The Board of Ed postponed a vote on turning over the first city school to a for-profit entity, as the company revealed it has already secretly begun working at the Roberto Clemente Leadership Academy, before the public received notice.
School board President Carlos Torre opened a special board meeting at 6 p.m. Monday night to vote on a $456,000 contract with Renaissance School Services, LLC, a Califon, N.J.-based school management company, to run Clemente next fall.
Clemente, which has been considered a failing school for nearly a decade, has been tapped as a “turnaround” school as part of the city’s new school reform effort. Schools Superintendent Reggie Mayo first revealed in March that he was in talks with a company to manage the neighborhood school, which serves 538 students in grades pre‑K to 8 at 360 Columbus Ave. in the Hill.
School officials talked to Clemente parents and staff last week about Renaissance, but refused to hold any public discussions ahead of Monday’s meeting and barred the press from a community meeting with parents about the deal. (Read about that here).
As Torre opened the board meeting Monday, the Independent objected to the proceedings on the grounds that the meeting was in violation of state law. By the state Freedom of Information Act, special meetings must be publicly noticed in the city clerk’s office no less than 24 hours in advance. A time stamp on the legal notice announcing the meeting showed it was posted at 10:48 a.m. Monday, less than eight hours before the meeting.
(Click here to see the meeting notice.)
Board members took a “time out” to verify that the meeting indeed was violating state law. Schools Superintendent Reggie Mayo said the district sent notice to the clerk’s office Friday, but the notice was not time-stamped until Monday, which means it was not legally noticed in time. Torre announced that the meeting would be adjourned: “We have no choice.” The board decided to vote on the matter at the board’s next regularly scheduled meeting, next Monday at 5:30 p.m. on the second floor of 54 Meadow St.
Melissa Bailey Photo
Meanwhile, Renaissance President Richard O’Neill (at right in photo, with Torre) revealed his company has already been doing work in the district without a contract.
“I’ve been in the district for the entire last week,” looking at data and meeting with staff and parents, he said Monday.
Schools Chief Operating Officer Will Clark said the company has already begun an “internal recruiting” process within the school, interviewing teachers about whether they’d like to stay on at the school. Because Clemente was tapped as a “turnaround,” all the 45 teachers must reapply for their jobs if they want to remain there. Clark said Renaissance has also met with LEAP, a youth development organization that runs after-school programming in the school.
O’Neill said he has already positioned his staff for more intensive work at Clemente this week. In anticipation that a contract would be approved Monday, O’Neill brought several staff members up from New Jersey this week. He said he planned to have them start working in the school Tuesday, on what was supposed to be the first day of the contract.
“Although they’ve had boots on the ground,” Clark said Monday, the contract “would get them literally on the ground tomorrow.”
Though Monday’s approval fell through, O’Neill said he plans to proceed with the work that he had planned for the week. If the contract isn’t approved next Monday, he said, “it’s my risk.”
O’Neill, who’s 57, founded Renaissance in 2006 after working for nine years for Edison Schools Inc., a school management company that recently morphed into EdisonLearning Inc.. Since 2000, O’Neill and his business partner, Dominique Taylor, have directly managed 25 turnaround schools, including charters and traditional schools in Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, South Carolina and Massachusetts, O’Neill said.
Fee: $800 Per Student
The contract with Renaissance was the only new item on Monday’s agenda. It was discussed for about 10 minutes at the board’s Administration and Finance Committee, which took place right before the full board meeting.
The proposed contract calls for the district to pay Renaissance up to $123,000 for an initial term beginning Tuesday and running through June 30, the end of the budget year. That includes a “management fee” of $58,000, and a “retainer” for $65,000.
The $65,000 would be paid back to the district, according to Clark.
The contract has an extension option for five one-year periods, for no more than $456,000 per year. The first year would run from July 1, 2011, to June 30, 2012. The annual contract is based on a per-student fee.
The fee in the first year would be $800 per student, said O’Neill. He said for that price, the company offers its expertise on fixing failing schools.
If Renaissance continues to take over Clemente, the school would have three top officials, whose salaries are not included in the contract. The three positions — principal, “achievement specialist,” and “operations specialist” — carry salaries totaling about $350,000, said O’Neill.
The achievement specialist would be akin to an assistant principal. The “operations specialist” would take on the task of running the school, including talking to parents and dealing with buses — tasks currently handled by the principal and by some central office staff.
O’Neill said he plans to launch a national search this week for these three positions, in addition to considering any internal candidates.
The contract comes as the city faces a budget crisis, with up to 190 layoffs looming at the school board.
Clark (pictured) said the district figured out a way to bring in Renaissance with no financial risk. The district is applying for a federal School Improvement Grant (SIG), which would fund the contract for three years. The grants aim to pay for the restructuring of the nation’s failing schools. The district won SIGs for four schools last year, including the city’s two biggest high schools. The district should know by the end of June if it has won the grant for Clemente, Clark said. He said there’s an escape clause in the Renaissance contract that allows the district to back out if the grant doesn’t come through.
If Renaissance takes over Clemente, it would be a lot like Domus Academy, Clark said: “it’s still our school, our people, our kids,” but an outside entity is managing it.
Domus Academy, which serves 48 troubled middle-school kids, launched this fall. It was the first city school to be taken over by an outside entity, a not-for-profit social services agency. Clemente, which is over 10 times the size of that school, would be a major undertaking.
