Christine Emmons pitches ideas for a better school system.
School-change ideas abound at Elicker Transition Team’s community dialogue at HSC.
Those were a sampling of the cornucopia of ideas, priorities, specific initiatives and wishful musings proposed by a group of 20 public school watchdogs charged with thinking aloud about what’s working well, and what needs fixing, in the New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) system.
That group represented one segment among over 200 people who filled the cafeteria of High School in the Community on Water Street Saturday morning for a two-and-a-half-hour public meeting hosted by Mayor-Elect Justin Elicker’s transition team.
The goal of the meeting, which was facilitated by Elizabeth Nearing and Kia Levey-Burden, was relatively simple … and audaciously democratic: To bring together as many city residents as possible, regardless of their background or education or professional expertise or political affiliation, and have them come up with policy priorities for the next mayoral administration.
Levey-Burden.
“I hope that we can all listen to each other and really share honesty here today,” Levey-Burden said as she laid out some of the ground rules, and some of her hopes and expectations, for the meeting ahead.
“I hope that we can bring all of our love, all of our excitement, all of our commitment for New Haven, all of our power and energy, to this room here today.”
The meeting was the first that Elicker has held since he announced his diverse slate of two dozen transition team members after soundly defeating incumbent Mayor Toni Harp in this month’s general election.
He and the facilitators said that the transition team will now take the superabundance of ideas — on education, public safety, housing, arts and culture, the environment, and more — that were proposed and scrawled on multiple sheaves of oversized paper Saturday morning and developing specific policy initiatives for the incoming Elicker administration to pursue upon taking office in January.
The transition team will be hosting another public brainstorming meeting at High School in the Community on Dec. 8. People can also submit ideas about what they want the next administration to focus on via email at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Elicker: “The spirit is inclusion.”
“The spirit is inclusion,” Elicker said to the standing room-only crowd as he introduced the transition team meeting. “The spirit is giving people a voice in the way that the city is run. And I feel like today is an indication that we’re taking a really strong step in that direction.”
Nearing, a former community engagement staffer at Long Wharf Theatre with ample expertise leading thoughtful public conversations about large, challenging topics, warned the assembled attendees that they would inevitably not be able to cover every single issue they care about in Saturday morning’s meeting alone.
Nearing: Speak from the “I,” respect each other’s ideas, and hold the mic like a candy bar.
But, she said, amidst teaching people how best to hold a microphone to maximize audibility (like a candy bar, held parallel to your mouth, and not like an ice cream cone, held beneath your mouth), this meeting represented a prime opportunity for city residents passionate about the wellbeing of New Haven to hear one another out, put ideas to paper, and have a say in the direction of local government.
“There’s a lot of different ideas in this room,” she said, “and we want to be able to honor them all.”
And so, after a few brief get-to-know-your-neighbor exercises, followed by a room-wide brainstorming session about the biggest challenges facing the city today, Nearing and Levey-Burden asked the attendees to self-select into smaller groups focused on particular areas of interest.
People in each group then spent the next hour talking, debating, and brainstorming about what they see going on in the city today, and about how residents and City Hall might work together to make New Haven an even better place to live and study and work over the next few years to come.
“Money Is Not Going Where It’s Supposed To Be Going”
One of the breakout groups dedicated to public education and improving NHPS.
Nearly 40 people who showed up Saturday morning wanted to talk about what’s going right and what’s going wrong with public education in this city. So the school system — currently at a crossroads of leadership and demographics and funding —wound up being the focal point for two separate groups’ worth of discussions.
Columbus Family Academy teacher Irene Logan took the lead in moderating one of those groups, a passionate mix of teachers, parents, social workers, school staffers, and other residents all squeezed around a single table in the northwest corner of the room.
“Money is not going to where it’s supposed to be going,” said city public school teacher Julie Anastasio (pictured). She said that she’s spoken to quite a few colleagues in the district who have had to pay for pencils, paper, and other basic classroom supplies out of their own pockets.
The city summer school program she taught at this year never had enough books to hand out to kids for them to take home, she said. “Teachers have to provide a lot.”
Valerie Hardy (pictured, in the black hat), a social worker who has worked for the school system for 15 years, said that NHPS does an admirable job of trying to place at least one social worker in every city school.
Nevertheless, she said, the system has long struggled to hire enough school nurses, and has seen a recent winnowing of critical staff—including teachers, librarians, and counselors — because of budget shortfalls.
Persistent budget cuts and the racial, economic, and education segregation of this city has led to the development of radically unequal education environments within the same public school system, she said.
