Melissa Bailey Photo
Lemar’s sending his kid — hoping others will too.
Two politicians are rounding up neighborhood parents to start a new chapter at the East Rock Global Magnet School when it reopens in January 2013 on the grave of a concrete bunker — and in the historic shadow of Hooker.
State Rep. Roland Lemar (pictured), who lives on East Rock’s Eld Street, said he has committed to sending his toddler to the school when 1‑year-old Sahil is old enough for pre‑K. And he’s holding a meeting later this month in his living room to try to convince other parents to do the same.
Lemar made those remarks at a press conference Wednesday at the school at 133 Nash St., which is being demolished to make way for a brand new, window-filled school.
The new school is due to open in January 2013, a few months later than expected, announced Mayor John DeStefano. The original opening date was September 2012. The building had a large amount of asbestos in it. “There was a delay during the demolition phase related to abatement,” according to schools Chief Operating Officer William Clark.
Lemar said the $45 million redesign of the dilapidated, 1973 building has generated a new discussion about not just the design of the building but what’s going on inside. While East Rockers remain fixated on getting into and staying involved with the Worthington Hooker School, “we haven’t had much community interest” from parents in the East Rock Global Magnet School, Lemar said.
He hopes the discussions around the redesign process, through which a cavernous cement structure will be reborn as a neighborhood-friendly space, will “form the basis of a community revival at this school.”
East Rock Alderman Matt Smith, who graduated from the school in 1988, said it has “languished” in recent years. He’s joining Lemar in what he called a new campaign to “sell East Rock School” to families in the neighborhood.
Their goal is to boost neighborhood enrollment at East Rock school from 20 to 50 percent of the student body.
Mayor DeStefano called the press conference to announce the city has far exceeded its quotas for the number of hours that minority, New Haven resident and female workers have been employed on the project, which is part of his signature $1.5 billion citywide school construction program. He said he hopes the neighborhood uses the project as a way to expand the number of school choices East Rock families have.
“For a lot of these neighbors, there’s one school — Hooker,” DeStefano said. Parents have been known to move house, stake out the superintendent’s office and launch letter-writing campaigns to get into the top-performing K‑8 school, which is chock full of engaged families, many with connections to Yale.
“This project is really important as this district reshapes” itself, DeStefano said. He said he’d like to see parents focus not just on Hooker but on the nearby Celentano Museum Academy and East Rock Global Studies Magnet School.
“We have the opportunity to create a quality school of choice,” agreed Smith.
Some East Rockers, like 10-year-old Marc Gonzalez (at left in picture with his brother Mikey) of Nash Street, choose to go to the school on their block. Their mom Daisy Gonzalez is the president of the school’s struggling PTO. Many other parents apply for spots in more competitive public or private schools.
East Rock is an intradistrict magnet school that accepts students from across the city through a magnet lottery, according to schools spokesman Chris Hoffman. Families in the East Rock “catchment area” have top preference in getting into the school, but not many choose to claim it, Hoffman said.
As of the latest count, only 20 percent of kids at the 436-student school came from the East Rock neighborhood, according to Hoffman. “The district is looking at why it is that fewer parents send their kids to East Rock” than other neighborhood schools.
East Rock lags behind Hooker on student performance: When the city graded all its schools into three tiers based on test scores and school climate, East Rock scored a middle-performing Tier II while Hooker was named a top-performing Tier I.
Lemar said he chose to avoid the political process of lobbying to get his first-born child into Hooker School. Instead, he sent her to Nathan Hale in the East Shore. Thanks to a strong group of involved parents, Lemar said, “we ended up with a school that we really love.”
“We want to establish the same thing for this school,” he said of East Rock.
“There’s no need to fight over those 52 spots at Hooker,” said Lemar.
Newman Architects
The view of the new school from Blake Field.
He said East Rock’s previous design was “offensive to most of the neighborhood.” Not many East Rock parents were scrambling to get their kids inside. When families leave East Rock’s Ward 9 just to get into the Hooker School neighborhood boundary, it hurts the rest of the neighborhood, he argued.
East Rock has “languished” since he went there, Smith said. “People haven’t seen it as a quality school.”
“This school’s success is integral to the survival of the surrounding neighborhood,” Lemar argued. When a school is desirable, it encourages people to buy homes in the area, clean up their yards, and invest in staying there long-term.
Lemar acknowledged that “no one wants to be the first parent in” to a school to make an investment in its revival.
Smith said that’s why he and Lemar are working on “getting blocks of people to enroll in the school” so they can help shape its future.
Smith also announced that he is gathering parents together to try to give the district input in picking a new principal for the school, as a way to shape the school’s academic environment.
Smith announced at the press conference that Principal Michael Conte will be leaving the school in one year. He said Conte told him so directly and that Conte has discussed the departure with other people in the neighborhood.
Reached Wednesday, Conte said “I haven’t made any decisions yet” about whether to leave or stay.
Meanwhile, kids like Mark Gonzalez are looking forward to returning to a rebuilt school. Mark, who’s 10, will be attending the 5th grade this year in a swing space on Leeder Hill Drive in Hamden. He said his old school, which was reduced almost to nothing by Wednesday, “looked like a concrete jail.” He said despite what the school looked like on the outside, it didn’t feel like a jail inside.
“How the classroom is is what affects your learning,” he said. “The classroom and the teacher.”
Mark said the best thing about the new school rising across the street from his house will be what’s going on inside.
“This school is going to have the presence of happy, joyful kids — like a school should have,” he said.