money to build an addition to Hillhouse High School to house Hyde. The proposal, slipped into the mayor’s budget proposal without consulting parents, aldermen or neighbors, drew public outcry. Aldermen refused to approve the proposal, sending the school board back to the drawing board in April.
Melissa Bailey File Photo
Dawn Gibson-Brehon (pictured), one of the parents who decried a lack of transparency about that proposal, joined a working group of parents, teachers and administrators to come up with a new solution. She said the group considered retrofitting the Hamden space, but decided Long Wharf would be a better fit.
“We felt this is a great move for them, given what the kids need,” she said.
Gibson-Brehon said the Long Wharf campus has one main advantage — modern science labs.
President Kendrick said the science labs are ready to go.
“We’ve pretty much left everything intact at the Long Wharf campus,” Kendrick said. “All the equipment and labs are there. They don’t have to go in and equip” the rooms.
While Gateway has outgrown the facility, she said, “it’s still a good space.”
Modern science labs will be key to complying with the promises the school made when it landed a federal grant to become a magnet school in 2010, Gibson-Brehon said.
The Long Wharf campus also has a library, which Hyde didn’t have before, Gibson-Brehon said. It does not have athletic fields: Hyde students will continue to practice and compete on borrowed fields. The main drawback, she said, is that it lacks a gym, which is a problem for kids studying sports medicine.
The Long Wharf campus is empty at the moment, Kendrick said. Gateway plans to retro-fit part of the space to accommodate its automotive technology program. The automotive program occupies 30,000 square feet at Gateway’s North Haven campus; all the other programs out there moved to downtown New Haven. Kendrick said the process, which includes installing lifts for automobiles, will take a lot of work.
Meanwhile, Principal Steve Pynn is crafting plans for the city’s new vo-tech high school. The district and Gateway are still looking for funding for the school, which would include a “middle college” program that enables high school students to earn college credits and graduate with an associate’s degree.
Incoming Gateway student Matt Watkinson rollerbladed downtown after finding the Long Wharf campus abandoned.
While the school doesn’t plan to launch until the fall of 2013, Pynn said he plans to move into the Long Wharf campus in the next two weeks to start making the resources there available to high schools during this academic year.
Pynn said there won’t be official courses at Long Wharf this year, but career-focused high schools may begin to make use of the space. For example, the culinary arts program at Wilbur Cross High School will begin to use the kitchen space, Pynn said.
The following year, students at five career-focused high schools, including Hyde, will be able to enroll in college-level courses at Long Wharf, according to the plan.
Kendrick said all the activity at Long Wharf represents an expansion of the college’s efforts to inspire high school kids to get higher degrees. Gateway already invites high schoolers from New Haven and beyond to take its courses. In a new “middle college” experiment run by Gateway and Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School, 24 students graduated from Coop in June ready to be college sophomores.
With 200 Hyde kids at Long Wharf, “we’ll have a captive audience,” Kendrick said. College staff will be able to “go in and talk about what a college education would mean for them.”
“We’re excited,” she said. “Anytime young people can be in a college setting earlier, it only helps get them thinking about college.”
Good to see the building put to use.
How much money could we have saved on school construction -- and put that money to police and sidewalks instead -- if we had just reused more of the hundreds of underutilized buildings in New Haven?
Also, roller-blading is one of the best ways to get to the new campus. More students and staff would do it if we weren't giving away $100,000 parking spaces for free.