Public School Kids Get A College ​“Promise”

(Updated) High-school freshmen across the city got an offer Tuesday from the city and Yale: Keep up good grades and stay in school, and you’ll get a full ride to a state college or university.

Ellyana Simon (at right in photo), whose parents never went to college, said she’s ​“really excited” about the offer. Imani Manick-Highsmith (at left) said she’d like to use Promise to pay her way to study graphic design at an in-state college.

The two ninth-graders joined dozens of their peers, as well as teachers, and public officials, in a packed theater at their school, Cooperative Arts and Humanities Magnet High School, as the city unveiled a new ​“Promise” as part of its ambitious school reform drive.

It will pay up to 25 percent of the tuition for qualifying seniors who go on to public colleges or universities in Connecticut next year; up to 50 percent for the class after that, up to 75 percent for the following class; and up to 100 percent for the Class of 2014. Then funders will decide whether to continue the program.

Yale University has pledged up to $4 million per year to fund the new college tuition program, called New Haven Promise, according to Mayor John DeStefano, Jr. The program will be available to New Haven residents who attend public schools, with some conditions. Yale has committed to fund the program for an initial eight years as it is phased in for the four classes of current high school students; the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven will pay for the employees to administer the fund.

The program is a ​“contract that says to kids: If you work hard, you demonstrate academic achievement and display appropriate behaviors, we’ll give you the tools to go to college and therefore inject choice and opportunity in your lives,” said the mayor.

DeStefano and other officials announced the news at a 9:30 a.m. press conference Tuesday at the downtown Cooperative Arts and Humanities Magnet High School. To build suspense, the Board of Education hired a media consultant to build a web page that features a countdown to the announcement. The event will be live-streamed here.

“This is not a handout,” DeStefano told students assembled in the crowd at Co-op. ​“You will have to work hard.”

The mayor’s office billed the event as ​“the most significant announcement ever made in New Haven,” one that will answer the questions, ​“What makes a city great?” and ​“What does it take to help move an entire city forward into a new generation?”

DeStefano hinted at the answers in an interview before the event.

“For a city to be competitive, to be successful and vibrant, it will require a trained workforce,” the mayor said. The scholarship program will ​“support development of the grand list by promoting families to want to live inside the city of New Haven.”

“The most powerful way that we as a city can organize and envision our future is around the aspirations and potential of our young people. That is more powerful than a sports club, or any building that we build, or any highway that we seek to rip up, or any city office that we create, or anything else that we do,” he added.

There are at least 20 college promise programs nationwide, many based on a model pioneered in 2005 in Kalamazoo, Mich. The Kalamazoo Promise offers up to 100 percent scholarships to students who get into a state university or college and keep at least a 2.0 grade point average (GPA) there. New Haven’s model is based on Kalamazoo’s, with extra rules for behavior and high-school grades.

New Haven Promise has been in the works for a year and a half, but the names of the funders have not been previously disclosed. DeStefano said it will be a key component of a citywide school reform drive that aims to cut the dropout rate in half, close the achievement gap on tests, and give kids the opportunity to go to college.

Starting last year, the district started focusing on college ambition in the early grades, handing out mortar boards to kindergartners with the projected date of their college graduation.

Under the new program, current high school freshmen will get the chance to earn a free ride to a state university, if they do well in school for the next four years.

Here are the requirements:

* Residency: Students have to live in New Haven. They must graduate from a public school in New Haven, including the city’s public charter schools.

* Behavior: Students must never be expelled from high school. They must complete 40 hours of community service during high school. And they can’t miss more than 10 percent of school days during high school.

* Academics: Students must score a cumulative 3.0 GPA in high school. Each year in college, they have to maintain a 2.5 GPA.

Students who meet those criteria will get a college scholarship of up to 100 percent of tuition at state colleges and universities, for up to four years. In-state tuition is about $8,000 at the University of Connecticut (UConn) and $4,000 at the four members of the Connecticut State University System.