Track Record
Renaissance was among “scores” of outside groups that the district talked to about managing its schools, according to a memo from Clark and school reform czar Garth Harries. Eleven providers were screened by phone and in paper; five came in for interviews with Harries, and three reached a final stage of screening.
In March, Harries and other top New Haven school officials headed up to Lowell, Mass., to see Renaissance’s work in action. O’Neill said he wasn’t able to escort the visitors around the Lowell Community Charter Public School, which his company took over in March 2010. Harries and co. were given full access to the school, including to a meeting with parents with no administrators present.
The Lowell school is one of two that Renaissance has directly managed. Renaissance was called in to take over the Eastside Charter School in December 2008, when it was the worst-performing elementary school in Delaware.
O’Neill (pictured) said he knew Harries from a past research project when Harries was working in New York City for schools chancellor Joel Klein. He bumped into Harries again last October, when the two were seated next to each other at an education conference in Arizona. O’Neill asked Harries if he was planning any turnaround work in New Haven; it turned out he was.
O’Neill comes from a company with a checkered past.
Caroline Grannan, a San Francisco public school parent, ran a research project on Edison Schools 10 years ago, “when Edison was being touted as the savior of education.”
“Short version: Edison failed,” she wrote in an email. “There were lies, scams, frauds galore.” She published a compendium of news accounts of Edison mishaps here.
Edison’s track record is “mixed at best,” said Thomas Toch, a former reporter for the U.S. News & World Report and Education Week, in an interview Monday. Toch, a guest scholar at Brookings Institution, has written extensively about school turnarounds and Edison.
“Some of the Edison Schools were very effective; some of them were less so,” Toch said. In the end, the company wasn’t able to make money. It dissolved and morphed into EdisonLearning, a consulting and online platform that doesn’t directly manage schools.
However, Toch said he “wouldn’t equate Rich’s performance” with Edison’s. “Rich is a very thoughtful and successful school turnaround guy. He’s been in the school improvement business for a long time. … He’s put together some very effective teams around the country.”
O’Neill said while he was at Edison, he and his business partner directly managed 25 failing schools.
In one group, where Edison picked the principal and teachers, results were very promising, he reported: Of eight to nine schools, nearly all reached Adequate Yearly Progress, a federal benchmark for standardized tests, within two years of the turnaround.
In a second category, where Edison picked the principal but not the teachers, half of the eight schools made AYP, he said.
In a third group of about eight schools, where Edison did not pick any school staff, the turnaround “made no impact” on AYP, according to O’Neill.
“Where we have more control, there’s a greater opportunity for success,” he said.
Clemente would fall in the first category — Renaissance would pick the three top administrative staff as well as all the teachers.
Superintendent Mayo (center) greets O’Neill. At left: Clark.
The school has been on the federal watch list for failing schools for nine years — the longest in the district, according to Superintendent Mayo. That means it has not reached AYP in that time period.
“Clemente did not suffer chronic underperformance because it failed in one thing, and it didn’t get there overnight — it will not reverse the trend without a jump start,” wrote O’Neill in prepared remarks he was set to deliver Monday.
O’Neill said he and his partner have developed a set of tools to help struggling schools deal with behavior and culture, academics and operations. Which tools it uses will depend on the school’s needs, he said.
The contract lays out expectations for the school’s performance, measured by student growth and meeting AYP.
More details will be discussed when the contract comes up for a vote next Monday.
Transparency
After Monday night’s meeting, school district Chris Hoffman was asked why the board needed to schedule a special meeting to address the contract instead of waiting until next week. He said the district has been trying to pull together the contract for some time, and is eager for the work to begin.
Earlier that day, he refused to specify the purpose of Monday’s meeting, beyond what was posted in the city clerk’s office. That legal notice stated that the board would meet “to approve an Agreement by and between the New Haven Board of Education and Renaissance School Services,” with no further details about which school would be affected.
Monday’s illegal meeting was the latest in a series of incidents that raised questions about the transparency of the school reform drive. This year, COO Clark refused to share a public budget document with the press while it was being publicly discussed by school board members, despite promising state public information officials that he would begin following the law; and a student political action club was disbanded after students marched on City Hall to protest budget cutbacks. (The school system alleges that a faculty adviser — who is not allowed to talk to the press — suddenly had no time to advise the club, which is why it had to close up.)
At the outset of his citywide school reform initiative, Mayor John DeStefano pledged the process would be transparent.
DeStefano (pictured) Monday night was asked about the school board’s process of noticing the meeting: The district had planned to notice it on Friday through a notice posted in the city clerk’s office and a link on a back page of the website. In an interview, he also offered a definition of what he means by “transparency.” (Click on the play arrow at the top of the story to watch his remarks.)
Is that enough for the public to learn about the meeting? Should the public be apprised of a major decision like this — turning its first school over to a for-profit company — before the school board votes?
On Monday, he said he thinks the district is providing a “fair process.”
He said the overlying structure of the reform movement — grading schools into three tiers, the fact that failing schools would be reconstituted, and the process by which that would be done — has been well-publicized. He said evaluations of teachers and principals and school surveys allow for a high level of public scrutiny. As for the specific decision around Clemente, DeStefano said the affected parties have been informed.
“Everyone knew this was coming” at Clemente, DeStefano said, “everyone who’s a party at interest to this.”
“We’ve contracted out schools before,” he said. “I think what people really look to do is … how do they really do with the school that they’re assigned to manage.”
Click on the play arrow to watch spokesman Hoffman’s version of events as of last Thursday night. (Background here.)