State Department of Education
State education commissioner Miguel Cardona: City can decide best path forward.
(Updated at 9:15 p.m.) The state education commissioner assured city leaders that the decision around how New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) reopens this fall — all remote, all in person, or a hybrid of the two — will be decided by local authorities, and not by the state.
He also encouraged the city’s school board to reconsider its vote to start the school year with 10 weeks of all-online learning, and to adopt a hybrid learning plan instead.
That was the outcome of an hour-and-a-half virtual meeting Tuesday afternoon during which city school officials and ed board members pitched the state Department of Education and other state officials on a local all-remote learning plan. Over 2,300 people tuned into the live broadcast of the meeting.
Click on the video above to watch the full virtual meeting of the Connecticut PK-12 Exception Review Panel and its discussion of New Haven’s school reopening plan.
State Department of Education
State education commissioner Miguel Cardona: City can decide best path forward.
State Department of Education Commissioner Miguel Cardona told the local presenters, including four members of New Haven’s Board of Education who voted in support of 10 weeks of all-remote learning, that the decision as to how to reopen is ultimately in their hands.
“This process is not intended to approve or deny these plans,” he said about whichever route the city’s Board of Education and school administration decide to pursue. “The governor made clear that districts will have to decide.”
Cardona said that his department will be in touch with the local school board as soon as later Tuesday afternoon to set up another public meeting that will focus on the city’s plans for how to reopen this fall.
“A plan is only as good as the paper it’s written on unless there’s confidence behind it,” he said, noting that the four local Board of Education members who support all-online learning — Tamiko Jackson-McArthur, Ed Joyner, Darnell Goldson, and Larry Conaway — retained their skepticism of Superintendent Iline Tracy’s plan for hybrid learning, which would allow for some in-person schooling to resume at the start of the coming semester.
City ed board member Ed Joyner.
“We are a co-morbid city,” Joyner said during the meeting in defense of the local school board’s request for 10 weeks of all-remote learning. Students “cannot learn if they cannot live. … It’s like a lethal game of tag, and you don’t know who’s it.”
Cardona also laid out district demographic data at the start of the meeting that pointed towards the state encouraging the city to reopen.
He said that, based on survey data provided by NHPS to the state, only 30 percent of the roughly 21,000 New Haven public school students fully participated during the spring online-only semester. That’s compared to 74 percent of students who were fully engaged with their classes statewide during that time.
He said city survey data indicated that approximately 60 percent of New Haven students, or around 12,600, had some form of barrier that prevented full participation in remote learning. That’s compared to 17 percent statewide.
He said in-school learning should take place when new Covid-19 cases per 100,000 are under 10, and that fully remote learning should happen when there are more than 25 cases per 100,000. “New Haven County is currently at two cases per 100,000,” he said. And the region has a testing positivity rate that is under 1 percent.
Whether or not to reopen schools in-person has been one of the most hotly contested issues of the summer. The city’s school board voted this summer for the first 10 weeks of classes to be fully online. That vote came after protests by parents, teachers and paraprofessionals that argued that New Haven schools do not have enough resources to reopen safely in person.
Some parents and teachers have argued the opposite case, that Covid-19 case numbers are low and that now is the time to close achievement gaps that opened between students in the spring.
Tracey: “We’re Still In Limbo”
NHPS Superintendent Iline Tracey.
The meeting left Tracey with a strong sense that important details are still unresolved.
“We’re still in limbo, I would say,” New Haven Public Schools Superintendent Iline Tracey said after the meeting. “Not being certain which model we’re doing makes matters much more difficult. The opening of schools is a couple weeks around the corner. … To have even the major decisions still tentative is not good for the school community.”
“But we continue to work away,” she said.
Tracey has been clear that her preference is to reopen schools with a hybrid of in-person and remote classes. This gives parents the choice of whether to send their students into school — a choice that roughly half of parents want, she said.
The district’s latest survey of family preferences closed out on Tuesday evening with over 15,000 respondents.
A slim majority — 8,000 — want their child to learn remotely. The other 7,200 want their child to learn in-person some days of the week.
Tracey made her preference plain during the state meeting on Tuesday. She told Cardona and other state Board of Education members that she would rather see a hybrid learning plan in place, even though she will support and implement whatever plan is approved by the city’s Board of Education.
Thanks to state and local help, the district has enough laptops for all high schoolers, Tracey said.
The district has also ordered laptops and tablets to cover every student in the younger grades, but Tracey is not sure that they will be in by the beginning of the school year.
Tracey told the state officials that she and her team are worried about how well they will be able to teach students with autism, English learners and disengaged students without in-person classes.
“Special Education students and English learners … are impossible to teach remotely in some cases. They were not well served this spring,” Tracey said during Tuesday’s panel.
The district’s Special Education head, Typhanie Jackson, agreed that nonverbal students and others under her purview need face-to-face classes.