For students who pay for their tuition through Pell grants or other scholarships, Promise will pay up to $2,500 in remaining education costs, including tuition as well as books, fees, room and board.

Promise will also pay up to $2,500 in tuition for in-state, nonprofit colleges and universities, including Albertus Magnus, Quinnipiac, Yale and Wesleyan. There are 16 eligible institutions in that category.

Students seeking two-year scholarships have three years after graduating high school to cash in; students seeking four-year scholarships have five years.

Like the mayor’s immigrant-friendly municipal ID card, the Promise program will be open to all New Haven residents regardless of immigration status, DeStefano said. Right now, students have to be legal immigrants or citizens in order to get in-state tuition; illegal immigrants have to pay out-of-state tuition, which is about $10,000 at the state universities and $24,500 at UConn.

State legislators, including New Haven Sen. Martin Looney, have been pushing for a statewide version of the DREAM Act that would allow Connecticut residents who are undocumented immigrants to get in-state tuition. DeStefano said he will urge the state legislature to pass such a bill; he also said he’s working with various in-state colleges to work out an arrangement concerning the issue. Until such a change is made, he said, Promise will pay ​“full tuition” for each eligible student, even if that student is an immigrant who must pay out-of-state tuition.

“This is a community-wide initiative, intentionally so,” DeStefano said. ​“It is meant for everybody.”

The program is meant to encourage families to move into New Haven. To keep people from gaming the system by sending their kids to New Haven schools for only their senior year, the city has scaled benefits based on how long the student has attended public schools in the city. The scale mimics the one used in Kalamazoo.

Students who enter the system in pre‑K or K, and stay in a district public school or New Haven charter school until 12th grade, will qualify for 100 percent benefit. Students who join the system in grades 1 to 3 will get 95 percent. Students who join in each subsequent grade will get their benefit reduced by 5 percent per grade, until freshman year of high school. Students who join the district in ninth grade qualify for 65 percent of the benefit; those joining sophomore, junior or senior year qualify for none.

“We don’t want people moving into the city in their kids’ junior year,” DeStefano explained.

If Promise had been offered to the Class of 2009, about 211 city students would have qualified for some Promise money, according to the mayor.

The scholarships will be paid for by Yale, which has agreed to pay up to $4 million per year for the first four classes of students in the program. That’s seven years of college, for a total of up to $28 million. DeStefano said the total won’t be near that figure, because the program will be phased in as follows:

The program will start with current seniors, the Class of 2011, who will qualify for 25 percent of their benefit. Juniors, the Class of 2012, qualify for 50 percent. Sophomores, the Class of 2013, qualify for 75 percent. Four years from now, the current freshmen will be the first to enjoy the full 100 percent of their eligible benefit — which, depending on how long they’ve been with the district, could be a full ride to college.

To promote the new program, the school board on Monday approved a contract of up to $20,000 with media consultant Andre Yap, and his business Ripple 100 on Chapel Street, to maintain a New Haven School Change/Promise Website from Oct. 26, 2010 to June 30, 2011. The money will come from the school district operating budget.

Beyond that amount, DeStefano didn’t specify how much city money will go into the Promise program.

“Our dollars will be the last dollars in,” in terms of paying student tuition, he said. He said he plans to do further fundraising as the program grows.

Governance

Emily Byrne, the mayor’s deputy chief of staff, will leave the mayor’s office to become the acting executive director of the fund, DeStefano said.

The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven will pay for her salary and for any other staff to administer the fund, he said. The fund will operate as a directed fund run by the foundation, managed by a five-member board of governance. The board will consist of the mayor of New Haven, someone chosen by Yale, someone chosen by the foundation, and two other people chosen by the first three.

The foundation has an eight-year contract to administer the fund for the four current high school classes. The cost will be $500,000 per year, DeStefano said. With each new freshman class, Yale and the foundation will have to sign a contract to fund that specific class through college.

