Christopher Peak Photo
Iline Tracey: I’m committed to this school system.
New Haven’s new schools chief wants to bring music and art back to the classroom — and stability to a district that has been mired in turmoil for the last two years.
Interim Superintendent Iline Tracey revealed some of those plans at her first official Board of Education meeting as Superintendent Carol Birks’s replacement
Over two and a half hours Monday night at King-Robinson Interdistrict Magnet School in Beaver Hills, the board’s routine agenda items on academic data and staffing appointments turned into weighty discussions.
Tracey was challenged to make sure Spanish speakers are adequately represented without tokenizing them as an after-thought; improve student achievement without getting too caught up in test scores; and restore trust without knowing what comes next in what could be another divisive superintendent search.
After sticking with a decades-long career in urban education, ever since she started out at Dwight Day Care in 1980, Tracey said she’s feeling up for the challenge.
“This school system has been very dear to my heart. I’ve taught kindergarten, first grade, fourth grade, eighth grade — all the different grades — and I’m proud to say that I’m committed to this system,” Tracey said. “I’m not committed to a person, but to the system. That means people can come and go, but I still have my commitment to the system.”
“I’m not also here reveling in anyone’s demise. I will work with whoever’s in the system, because I’m working on behalf of families and students,” she went on. “I’m continuing this commitment. I’m not ready to go anywhere, even though my hair is gray. I still have a lot of energy left.”
Later in the meeting, she described a vision of classrooms where students read books and play music, though it’s up to the board how long she’ll have to see that through.
Tracey’s contract is still being negotiated. It can’t be signed until Friday anyway, in case Birks decides to pull out of her severance agreement.
But once the details are worked out, Tracey will likely remain interim superintendent until the end of this school year. A search will get going after the Nov. 5 mayoral election and the filling of an open board seat.
Right after the Board of Education inked a $175,000 severance agreement with Birks and tentatively handed the job over, parents and administrators inside King-Robinson’s auditorium (where Tracey had been principal in the early 2000s) leapt to their feet, whooping and clapping.
Florence Caldwell May Mitchell, and Robert Gibson at Monday’s school board meeting.
During public comment, nearly every speaker endorsed her for the job.
Florence Caldwell — maybe the only person in the auditorium who’s been involved in city schools longer than Tracey, showing up for school board meetings for more than 40 years — said she couldn’t think of anyone better. She called Tracey a “woman of compassion, conviction and dependability.”
“It’s going to take us a while to get back where we need to be,” Caldwell said. “But we’re on the right track, as long as there’s open commitment to transparency, we can move forward as New Haven Public Schools, a school district that we’re all so very proud of.”
Tracey’s First Test
Mayor Harp joins in a standing ovation for Tracey.
After the congratulations, Tracey quickly had to start answering questions about how she planned to approach academics this school year.
Elementary schools district-wide are slowly catching up to the state average in reading, but they aren’t keeping pace in math. And high schoolers reversed a recent upward swing on SAT scores.
Tamiko Jackson-McArthur said that, while standardized tests are a “one size fits all” exam, she still felt “very disturbed” by how far New Haven lags behind the state average, even as it routinely beats out Hartford and Bridgeport. She said the district needs to make sure that it’s making pre-kindergarten spots available to all New Haven families.
Mayor Toni Harp said she noticed the high schools with the highest SAT scores also had the highest proportion of white students: Engineering & Science University Magnet School and The Sound School. “That is a problem,” she said.
Ed Joyner called it “a rigged game.”
Tracey didn’t discount the test results. She said that the board needed to take the scores seriously, because state ratings and federal grants depend on them. But she added that one number shouldn’t define a student’s learning.
That view was a stark contrast with Birks, who’d ended her public job interview by distributing a run-down of the district’s test scores and who’d set specific test score targets in the district’s strategic plan.
“Are we where we should be? No,” she said, but “our schools are helping kids set goals where they are, not just based on numbers but based on how they’re performing qualitatively and quantitatively.”.
“I, for one, don’t think test scores define who our kids are,” she added.
Tracey said that, while she was working at Southern Connecticut State University, she met many New Haven grads who couldn’t read well or write well. But she said the main problem was that students didn’t have “the right approach to learning.” They needed to work on how they analyzed the material, not how they picked out “eenie, meenie, miney, mo” on a scantron, she said.
Her solution? Tracey said she wanted to get kids interested in learning again, and she said she’d need New Haven’s help in doing that.
“The problems are complex. I think we have to, as a community, come together to figure it out, because I know that our teachers are working very hard,” Tracey said. “We need to get our kids to move, getting our kids to read, getting music back, to let kids have fun with their learning, not sitting in sedentary positions in the classroom just being compliant.
“I need the whole community to rally around that,” she added. “Come in to read to kids. Come and support our youngsters. Our teachers need that level of help.”
The Board’s Second Test
Darnell Goldson: We’ll have another transparent search.
The other big question, since Birks’s departure, is how long Tracey will have to carry out that vision of her ideal classroom.
That question has rattled parents for the last two weeks, after Darnell Goldson, the board’s president, said at the last board meeting that he thought the last superintendent search was “very transparent.”
“You may not have liked the conclusion,” Goldson said, but “we all knew what was going to happen at the end because it was so transparent.”
Ed Joyner: That’s not how I remember the superintendent search.
Joyner objected that “a lot of things were hidden from the public, a lot of things were done behind the scenes.”
And Krystal Augustine, the former City-Wide Parent Team president, joined in, shouting from a corner of King-Robinson’s auditorium. She said that parents were given a one-day notice before a September forum with the three finalists.
“Just apologize,” she yelled. “Just be honest.”
Goldson told her she was out of order and temporarily shut down the meeting.
Two weeks later, on Monday night, Goldson agreed the board maybe should have just picked Tracey, one of the seven superintendent semifinalists, in the first place.
“I don’t know why we didn’t make the decision before to bring her on as superintendent,” he said.
Several members of the public — whom Goldson had accused of “publicly lynching this lady” for loudly protesting Birks’s hiring two years ago — burst out into disbelieving laughter.
“Really?” one mom said.
Goldson chuckled too. “I am super happy to make the decision now,” he clarified. “I feel a kind of sigh of relief throughout the entire district, and I’m looking forward to working with her to move this district forward.”
Would anything be different this time around? After Monday’s meeting, Goldson told reporters that the board would do site visits for any out-of-towners to see what parents and students thought.
“I think the search firm might have done that, but board members didn’t do that” he said. “Next time I want to be more hands-on.”
Hazel Pappas: I hope you’re here for a long time.
Hazel Pappas, another fixture who’s shown up to board meetings with Caldwell for decades, said that the school board should look within its own ranks for its next leader.
“When we have people’s that in New Haven that could be the superintendent from the get-go, that’s what should happen, because Dr. Tracey should have the superintendent from the beginning,” she said. “Since we’re so broke, let’s not be willing to go looking for somebody else, pay this and pay that, when we have somebody that’s qualified, even more than the people that we paid all this money for.”
“Dr. Tracey,” Pappas added, “I hope you stay with us for a long time.”
For some reason I have been reading a lot @ narcissists..the recurring theme is that the issue narcissists are most troubled by is being considered irrelevant...In addition, they tend to be extremely paranoid, you know, thinking everybody is keeping secrets and not telling them the whole truth. Again, the feeling of being irrelevant. So that is why they holler the loudest, disrupt proceedings at the drop of a hat and are generally combative....Just sayin...