The two Democrats running for seats on the Board of Education came out for eliminating Hillhouse High School’s three separate academies and three separate principals, and returning to one general high school with one principal.
The two candidates — Darnell Goldson and Edward Joyner — made the statements during an episode of WNHH radio’s “Dateline New Haven.”
They said the breaking up of Hillhosue into three academies with different themes isn’t working.
The most recent Board of Education meeting featured students and others complaining about a lack of communication about changes at the school. (Read about that here.) On a separate recent episode of “Dateline New Haven,” Mayor Toni Harp said officials are looking at whether the three-academy system is working; she said the idea is to give students smaller environments in which to learn so they don’t “get lost” in a large school.
Joyner, a former Hillhouse assistant principal, argued that one person needs to be in charge of the entire school.
“We keep experiment on our children, and the children keep failing,” said Goldson, a Hillhouse graduate.
Joyner said he believes in trying out new ideas in the schools, but only those that have been backed by solid research and practice.
The Republicans have two candidates running for the board seats on Sept. 3, as well: William Wynn and James O’Connell.
The status of Hillhouse has prompted repeated debate among Independent readers, one of whom posted the following comment to a recent article: ” It makes absolutely NO SENSE to divide a school into thirds, pay three people to act as principals, split up the faculty and the student body, and create strife, division and confusion in the process of following the superintendent’s educational fad which has not proven to be beneficial to the students and staff. Kids were placed into academies they had no interest in. Hillhouse needs a traditional liberal arts curriculum to prepare them for the future. Right now the curriculum has been so unnecessarily complicated and convoluted that you would need a PhD in education to figure it out! It should not take all that.”
To hear the full episode, click on the above audio file or find the episode in iTunes or any podcast app under “WNHH Community Radio.”
You don't need a PHD to figure it out you need more teachers like we were promised by Central Office when they first informed the staff of this latest experiment. When you make academies autonomous you limit the amount of classes available to students. Many students are enrolled in classes they have already passed because there are not enough sections to enroll them in. Criminal! Some students haven classes that just say staff because they have not been able to replace the veteran teachers that left due to the dysfunction. And some students are being forced to miss a year of Foriegn language because they need to offer those sections to Seniors who have priority. Criminal! Example, an English teacher in 1 academy may have 14 students for sophomore English and another English teacher in another Academy may have 11 students for the same class. If you combine those 2 classes into 1 class you create an empty section which can now be offered as an elective and availible for 27 more students. This is a common Solution across all subjects but you can't combine those 2 classes because we have 3 separate schools. Listen, If Garth wants to have 3 separate schools that's fine but you need to hire more teachers! We told Dr.Tracy and Garth this 2 years ago and they didn't listen. That's why 1/3 of the staff exited last June. Garth has not supplied HH with the resources it needs to pull this off. Bottom line is our students need more TEACHERS so they can enroll in the classes they need to graduate and get a general education. I'm not even talking about hiring enough teachers to get a quality education filled with highly engaging electives, I'm talking about hiring enough to get the bare minimum! Let's at least start with that. I hope we can get more teachers hired at HH because honestly our kids are still AMAZING to teach and they deserve it!