“March was not optimal. Yes, we did provide virtual instruction. Yes, we did provide alternative learning packets when online didn’t work,” Jackson said. “The hybrid experience is what’s optimal.”
Students with special needs make up 15 percent of the district’s student body. Seventeen percent are English learners.
On the other hand, Tracey was not expecting to hear that only 30 percent of her students fully participated this spring.
She said that the other 70 percent may include students working from packets or logging on inconsistently, and that she has to look back at what the state was asking in the survey they sent her.
“We Cannot Make Up Lives”
City ed board member Tamiko Jackson-McArthur.
Four of seven adult Board of Education members, plus the two student representatives, voted in August to open entirely online this September.
Their opposition came down to specific safety precautions they wanted to have in place, they explained to the state panel Tuesday.
“My vote was around readiness,” said Jackson-McArthur, who is a pediatrician. “With children mostly asymptomatic or not as sick as adults, we have to be very careful of them spreading the disease at home. We have many, many intergenerational households.”
Jackson-McArthur pointed to families where grandparents are the main caretakers or where great-grandparents live in the same home as students.
Larry Conaway, a former principal in the city’s public school system, stressed that the local ed board’s requested 10-week delay of in-person learning was just that — a delay, not a permanent end to all in-person instruction.
“We are asking for a mere 10 weeks. We can always make it up at the back end of school. We cannot make up lives,” Conaway said. “We are in a crisis. We need to act like it.”
Retired professor and principal Ed Joyner talked about how schools are trying to close gaps between students opened by housing, employment and other inequalities.
“We are a poor city that has never gotten the resources that we need to educate kids,” Joyner said Tuesday. “I implore you to think collectively about how we can ensure that all children return under the best possible conditions.”
Masks For All?
One of the board members’ top concerns was making sure every teacher, student and staff member has access to clean face masks every day, since masks are key to the district’s strategy of preventing sick children and adults from spreading Covid-19 to others.
“Facial coverings will be funded. We can take that off the table,” Cardona said.
Kosta Diamantis, who is deputy secretary for the state’s budget-focused Office of Policy and Management, said that Gov. Ned Lamont wants them to cover 100 percent of school needs for personal protective equipment and cleaning supplies.
New Haven Public Schools can only get these extra funds if they hold in-person classes.
The district administrators already submitted the cost estimates of what they will need. Because cost estimates did not include much details, OPM could not say whether the extra dollars will cover face masks for students as well as teachers. Other districts will hear how much they are getting next week, OPM Secretary Melissa McCaw said after the meeting.
Diamantis also said that his team under the state’s school construction office has inspected the readiness of New Haven school buildings for the fall.
He said that New Haven schools have switched to a higher quality air filtration system than is typical and that their heating and cooling systems are working well.
His team specifically looked at Hillhouse High School, Wilbur Cross High School and Fair Haven School. He said that the boom of school construction in New Haven since the 1990s means the district is in a good place for the pandemic.
“You have some pretty good stuff down there if it is working efficiently. The service providers are there,” Diamantis said.
The hybrid model halves the number of students in schools on any particular day. The number of families opting to keep their children fully at home reduces class sizes further.
“You’re going to get more than six feet [between students] in those cases,” Cardona said.
Goldson: State Needs To “Put Their Money Where Their Mouths Are”
Board member Darnell Goldson said after the meeting that the panel was encouraging.
“For instance, the state is willing to provide personal protective equipment to teachers and students. That is not the information we had received earlier. We were told that students would provide their own PPE,” Goldson said.
Goldson said that he and other board members are now putting together a checklist of items that will make them feel comfortable about reopening schools in the hybrid model.
Other items on the list include Covid-19 tests for students, being able to effectively trace those potentially infected, and more bus monitors to ensure kids are keeping their masks on.
He said that they would run this list by teachers and families and then ask the administration to price it out.
“We can see if they put their money where their mouths are with that and we can get safety protections in place. It all may happen within the next couple of days,” Goldson said.
The board has not yet decided whether it will schedule another meeting before the one planned for Monday, according to Board President Yesenia Rivera.
Just listened to the NHPS presentation by board members -- what an incoherent mess! The board members didn't even know that only 30% of NHPS students were engaged in any way in online education this spring compared to 74% for the rest of the state. YET they ask for all ONLINE SCHOOL and even admitted that education is not really the main concern here! NHPS BOE is saying they need more time, but they have had the same amount of time as the rest of the state but almost every other distirct including some of the peer districts have gotten ready! NHPS staff presented a very detailed plan several weeks ago and as a parent, I feel confident that they are ready!!! The NHPS BOE is disconnted from reality and can not make these important decsions that impact more than 20,000 children in CT who will be even further disadvantaged from their peers and even further disadvanted at a national basis. This is shameful!!!