Mayor John DeStefano has tapped Che Dawson, a longtime youth worker now serving as an assistant principal at Amistad Academy Elementary School, to fill the latest vacancy on the city’s Board of Education.
Dawson (pictured) got sworn into a four-year term at the school board’s regular meeting this week at 54 Meadow St. He replaces Ferdinand Risco, Jr., whose term expired in September. Risco had been doubling as a member of the State Board of Education.
Dawson, who’s 38 and grew up in the Church Street South projects, has spent his career working with kids. He served as executive director of LEAP, a not-for-profit youth development organization, before joining the mayor’s office in 2007 as deputy chief of staff. He went on to create the city’s new youth department later that year. He has also worked for the Success Academy charter schools in Harlem. He has three kids: one too young for school and two who attend St. Thomas’ Day School, a small parochial school in East Rock.
In September, Dawson joined Achievement First, New Haven’s not-for-profit hometown charter school organization, as an assistant principal at the Amistad Academy Elementary School on Edgewood Avenue. His official title is “director of school operations.”
He said he doesn’t come to the school board with an agenda in mind. He plans to “use my experience growing up in New Haven,” and working with city kids, to guide his decisions on the board.
Rev. Boise Kimber, a critic of the plan to sell an empty Newhallville school to Achievement First, blasted Dawson’s appointment as representative of a disturbing growing influence of the charter organization on the Board of Ed.
Achievement First (AF) runs five public charter schools in New Haven. After years of bitter fights with charter proponents, Mayor DeStefano made peace with AF and even joined its board as he launched the city’s school reform drive. He brought onto the school board Alex Johnston, then-CEO of ConnCAN, an education watchdog group that has fought at the state level for funding for charter schools and changes in teacher certification. (Johnston has since left the group, which has no direct affiliation with Achievement First.)
Kimber noted that in addition to Dawson, board member Myra Jones-Taylor has an AF connection: Her husband, Matt Taylor, a former Amistad Academy principal, is AF’s point person in charge of a new residency program run jointly by the school board and the charter group. The program trains city teachers who aspire to be principals by embedding them for half a year each at charter and district schools.
Kimber said AF is too closely connected to the Board of Ed. He cited three examples of that “connection”: the future-principal training program; the shuttling of students back and forth between AF and city public schools; negotiations like the current proposed deal to see the MLK school.
Asked about that criticism Wednesday, Dawson downplayed his affiliation.
“I’ve been working with Achievement First for 5 months,” he said. “I’ve been working with New Haven kids for 20 years. If you ask people about Che Dawson, most of them” think about those 20 years, and don’t even know he now works for a charter school. Dawson started working for LEAP at age 19.
Dawson said “if there’s any conflicts, or anything that even appears as a conflict for me, I would raise it with our legal counsel and recuse myself from any of those types of decisions.”
“In terms of the mayor’s appointment,” he said, he feels he was chosen as a youth advocate, not as a charter proponent. “I don’t think that’s why I’m there. Nor do I feel that’s who I’m representing.”
“If there’s a legitimate question about my affiliation” with AF, he said, “I’m happy to address it.”
Paul Bass contributed reporting.