Christopher Peak Photo
Superintendent Carol Birks holds up state notice letter.
The Board of Education might have resolved to close a high school, but it hasn’t yet figured out how to attract enough racial diversity to keep the rest of its magnet schools open.
Currently, only two of New Haven’s regional magnet schools are keeping up with state requirements: Betsy Ross Arts Magnet, a middle school, and Engineering & Science University Magnet School, a combined middle and high school.
Fourteen other magnets are too “racially isolated,” meaning less than a quarter of the students in them are white, Asian, Native American or some mix of those races.
Those figures will have to change soon if the district hopes to continue receiving extra money, the Connecticut State Department of Education (SDE) told Superintendent Carol Birks earlier this month.
In a May 8 letter, the SDE said four schools could face financial penalties if their racial demographics don’t change next year. Ten other schools have until October 2021 to catch up or face penalties too.
Next year, New Haven expected to receive $35.31 million from the inter-district magnet program, about one-sixth of the school system’s general fund.
The schools get extra state funding — $7,085 per suburban pupil; $3,000 per local kid — to reserve at least a quarter of their seats for surrounding towns. Aside from those funds, state lawmakers tried to block magnet operators from charging tuition, and they send the Education Cost Sharing formula to the student’s home district, rather than where they attend school.
The 90 inter-district magnet schools across the state are the primary vehicle for the Connecticut’s desegregation effort.
Over the last decade in New Haven, the percentage of white students attending city public schools has ticked upward. In 2004-05, white students made up 11.1 percent. Diversity peaked in 2013 – 14, when white students made up 15.12 percent, but it’s been trending down ever since. This year, white students represent 13.3 percent.
Most of those white students go to inter-district magnet schools, a vocational school and a handful of traditional schools; most of the city’s neighborhood schools, on the other hand, are profoundly segregated.
That means the magnet program’s making progress toward desegregation, especially as the state’s demographics moved in the other direction, but it’s not nearly as much as the SDE had wanted.
Google Maps
Beecher, Ross-Woodward, Daniels and West Rock (pictured) need more white kids.
According to letters obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the SDE and New Haven have been talking about enrollment issues for months, with a back-and-forth about diversity goals and penalties, compliance challenges and solutions.
In October 2017, The SDE alerted Elm City officials about the stricter enforcement of “racial isolation” requirements, with a four-page explainer about new rules the legislature passed unanimously last summer. Those require no more than three-quarters of the student body to be black or brown or even half of those races.
That’s pretty much the same standard that Hartford’s inter-district magnet schools have long used. They needed it to comply with Sheff v. O’Neill, the landmark 1996 case that found Connecticut’s municipal-based school system violated students’ constitutional right to a “substantially equal educational opportunity.”
The recently revised law now sets one unified standard for the entire state. That means a higher bar for New Haven, which had previously needed only 20 percent white students.
The law does contain a waiver if the commissioner determines city schools are trending in the right direction on race or increasing diversity in other ways, such as integrating across geography, socioeconomics, English-language learner or special education status, achievement and other factors.
In November 2017, two weeks after SDE sent its first memo about the new process, the state asked New Haven to send in compliance plans. But Birks didn’t get to speak with the SDE about the changes until mid-April 2018, a month into taking over the job from Reggie Mayo, the interim superintendent.
Earlier this month, the SDE signed off on most of her plans — with the exception of Cortlandt V.R. Creed Health & Sports Science Magnet School, which it slapped with a $121,059 penalty for trending in the wrong direction.
Other schools, the SDE warned, needed to carry out their plans next school year or suffer the same sanctions.
Besides Creed, the four schools that the SDE scrutinized were L.W. Beecher Museum School of Arts and Sciences, John C. Daniels School of International Communication, Ross-Woodward Classical Studies School and West Rock STREAM Academy.
All of them opened after July 2005, when the expectations on racial diversity were made clear.
But for each, New Haven officials explained that it was tough to recruit suburban kids with a “lowered marketing budget” after state cuts, especially when already overcoming the hurdle of “transportation timing” from distant towns.
To offset the problems, Daniels hired a magnet coordinator that visited facilities in suburban areas, and Beecher asked for more help from its students and tutors from Southern Connecticut State University in recruiting drives, the letter said.
West Rock faced the additional “challenge of competition among other choice schools in New Haven,” since it goes up to only fourth grade and is located in the westernmost corner of the city. A monetary boost from a 2016 federal grant helped push up the numbers recently.
The district’s 10 other noncompliant inter-district magnets, which all opened before 2005, are facing similar issues — “demographic makeup of the surrounding suburban towns,” “transportation ride times,” and “the amount of resources dedicated to marketing and retention efforts. They all have until October 2021 to get their numbers up.
Some, like Benjamin Jepson and Davis 21st Century, are close. Others, like New Haven Academy and King-Robinson, have a ways to go.
Sherri Davis-Googe, the director of New Haven’s school choice programs, said that the jumps at some schools are “kind of high,” but overall she feels that the compliance plans are “reasonable,” especially because the state allows her to prove diversity is being established in other ways.
“At the end of the day, it is the requirement, so we do have to work to meet it,” Davis-Googe explained. “Reduced isolation will continue to be a challenge because of the diversity of our surrounding districts. Outreach efforts to increase the number of towns participating in the program is also a challenge due to the extended amount of time students spend traveling to and from school. For these reasons, we will also be exploring other ways of assessing diversity that is specific to our schools and our geographic location, which the state gives us the leverage to do.”
After “productive meetings,” the SDE said it expects that New Haven will come into compliance.
“I look forward to the successful implementation of the strategies in the compliance plans,” Glen Peterson, the SDE’s director of choice programs, wrote in the letter to Birks. “Thank you for your cooperation and continuing partnership.”
Who came up with this Sisyphean task? It seems hard to increase the numbers 1) if you are talking about closing the schools, 2) GOP leaders and some white suburban "democrats" are talking about further de-funding the schools (we don't have to point out why), 3) every year, the child population is rapidly becoming more diverse and less white in towns throughout New Haven County, especially outside of New Haven proper, and 4) the district can't recruit from communities much farther out that are still mostly white.
Where does the 25% standard come from? Is that an arbitrary number they set in 2005, or is it based on some kind of analysis of what is possible in 2020? 15-20% certainly seems better than 0% so maybe they can just do more waivers.