Parents Pick Up Grades, Jackets

In hard times, report card night doubled as coat night at Fair Haven Middle School.

Wednesday, before the parents (like Anmarliz Colon, pictured with daughters Maridalis and Caitlin) visited with teachers on citywide elementary and middle school report card night, they could also have picked up a package of diapers, or a mattress in the tag sale room, or a book or two for the home library.

They could even have done their laundry in the washer and dryer in the parent resource room.

Report card day at Fair Haven K‑8 is not what it used to be, as parents are involved all days of the year in a school that functions not only as a school but also like a community center.

That has become a more important goal than ever as the recession slams families.

“It was a very cold winter this year,” Principal Kim Johnsky said, ​“and we noticed many of our kids, whose families come from warm climates, not having good coats. Our assistant principal put out the word to her college friend in Wilton, and 300 new coats arrived, for kids as well as adults.

“The Friends of Fair Haven got some more for us. So the coats are there, and people just pick up what they need. One little boy the other day tried one on. It fit perfectly, but it was red, and he wanted one that was blue, because he liked, he said, the color of the sky. We had plenty of blue coats too.”

“Whatever is happening in their lives,” Johnsky said, ​“they know when they cross this threshold, we’re there for them.”

She meant not only the kids, but also their families.

“Many of our kids have parents who work very hard, two jobs, traveling to Meriden or wherever the jobs are, and are not home when the kids leave school.”

The school is in effect open from 7 in in the morning to 7 at night, a second home.

Parents could pay a dollar or whatever they can afford for the coats and other items in the tag sale room. ​“People take what they need, pay if they can, and bring things in for other needy families,” Johnsky said.

Report card night’s event ended up feeling like an extended family gathering for a party, not a dreaded showdown with graders.

80 percent of the school population speaks Spanish.. So Johnsky’s weekly bulletins home to parents are in English and Spanish. The same goes for school announcements. There are translations always at events, monthly town meetings and twice-a-month parent-teacher-organization meetings.

Even though she knows that many of the parents cannot help their kids in English homework, Johnsky and her staff have devised questions, in Spanish, that parents can ask to help with the kids’ homework. One of the first activities during parent orientations at the beginning of the school year in the resource room was how to put together family scrapbooks, where the language required was the universal one of memory and love.

One question that Brenda Rodriguez, who can speak English perfectly fine, did not ask her son was whether he really had done his homework. This night she learned from her son’s teacher that his grades had fallen from As and Bs to Ds. ​“He said he was doing the homework, but I learned he really wasn’t. Now I’m going to check his backpack, you better believe it, every day.”

Fair Haven is of course, above all a school, and Johnsky and her staff have also pulled together a dizzying array of partners for academic enrichment; Yale University, Amity High School, Target Store employees, the New Haven Symphony, Chabasso Bakery, Math Counts, and Mystic Aquarium for enrichment projects during the school day and afterwards, until 7 every night.

Johnsky estimated some 500 of the 600 kids participate, many leaving and returning to the building as they might do the porch of their homes.

Result: Fair Haven Middle (its former name before it became a K‑8) had 890 suspensions before Johnsky and her key staff moved over there from The Nathan Hale School. Now there are only a handful. Similarly, parents are involved: 80 percent of parents come to report card conferences, a high turnout for the district.

The class with the highest number of kids and parents coming to this night’s Report Card Night will receive a batch of the famous chocolate-chip wonders from cooking teacher Mr. Bradshaw.

“I transferred my son from Worthington Hooker” to Fair Haven, said Tarey Hampton, mother of sixth-grader Elijah, ​“because of this principal and these teachers and the atmosphere here. The diversity and the love. I don’t care about Hooker’s new building. Teachers make the school, not a building, and the way they value these kids.” (She’s pictured here meeting with Elijah’s teacher, Richard Cordaway.)

She trailed off as Cordaway explained Elijah’s all‑A minus second grading period scores and the skit he wrote about young Barry Obama’s friends. In the first scene they rib him, trying to get him to skip his homework, saying he won’t get anywhere.