The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
AN IDEA THAT SPARKED NEW SCHOOLS By Brian Zahn
$1.5 billion and 41 projects later, the project is on going
Editor’s note: This is the 19th part in the Register’s Top 50 Project as we roll out the stories through this year.
NEW HAVEN — Early in the 20-year tenure of former Mayor John DeStefano Jr., acrimony between city and Board of Education officials was high because of education funding, and the schools were in poor shape.
“I came on and determined the adults needed to get along,” he said, reflecting back on when he took office in 1993. Per the city charter, the mayor serves as a member of the school board.
The city also had an “abandoned building problem” and a shrinking population, he said. DeStefano said it was clear that many residents were moving out
of the city when their children reached middle school age to take advantage of the school systems in neighboring communities.
The city schools were built in either the prohibition era and crumbling or the 1960s, bearing hallmarks of the Brutalist modern architecture (think concrete) movement; “Very small, tended to have problems with their physical envelopes and built without windows because we were expecting the apocalypse,” DeStefano said.
A way forward
“It seemed to a lot of us (then) that we did not have the kinds of facility environments that supported the academic achievement goals the city needed to pursue,” DeStefano said.
In a March 1961 facilities report, researchers found even at that time that the situation was precarious for city schools.
“As a community, New Haven must be careful of its resources, both human and material. It cannot afford to maintain a school plant that is not in every way capable of encouraging the best type of educational program which it is possible to provide for the children and youth of the community,” wrote Cyril G. Sargent of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and director of that study.
“It is my hope that the citizens of New Haven will study this program, will recognize the need for immediate action, and will proceed to meet this situation with both vision and courage,” he wrote.
The city learned from a 1994 study on the cost of bringing school facilities up to code after years of deferred maintenance and following the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, that it would cost an estimated $82 million.
“This was not replacing or building schools. This was just fixing what we’ve got,” DeStefano said.
At the time, the city’s tax collection rate was also below 90 percent.
The city opted to sell uncollected taxes as an asset for $17 million, a move DeStefano said he regrets now. With that $17 million, city officials looked for ways to spend those funds before DeStefano stumbled across the state’s capital project reimbursement program. The state was willing at the time to reimburse about 80 percent of eligible costs, which included some exceptions, for communities with low wealth factors.
“For every dollar we invest, we could leverage four more dollars,” DeStefano said. “For $17 million, that could leverage almost $100 million of activity.”
Suddenly, DeStefano realized an ambitious solution to the city’s various problems.
“What if we leveraged the tax lien dollars into a school construction program?” he said. “If you have good schools, that will create demand for those schools, which promotes property wealth and construction.”
Reginald Mayo, then-superintendent of schools, recalls getting the phone call.
“John called one day and said, ‘I’m coming over,’ ” he said. “Out of the clear blue sky, he says, ‘How would you like me to rebuild all of your schools, some we renovate and some we expand?’ In New Haven, we were doing one school every 25 years then.”
The construction rate at that time took its toll in the classroom.
When Mayo was a science teacher in the district, for instance, he said he was given only one lab table to work on, as the students were made to observe from their desks. As a cost-saving measure, the district was also manufacturing its own windows, which Mayo said would shake and rattle during inclement weather, roofs would leak and classes would relocate outside under the shade of a tree in June without functioning air conditioning.
“It was very difficult not having the right facilities in order for these kids to matriculate,” he said. “It’s important the people work in environments that are conducive to learning.”
Changes to standardized testing in Connecticut has made it difficult to compare differences in student performance since the beginning of the school construction program. In 2011, however, a Yale study on school construction found that $10,000 of per-student investment in school construction raised reading scores by 0.027 standard deviations in middle school and high school, which amounted to an average of 0.21 in standard deviations.
“Trends in reading scores are flat in the years leading up to construction, but turn upwards in the year of construction and continue to increase for at least the next six years. By the sixth year following the year of construction, student scores rise by 0.027 standard deviations for each $10,000 of per student construction expenditure,” wrote study authors Christopher Neilson and Seth Zimmerman, both economists with Yale degrees.
