Facing a grilling from crime-weary neighbors — including this woman, the victim of an attempted mugging outside her house — an embattled schools superintendent Reginald Mayo told East Rockers he plans to move the Wilbur Cross Annex to another part of town.
Mayo and other school officials faced an angry crowd of 60 neighbors at the East Rock Magnet School library Monday night. They were upset about crimes, some of them violent, allegedly committed by students from the school at 45 Nash St., where the system sends kids who have gotten in too much trouble at the main Cross campus.
Mayo announced that a different Cross overflow program — New Haven Scholars — will probably move into the building. A smaller version of the Cross Annex would move elsewhere in town, he said.
That failed to dampen the heated debate at Monday’s meeting, which touched on difficult questions from NIMBY to whether to mainstream or segregate trouble-causing students.
At issue were experiences of local people such as Stefanie Lapetina, pictured at the top of this story. “I had a gun in my face,” she told Mayo. “You didn’t have a gun held in your face. I really fear for my daughter now.”
She was referring to an incident two weeks ago when a kid accosted her in her driveway on Mechanic Street. He was holding a gun. He put his hand in her purse, she said, but then Lapetina, who described herself as having had six years of military service, saw that the gun might be a fake. “I called him on it. I just wanted to get out of the driveway, where I was concealed. So I called him on it and called for help while I lunged away, and he lunged after me. But then he saw I was getting control of the situation, he cursed me, but then crossed the street, and we glared at each other.
“A neighbor called 911, and within 30 minutes they had traced him to the Cross Annex on nearby Nash Street. He was trying to meld into the crowd. They put the school into lockdown, isolated some kids, and later I identified him.”
Military training or not, her voice was still shaking as she recounted this. Then other people described kids run amok over automobiles, destroying property.
This man, Bob Frew, a former alderman who’s frequently on Nash Street where he’s redeveloping properties, said he’d seen 30 Cross Annex kids chase down a Mexican man and beat him up in the open on State Street. “All my life in this country,” he said, “I’d never seen anything like it.”
p(clear). 
And Omalys Sosa, of Nash Street said that when she called the police to tell them kids from the school were doing drugs, the police told her to call the school, “that it’s a school matter.”
p(clear). Mayo had begun his presentation describing the Annex as a place for about 175 kids, some, he acknowledged, difficult to handle. He said the population had, because of poor grades and truancy and misbehavior, been sent to the Annex, where the goal is for them to work their way back to the regular high school. “I know the kid involved in the robbery was very upsetting to you,” he said, “and believe me we are going to address this. We have been putting resources into the Annex, but we are really going to put in some serious mental health, behavior counselors.”
p(clear). Mayo asserted that over the last few months, overcrowding at Cross had led the schools to send over perhaps too many kids to the Annex, and that was perhaps the prime cause of the recent trouble.
p(clear). “That just isn’t true,” someone called out. “It’s been going on for years.”
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East Rock Alderman Roland Lemar (pictured on the left with Alderman Ed Mattison), who had invited the superintendent to the meeting, concurred. “Truthfully, we’ve had trouble with kids from the Annex — and not from the regular Wilbur Cross or the other schools in the area, mind you, but only the Annex — for over a year. This robbery at gunpoint was not what precipitated this meeting.”
p(clear). 
Public schools Chief Operating Officer Robin Golden said she and the superintendent (pictured) would have come to discuss the matter, but until now, no one had invited them.
p(clear). “This is a good meeting,” Mayo said, “because in the future, just like police officers attend your management team meetings regularly, so should the principal or representatives from the Annex.”
p(clear). 
“So what are you going to do, Dr. Mayo!” said an angry Ron Oster. “Kids from the Annex sit on the porches, they wander all over the neighborhood. There’s trashing the community garden, and obviously much worse. What are you going to do!”
p(clear). “The Annex is on overload. Like I said, we sent too many kids over there.”