“You have a school like Hooker, which is like paradise,” she said, “and then you have Troup, which is like somewhere in Beirut.”
Every school must be equally desirable and effective regardless of neighborhood, she said. Teachers need better training in how to educate special needs students. “And we need to make the cutlures in our schools friendly and accessible” to parents, and to better encourage their involvement in their children’s education.
Local clinical therapist Kym Mckoy (pictured, in the red hat) said she has two children currently enrolled at Hillhouse High School — and that she is quite relieved that they are just a few years from graduating and putting the public school system behind them.
One of her biggest concerns with the school system today is the racial and cultural disconnect she sees between many of the white teachers and many of the African American and Latino students.
“A lot of the teachers who are not African American need to become culturally sensitive to the kids they’re working with,” she said.
She said a teacher recently told one of her sons that he “doesn’t deserve to be in high school.” She was irate when she found out a school teacher had spoken to her son that way, she said. “There needs to be more sensitivity training,” as well as more teachers who look like and can identify with the majority-minority public school student population.
Bill MacMullen (pictured at left), an architect and city Engineering Department staffer, said that, as someone who has spent his career in the building design and construction trade, he would love to see “cooperative education” partnerships and practical internships pushed for students who want to work, and not go to college, after graduating from high school.
In particular, he said, the city should pilot a partnership with adult education that would give students hands-on experience learning how to estimate, design, and construct buildings. They should be paired with contractors in a sort of school-sanctioned apprentice program that would give them the practical experience necessary to get a job in the trades after graduation.
Christine Emmons pitches ideas for a better school system.
Educational psychologist Christine Emmons (pictured, in the grey hat) agreed. She said the city should have not only a traditional technology and vocational school, but also a “school of innovation” where students would be encouraged to build robots and other out-of-the-box solutions to any social or economic problem they can think of.
“Just open the field wide,” she said. The school system should build its capacity to teach and train students who want to be plumbers, electricians, or even music producers, professions that don’t necessarily require a college education.
Retired Hillhouse history teacher and frequent Board of Education meeting attendee Robert Gibson (pictured, at left) offered one specific initiative that the city and the school board can launch relatively easily — and that would have an outsized impact bridging the divide between the classroom and students’ home lives.
“We should have a campaign for parent empowerment,” he said. “Parents need to understand that they have power, that they have influence” over how their children are being educated.
He said that those schools that have the best teachers, the best support staff, the best resources and the best quality of education tend to be the ones with the most engaged parents.
The city and school board should develop and promote a program that trains parents on how to be public education advocates, that encourages them to come to school board meetings, that shows them how staying in touch with teachers and principals can benefit their children’s education. ‘We need to keep our eyes and ears open,” he said.
Yari Ijeh and Larry Laconi (both pictured) were tapped to read five of the group’s suggestions to the larger audience as Nearing and Levey-Burden and a handful of volunteers sought to write down a handful of ideas that emerged from each group’s breakout discussion.
“Our conversations went everywhere from making sure that we have social workers, nurses, and librarians,” Ijeh said, “to making sure that there’s paper and materials and books for all of the classrooms.”
She stressed that the district needs to do more to recruit and retain teachers of color, and to offer racial justice and implicit bias training for teachers already in the system.
Monica Maldonado writes down some of the many ideas and policy priorities discussed by Saturday’s meeting attendees.
The city school system should establish more and deeper community partnerships for skilled trades education, she added.
“If we’re literally building our city,” she said, “can our students be a part of that building? Not all of our students are on the college track and would take advantage of the New Haven Promise [scholarship program]. So could the New Haven Promise offer other opportunities for them as well?”
Nearing, Levey-Burden, and Elicker ended the meeting by thanking everyone for their curiosity, for their passion, for coming out to a nearly three-hour meeting on a Saturday morning to discuss how to improve the quality of life in this city for all residents.
“You people have huge networks,” said, “so please, please, please go out into your networks and ask other people what they think the direction of the city should be. And bring that back.”
Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch the beginning of Saturday morning’s transition team public meeting.
A superb turnout like this suggests exactly what Mayor-Elect Elicker's huge victory suggested -- that people in this city hunger for new ways of doing things in city government, and will respond to a leader who demonstrates a commitment to finding ways to achieve this.
It's early; this is just a start, of course, but it is very encouraging. I hope the commitment will continue, and last, through Justin's tenure.
A suggestion for the NHI: after the next public brainstorming meeting on Dec. 8, please try to report on more than just the primary topic considered. If discussions, like yesterday's, cover "public safety, housing, arts and culture, the environment, and more," besides education, it would be fascinating to read about ideas in those other areas as well.