Step-by-step
At the time DeStefano was proposing the new school construction project, the community of Edgewood had been asking for the school there to move from its kindergarten through fourth grade model to including kindergarten through eighth grade, a model used at the West Hills School. Additionally, the Connecticut Supreme Court’s 1996 ruling in Sheff v. O’Neill opened the door for and popularized inter-district schools as a means of desegregation, but also increasing enrollment in urban schools.
Sue Weisselberg, a former school district employee, was hired as a consultant for the Edgewood project and later became coordinator of the entire school construction project. She said they did a survey of the Edgewood school community and received 130 responses, of which about 120 said they wanted the school to expand to include fifth through eighth grade.
“A curricular decision was made to have schools hold onto kids all the way through eighth grade so they don’t get lost in middle school,” said Will Clark, COO of New Haven Public Schools. “It maintains neighborhood integrity and you have through the magnet program different themes. You can decide to stay in your neighborhood or go across town.”
Mayo said the district also decided to go a step further, taking some of the city’s early childhood programs and turning schools into pre-k through eighth grade schools.
Soon, there was a citywide school construction committee, which agreed the project needed a project manager. After putting out a bid, the committee hired Gilbane Building Co., which remains the school construction program’s project manager to this day.
“With each completed school project, more and more credibility was gained by the program as it went on,” said Bob Lynn, a Gilbane project manager.
Although there were multiple issues, from community members opposed to changes on their property to concern from preservationists, the committee met with groups and assuaged their concerns.
“When we first started, I think people weren’t sure we were going to follow through,” Weisselberg said. “As schools started to open in different neighborhoods, people started to want to be involved. The alders supported the notion of a different type of school in their neighborhood.”
Weisselberg said the city’s community management teams began taking advantage of newly opened school facilities for meetings, effectively turning them into community centers.
Suddenly, the city had three goals for a school construction project: growing the tax base with modern and appealing buildings that improve neighborhoods, improving academic achievement by creating smaller class sizes and specialized building-level curriculum, and pursuing new models of public education to increase enrollment.
Not without ire
From its start at the Hill Career Regional Magnet High School, eventually, the program would encompass more than 40 projects at a cost of $1.5 billion.
“The good news from a macro perspective is that, based on our enrollment and the studies and geography and where the need is in various neighborhoods, all these things were needed,” Clark said. “Schools were falling down and they didn’t have the technology or the amenities you would desire from modern education, or even then-modern education. Things like libraries, gyms and cafeterias.”
But one of the most controversial school projects was the John C. Daniels School, which became an eminent domain and gentrification concern as residents were displaced from the Hill. In 2002, a U.S. District judge ruled that a lawsuit was brought too late, as the district had already begun developing the school. However, the “three sisters” building on Congress Avenue was salvaged from the project, largely thanks to community organizing. today, it’s a stable condominium.
“All this is about the sordid history of New Haven and it is typically forgotten when people talk about the gentrification of the city. Gentrification, as we all know, comes with a huge price,” said attorney John Williams in 2015, following a screening of a documentary about the community organizing against the project. “Politics, it seems to me is governed not by the voice of the people, but by the voice of the people writing the checks.”
Another community challenge for the citywide school construction committee was when Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School was initially slated to be located downtown at Orange and Audubon streets.
“We selected that site and there was an outrage. An uproar,” Weisselberg said. “We did a detailed site study that involved that community.”
Ultimately, Coop High School landed in the smallest site that the committee had vetted, but is comfortably nestled near the Yale University Art Gallery and the Shubert Theatre.
“They were very supportive. We worked with the arts community,” Weisselberg said.
In Fair Haven, the committee also made a decision to preserve the auditorium in Fair Haven School — “It’s an incredible space,” DeStefano said — and to create another school in John S. Martinez School, both which were unveiled in 2004. Four years later, a new Christopher Columbus Family Academy was unveiled.