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Annex Principal Willie Elder (in the white shirt) and its technology teacher Nathan Joyner (in the yellow hat) , along with supervisor of high schools Charles Williams, were also in attendance. They explained the Annex had a metal detector and a security staff of two guards plus one School Resource Officer (SRO), who is a full-fledged New Haven cop. Still, many in the audience described situations where the guards, had they been vigilant and out in front of the building, might have prevented crimes.
p(clear). “We’re the ones on overload here, with these kids run amok, this crime,” said Oster. “I think you should close the Annex.”
p(clear). “Well we are going to put in inputs, new resources, we have been doing that over the years.”
p(clear). Other voices called out: “The kids are a danger to senior citizens. Does someone have to die before something is done?”
p(clear). In response to such an atmosphere, Mayo ended up revealing details of a plan that he had been reluctant to disclose at the start of the meeting.
p(clear). “I think what we’ll do is, in effect, move the Annex. We will review each of the files of the kids, and move some back into Cross, some elsewhere. But we’ll take the program and move it out of the neighborhood. Instead, we’ll bring in another of our transitional programs, the Connecticut Scholars [now housed on Ella Grasso Boulevard]. These are fine freshmen and sophomores, who are average students, working to move up and to enter Cross, the main building, in their junior year. We have 1,600 kids at Cross. The Connecticut Scholars is our way to handle some of the overload. These are good kids. It will ameliorate the problem, I assure you. But remember, they are kids,” Mayo concluded. “Things will happen.”
p(clear). 
But Virginia Blaisdell, of Nash Street, who had been listening carefully, had a further challenge for the superintendent. “I don’t want to get involved in a NIMBY [Not In My Backyard] situation. We’re grateful for the idea, but why don’t you mainstream these kids? You heard what others in this room have said. Putting all these kids with problems together in that dilapidated building, it’s going to cause problems in another part of town. I live in East Rock, but I’m a New Havener, and I don’t want that to happen.”
p(clear). “I repeat, we will deal with it,” said Mayo. “However we can’t send them all to Cross or they’ll run around the halls there. We’ll move Connecticut Scholars into the Annex’s current building, find a way to connect it, as many of you are suggesting, to the bigger Cross, and still find a place for a much smaller Annex elsewhere. That’s the plan.”
p(clear). Alderman Mattison said he’d heard the Annex kids discuss their life there as if they were stigmatized, as if they were dumped there.
p(clear). 
That prompted Cross’s principal, Bob Canelli, to say candidly, “You wouldn’t want some of the Annex kids in your kid’s class, I don’t think. But, no, we don’t think of the Annex as a dumping ground at all.
p(clear). “These are smaller classes, where the kids won’t act out as much. That’s the theory, and it was working until too many kids were under the roof there. The Annex is a retrieval program.”
p(clear). 
Debra Rossi, the long-time secretary of the East Rock Community Management Team asked, while juggling her two-year old Abigail, if the superintendent would come back with a confirmation of the steps he’d outlined. Mayo said he’d come back before the start of school in the fall, by which time the details of the plan would be in place. “Things will be a lot better. I assure you.”
p(clear). What did Lapetina, the woman, whose mugging was the immediate catalyst for the outcry, think of the meeting? “I still think he sugar-coated things. He doesn’t know how bad it is.”
p(clear). Was the superintendent’s plan a done deal? Although Bob Frew alleged that he had talked to the mayor, who had approved the approach Mayo was taking, Roland Lemar reminded those who lingered after adjournment that there are hurdles still to leap. “The superintendent has to get a Board of Education committee to approve the change. And then the full BOE has to approve. You saw he wasn’t going to give specifics at the start, but then he did. No, we’ve definitely still got to keep the pressure up.”
Two suggestions.
1 - move the Annex to the Gateway building.
It's across the street from the police station
its large enough to hold 175 extra people
it's in the same building as the B.O.E. & Dr. Mayo
it's centrally located
2 - ask the Greer family if they are interested in moving to Nash St. or becoming principals.