New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
New Haven schools crying out for some real leadership
Americans, including New Haveners, are crying out for leadership. The failures are well documented: a months-long failure of planning and continued lack of response to the virus pandemic, including forced early school openings; lack of response to clear ethical issues; the use of emergencies to hide and justify corporate giveaways; self-inflicted wounds related to historical monuments; character assassinations and phony investigations on political opponents; removals of seasoned community service experts from leadership positions; ignoring recent trends related to COVID opening strategies; and lack of advocacy for our public education funding.
No, I’m not talking about our ethically challenged President Donald Trump. Instead, I am referring to our newly elected Mayor Justin Elicker, and his Board of Education cabal. Yes, this is only one department out of several where all of the issues above have raised their ugly heads. New Haven Public Schools CFO Phillip Penn, who came to us from the Trump-loving Republican-led Connecticut towns of Plymouth, Burlington and Canton, and was at one time the leader of the Republican Town Committee, all of which have no appreciable Black or low-income residents. He, along with the mayor, Board President Yesenia Rivera and Superintendent Iline Tracey, recently announced with great fanfare that the school system ended the last fiscal year with an $865 surplus. They bragged that the surplus was a result of the “NHPS leadership and the Board of Ed to control costs and maximize grants.”
Control costs? The school system was shut down for four months. Children didn’t receive what the NHPS is supposed to provide, education. Of course they saved money, but at the expense of our children’s education as well as the many lower-income workers who help shape our students’ education. What they failed to mention during their brag fest was that during these four months of shutdown, they were not prepared for remote learning and failed miserably with providing support to teachers and families during the remote learning period. What they also failed to mention was that payouts to corporations, including a major out-of-country service provider, continued unabated at millions of dollars. They paid over $7 million to the school bus company to not provide transportation. They used this pandemic to save money and pay out millions to well to do contractors.
Board leaders’ President Rivera and Secretary Edward Joyner are both on the record for voting on resolutions related to opening schools for in-class learning. They both have serious ethical conflicts and have refused to step aside during these votes. President Rivera runs and is paid by an after-school program in one of the schools. If the school doesn’t open, her program cannot open, and she can’t make money. Joyner has two children who work for the NHPS, and his conflicts are numerous. If schools don’t open his children are protected from school-related COVID contagion. Neither of them should be on the board, much less in leadership positions and voting on these matters. And they were promoted by Mayor Elicker, who promised a greater level of ethical adherence during his campaign. Worse yet, Elicker and Tracey advocated sending children back to school without the proper safety measures in place, and failed to adequately secure equal funding from the state. Hartford, with the same number of students and less schools, received $12 million for safety funding, four times more than New Haven’s ultimate $3 million.
The one person who has challenged the board on transparency and ethics has been Darnell Goldson, and lately Dr. Tamiko Jackson McArthur and Larry Conaway. Goldson has done so since he joined the board, through several mayors and superintendents. A year ago, based on mysterious complaints from the previous superintendent, there was an investigation of Goldson which ended with his exoneration and public apology from the superintendent. This current superintendent, mayor and board leadership have launched yet another costly investigation of Goldson, hiring a Waterbury firm to investigate as the firm said his “conduct at several Board of Education meetings … and whether that conduct constitutes harassment or a violation of any local, federal or state ordinances, laws, provisions of the City’s Code of Ethics and or Board of Education Bylaws.”
It’s no wonder many of us are starting to see similarities between the New Canaan transplant Elicker and the Trump administration. It appears that using public funding to further enrich friends, bragging about providing less educational opportunities to urban children as a good thing, promoting and ignoring ethical lapses, and launching investigations of political opponents is not just a national Republican phenomenon. It is a failure of leadership that seems to have infected all levels of government. New Haven has not been immune, but hopefully in the near future we will develop a vaccine to this leadership void both in Washington and in New Haven. Our children are depending on it.