Around that time, Mayo said DeStefano approached him holding a copy of TIME Magazine with corporate education reformer Michelle Rhee, then chancellor of Washington D.C. schools, on the cover. The local charter schools had also become darlings of the press, Mayo said DeStefano believed.
“We decided to do some school change stuff to close the achievement gap,” he said.
The district began looking at data to identify where students could use more instruction and assistance. During this time, the district’s focus on early childhood education that was largely made possible by larger schools, was seen as one of the district’s strongest advantages, Mayo said.
The reform-minded “school change” era also helped to bring about a partnership between the district and Yale University: the New Haven Promise scholarship program. Owing in part to the city’s embrace of reform initiatives, Yale University, the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, Yale-New Haven Hospital and Wells Fargo fund the multi-million dollar scholarship program that offers city students with good grades, good attendance and community service hours full in-state tuition to college.
“(Former Yale President) Rick Levin has been great and it was my job to keep in touch with (former vice president and director of the Office of New Haven and State Affairs and Campus Development) Bruce Alexander,” Mayo said. “We included a lot of people. It’s one of those good things.”
One of DeStefano’s pet projects had been placing a school on a university’s campus, which eventually reached fruition in 2017 when the Engineering and Science University Magnet School had its ribbon cutting on the University of New Haven’s campus in West Haven.
ESUMS is one example of a magnet school, of which a plurality of its schools are today.
Today, the district brings in over $30 million annually for its magnet schools program, although that number has been under constant threat in recent years as the state faces budget issues.
“New Haven basically jumped in with both feet on both issues, on reimbursement from the state and also securing other revenue streams through magnet schools,” Clark said. “The same logic that held true in ’95 to ’98 really still largely holds true in 2017 and 2018: We have to think long and hard about it.”
Clark said that means finding grants to introduce amenities and resources into new schools and also looking at enrollment needs. Without using state bonding, he said, the cost for about three schools would have been the same as what the district got for 42 school renovations, buildings and projects.
In present day, the school district once again finds itself in a position where it is thinking long and hard about its school buildings and its instructional models. In May 2018, seeking to close a multimillion-dollar deficit, the school board voted to close Creed High School, which had been renamed from Hyde Leadership Academy only two years prior. Creed was one of a small handful of schools that never received a new building or a renovation from the two decade school construction project.
The school district was also facing a six-figure sanction from the state Education Department over the magnet school’s low racial integration numbers. To meet the needs of the school desegregation magnet school mandate, the school’s racial makeup must comprise between 25 percent and 75 percent nonblack and non-Hispanic students; at Creed, that number was around 8 percent.
Current Superintendent of Schools Carol Birks, in recommending Creed for closure to the school board, said the school was not the only one out of compliance with the required “racial isolation” numbers.
Mayor Toni Harp, a former member of the New Haven delegation in the state Senate, was an enthusiastic supporter of the school construction project under DeStefano. The day of the vote to close Creed, she said as mayor that the school district had failed to meet the standards set in exchange for state funding.
“When I first went to Troup, it was before the (school construction) program started in earnest. I wasn’t paying attention and the floor sank about 10 inches,” Harp said two weeks after the vote. “When I think school construction, it was very important that the physical plant reflect our high expectations of them. I think having a theme and bringing kids in from the suburbs is a positive value.”
Two weeks prior, Harp heard Ariana Buckley, Creed’s magnet resource teacher, say that the school was recruiting suburban students, integrating the school economically, but those suburban students were also of some black or Hispanic heritage.
“I think the General Assembly needs to take another look at how they define things and the difficulties of attracting kids from certain cultures in the suburbs,” Harp said. “I want the General Assembly to consider economic standing other than race. As long as the money comes from the state, it’s sustainable, and the money will come from the state if we change the measures.”
Mayo said he is disappointed that Creed is closing, but in hindsight he views the construction project as a success and a triumph of governmental cooperation.
“I’ve never met someone who thinks big like John DeStefano,” he said.