New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
AFT president visits New Haven’s Wilbur Cross High
NEW HAVEN — It’s not enough for public schools simply to educate students; they need to “give them choices” that will help them after they get out of school, the national president of the American Federation of Teacher said Wednesday during a visit to Wilbur Cross High School.
“Lots of kids go to college. Lots of kids don’t go to college,” AFT President Randi Weingarten said at a news conference after a visit to a class in which Cross students learn EMT skills from professionals at a facility a block from the school. “Let’s make sure families have lots of choices.”
At the class at the Center for Emergency Medical Services at Yale New Haven Hospital, Assistant Superintendent of Schools Keisha Redd-Hannans and Weingarten “were talking to all these kids, who were using mannequins to learn how to keep people alive,
how to keep babies alive,” Weingarten said.
“But the fun that you saw in that classroom, the attention to detail, the sense of possibility, that is what education is,” she said, pointing out that 94 percent of the students in that and similar programs graduate, in part because “we are connecting students to their passions.”
“They’re experimenting to see what paths they
could be on,” said New Haven Federation of Teachers President Leslie Blatteau.
“One of instructors told me that when these high school students graduate, they will graduate with a high school diploma and with an industry certification in EMT, so they have lots of choices,” Weingarten said. “They can go to any ambulance company in Connecticut because of what we are teaching in a public high school.”
The key is “administration and teachers working together to try to lift up communities and give kids choices, and that is why we are at Wilbur Cross today,” Weingarten said.
Beyond that, “we need to make school fun,” she said.
The visit was part of the AFT’s $5 million “Real Solutions for Kids and Communities” campaign.
Others joining Weingarten included AFT Connecticut President and state Sen. Jan Hochadel, DMeriden, Superintendent of Schools Madeline Negrón and Wilbur Cross principal Matt Brown.
Weingarten praised Wilbur Cross programs as effective ways of addressing nationwide problems of learning loss, literacy and loneliness — three “pillars” of the “Real Solutions for Kids and Communities” campaign.
Later, after walking to Wilbur Cross High’s main building and meeting up with Negrón, Weingarten met with students and teachers working and sharing learning in the school’s print shop and its Pathways classrooms, including one for people who want to eventually become educators.
Then they visited an extended homeroom class and the high school’s twotime national champion culinary and restaurant management programs, running into some journalism students along the way.
“When you see programs like this, you see choices ... and that’s why we wanted to be at Wilbur Cross,” Weingarten said.
In a hallway along the way, Weingarten and school and union officials ran into a half-dozen Wilbur Cross student journalists, including Isabel Brown, Ranya Torabar and Sebastian Halpern.
Halpern said he’s attracted to studying journalism because “you get to tell the truth.”
After arriving at English teacher Akimi Nelken’s class for students that may some day want to be educators, Weingarten told them, “The reason we’re here is because we love your classroom — and the reason these cameras are here is because we want to show you off.”
Weingarten also stopped by an extended homeroom class, where student Genesis Correa, sitting at a table with fellow students Haylie McCall and Beatrice Alvarado, told her that the extended homeroom makes her feel “particularly connected” with the other members of the class.
“You just walk in, you feel like home,” Genesis said.
After Weingarten and Negrón led more than a dozen people through the culinary kitchen, student Travis Warren, who was just getting started on a batch of oatmeal cookies with classmates Zulaikha Khan and Keyli Mijangos said it was “a little different” from a normal day because “everyone was watching.
“We don’t usually have anyone watching,” he said.