The New Haven Promise will be run out of an office on the campus of the Southern Connecticut State University. The board of governors will be tasked with reviewing the program’s performance. It will also create a new ​“data platform” to track how well public school graduates perform in college.

In New Haven, only 50 percent of New Haven Public School graduates are enrolled in their second year of college within two years of finishing high school. The district aims to boost that number to 75 percent by 2015.

The program has three goals, DeStefano said: ​“building an aspiration for college-going” among students; building a community team to support that effort; and growing economic development in New Haven. The second part — building a community of adults to get involved in the program — has yet to be developed, DeStefano said.

Getting kids focused on college from kindergarten is something that charter schools have been aggressively promoting. The New Haven Public Schools followed suit last year, introducing mortar boards for kindergartners. 

DeStefano said without the other components of the city’s school reform drive — such as a new teacher evaluation system, school surveys, a landmark teacher contract and ​“portfolio management” of schools — there wouldn’t be the supports in place to get students ready for college.

Kalamazoo Revisited

Will the effort ​“move an entire city forward into a new generation?”

Promise programs in Pittsburgh, El Dorado and Kalamazoo have boosted public school enrollment, test scores, and even home values, according to an information packet assembled by the city. The document touted a ​“multitude of benefits.”

Researchers at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Michigan have spent a considerable amount of time studying the Kalamazoo Promise. A team of them in June presented what they called ​“strong evidence” that after the Promise was introduced in 2005, students did better in school and enrollment improved significantly. Click here to read more.

Another researcher at the institute, Michelle Miller-Adams, took an in-depth look at the much-emulated program in a 2009 book called ​“The Power of a Promise: Education and Economic Renewal in Kalamazoo.”

She warns that ​“changes in school enrollment, graduation rates, and housing prices have all been cited by those planning their own Promise-type programs. Often, however, these data have been taken out of context and their meaning is not always clear.”

In her book, she describes a town auditorium ​“humming with excitement” on Nov. 15, 2005, when ​“Hundreds of students, parents, teachers, and administrators had come to celebrate the news that a group of anonymous donors had pledged to provide full college scholarships to every graduate of the Kalamazoo Public Schools (KPS) for decades to come.”

“If the short-term benefits of the program are oversold,” she warned, ​“popular enthusiasm and support within Kalamazoo could wane when they fail to materialize.” She cautioned that other towns seeking to emulate the program to make sure that the ​“broader public understands the long-term strategy,” and instead of being ​“eager for quick results.”

Rally Draws Top Guns

At Tuesday morning’s announcement, students got bright blue Promise T‑shirts and pennants to wave as they entered the theater for the rally-style event, which featured a student stepping show and a dance performance by mayoral spokeswoman Jessica Mayorga. The stage filled with politicians and officials from local education institutions.

Students at every school in the city watched the announcement via live-stream on a new Web site set up for the Promise fund, OurNewHaven.org.

Will Ginsberg, CEO of the Community Foundation For Greater New Haven, said the foundation has long believed that ​“education is the base” on which long term social growth will be built. ​“This is a moment of great promise for our city,” he said.

“This is a great day for New Haven, which means it is a great day for Yale,” said Yale President Rick Levin. The strength of Yale is ​“inextricably linked” to the strength of New Haven, he explained.

He noted that each year of college-going increases a person’s earning potential by $10,000. While unemployment sits at 9.6 percent nationwide, it’s only 5 percent for college graduates, he said. He promised that if students go to college, they can land jobs at Yale, Yale-New Haven Hospital, or at nearby employers like Covidien and HigherOne. ​“A great life can be yours in this great community,” he said.

Gov.-elect Dan Malloy praised Promise as the ​“capstone” of an urban education system. He applauded New Haven for seeking to ​“guarantee results” for kids, rather than just offer them an opportunity.

DeStefano said New Haven Promise will be better than those pioneered in other communities: Unlike in Kalamazoo and Pittsburgh, he said, New Haven’s program will take place in the context of an aggressive school reform drive.