Melissa Bailey Photo
A mother on Pope Street could see Nathan Hale School from her window, but she couldn’t get her kid in.
That’s one problem the city hopes to solve as it launches an effort to reexamine the boundaries that determine who gets to go to the city’s 22 neighborhood schools.
Ed Linehan (pictured), former director of magnet schools for the Board of Ed and now a consultant, gave the lay of the land at Monday’s regular meeting of the Board of Education. He said a lot has changed since 1995, when the city launched a $1.5 billion initiative to rebuild or revamp every city school. Along the way, the city replaced neighborhood elementary schools with a system of K‑8 schools, many of which are magnet schools drawing kids from across the city and from the suburbs.
The school district now has 22 “neighborhood schools” — ones that give students who live nearby first dibs on open seats. The schools, including Nathan Hale in the East Shore and Worthington Hooker in East Rock, have specified boundaries outlining a “catchment area” where residents get neighborhood preference.
Those boundaries have been set piece-by-piece, without a master plan for how the system works as a whole, said Schools Superintendent Reggie Mayo.
“We haven’t looked at the district lines in 25 years,” he said.
New Choices
The school rebuilding project is now nearing an end, with Hill Central Music Academy and East Rock Global Magnet School in progress and one final school, the Engineering & Science University Magnet School, set to be built across the West Haven border.
Mayor John DeStefano suggested now is a good time to take a look at the school boundaries across the city. The school board hired Linehan on a $10,000 contract to examine the issue.
His work will form a starting point for a committee that will consider redrawing the lines, Mayo said. The committee, which has yet to be established, will consist of school board members, teachers, parents, administrators and aldermen, Mayo said.
Linehan kicked off the discussion with a presentation before the board Monday. He outlined how the district has changed over the past two decades.
In 1995, he said, New Haven had 22 elementary schools, six middle schools and three that spanned grades K to 8. Today, there are no more elementary schools left — just Strong School, which serves as an overflow for grades K to 2. There is one middle school, Betsy Ross Arts Magnet. And there are 27 K‑8 schools.
In that same time period, the city created three totally new schools: Celentano Museum Academy, MicroSociety Magnet and John Martinez. It closed two others — Timothy Dwight and Quinnipiac — and downsized Strong School from a full elementary school.
The city saw “enormous growth in magnet schools” since 1995, Linehan noted, with 13 magnet schools opening. Three new charter schools opened. And ACES (Area Cooperative Educational Services) started admitting city kids to the Wintergreen Interdistrict Magnet School as well as to seats in suburban schools. The result is a robust system of choice, said Linehan, who oversaw much of the magnet growth before retiring in 2007.
Overall, Linehan counted 18 new choices for city kids that didn’t exist in 1995.
As of 2010, there were 11,449 city kids attending K‑8 schools in the public school district. Those kids have 22 neighborhood schools to choose from, including 12 magnets where neighborhood kids get admissions preference. Most chose to attend schools outside of their neighborhoods: Only 27 percent attended neighborhood schools.
“Overflow”
As the city rapidly developed a new system of choice, the district’s admissions process didn’t quite keep up, Linehan indicated. Parents who want to know which neighborhood school they can send their kid to can look up their street on the district’s website. The site still reflects the old system, where elementary schools fed into middle schools, Linehan pointed out. In areas where K‑8 schools overlap, parents are given one answer for which “elementary school” and which “middle school” their kid fits into.
For example, according to the street listings on the city website, a kid on Ann Street would be sent to John C. Daniels school for elementary school, and to Roberto Clemente Leadership Academy for middle school.
That doesn’t reflect the fact that Clemente has expanded from a middle school to a K‑8, Linehan said.
The setup has an inadvertent effect, he noted: Because kids are fed into other Hill neighborhood schools in the early grades instead of directly to Clemente, Clemente becomes an “overflow” school for students from other schools.
He said that’s something the committee can take a look at.
Most neighborhood schools — 19 out of 22 — enroll less than 50 percent of students in their own neighborhoods, an indication that they aren’t hard to get into for neighborhood kids.
The three with neighborhood enrollment over 50 percent — Hooker, Hale and Edgewood — can get more competitive, mostly for the kindergarten slots.
Parents eying Worthington Hooker, considered by some the holy grail of public schools, have been known to buy homes in the district, launch letter-writing campaigns, and even stake out the superintendent’s office — yet still fail to score a prized kindergarten spot.
At Nathan Hale, DeStefano said he knows of a family on Pope Street who had trouble snagging a kindergarten spot even though the school is right outside their window. He said that family’s story has become, for some, a symbol that the system is broken.
Linehan provided some numbers to back up the anecdote: Nathan Hale, like most K‑8 schools, has two kindergarten classes capped at 26 kids each. On Oct. 1, 2010, there were 51 kindergarten students enrolled there, all from the neighborhood. And there were 31 more students who lived in the Nathan Hale boundaries but were going to other district schools.
That shows that the school has “no capacity” to serve all the kindergartners in the designated boundary, he pointed out. He said the Nathan Hale boundaries were expanded when the city demolished the Woodward School to make way for the expansion of I‑95. He suggested the committee take a look at that boundary and whether it makes sense. One option would be to shrink the boundary to make sure that kids who live on Pope Street can get a seat.
High Schools
None of the city’s 12 high schools and transitional programs are considered “neighborhood schools,” but Linehan suggested they be part of the conversation, too. Students have to apply to get into all of them except James Hillhouse and Wilbur Cross, the city’s two comprehensive high schools. Kids are split up between the two based on where they live. Kids who are in one district can apply to get into the other school, Linehan said. He said for every two kids who ask to switch to Cross, one kid asks to switch to Hillhouse.
The result of a system with so many schools of choice is that Cross and Hillhouse become a safety net for kids who leave other schools.
That can mean those schools take a heavy burden of transient kids: For example, in the 2010-11 school year, 14.6 percent of Hillhouse students transferred into the school after Oct. 1., compared to 1 to 2 percent at most of the schools of choice. Students who transfer in late tend to have more educational challenges, said school reform czar Garth Harries.
DeStefano said as the city takes a fresh look at the school boundaries, it should also examine the admissions process for high schools.
Board member Alex Johnston said the tension between a parent’s desire to go to a neighborhood school, and wanting a system of choice, comes with the territory of the school reform drive, which seeks to create a varied “portfolio” of schools.
“People used to think all 20 elementary schools should be the same,” Johnston said. Now parents are being asked to find the right school for their kid, even if it means busing across town.
DeStefano cautioned the redistricting process would likely be a “painful” one.
“I’ve been through this, and it’s a challenge,” agreed board member Michael Nast.
“All I would ask for,” DeStefano said, “is a very transparent, deliberative, slow process of talking to folks about redrawing those lines.”