Aliyya Swaby Photo
Larry Conaway is counting down until graduation. Wednesday marks 9 days until final exams and 25 until his students graduate — and at his alternative school, all 16 of his seniors need an extra hand to get there.
As principal of New Light, an alternative high school in Wooster Square for students who have not succeeded in traditional school environments, Conaway spends much of his time scraping together extra resources to get his kids more academic and social support.
On paper, the district spends more money per pupil on alternative school students than those at traditional schools. But still it’s not nearly enough for a school like New Light, where most students have learning disabilities and need help dealing with major life trauma. All are overage and under-credited, entering with an average of 10 to 12 credits.
And alternative schools grapple with rolling enrollment. Students enter from traditional schools throughout the year, while per pupil funding is calculated using Oct. 1 numbers. By this time in the year, Conaway has to make that money work for almost double the number of students.
Senioritis Alert
Camarco, Coplin, Velazquez, Conaway.
New Light is one of seven district schools – and one of two alternative schools – participating in Youth Stat, a citywide initiative that connects students who need help with the right community resources, ensuring they graduate, not drop out. (Click here to read about Youth Stat at Hillhouse High School.)
Every other Thursday afternoon, Conaway gets together with his school team as well as top district officials and representatives from community agencies to discuss how to help New Light students who are at risk of dropping out or otherwise need an extra boost.
Conaway focuses on getting students through high school and onto a career path. Last Thursday his team discussed how to motivate one student who had been accepted into post-secondary school for the fall and has just one more requirement left to graduate, but seems to be losing steam.
“They already have senioritis to the hilt,” Conaway said of his students. “They have senioritis times 10.”
The team wants students to pursue careers, but not to the detriment to their academics.
“Some kids, we hand them the diploma and they’re limping out. We want them strutting out,” said special education teacher Derek Stephenson.
One student had started the Construction Workforce Initiative 2 Program, which was likely to lead into full-time employment after graduation. But the student began “prioritizing it over school work,” mentally “checked out of high school,” and was at risk of failing a couple of classes, said data specialist Ray Coplin.
Kyisha Velazquez of New Haven Family Alliance asked: Could the student take the courses online through Odysseyware?
The student works better in a classroom environment. “Paper and pen are [the student’s] friends,” said social studies teacher Paul Camarco.
Everyone agreed to keep an eye on the student “to the finish line.”
“We want students to be ready for life after school,” Coplin said. “The last day of school should look like the first day of real life.”
The Tab
Conaway and Stephenson.
The district spent about $15,387 for each of 22 New Light students this fiscal year, about $1,000 more than it spent per pupil on students at Sound School, the traditional district school with the most resources. The preliminary budget proposal allocates New Light $17,519 for each of 34 students for the next fiscal year.
But Conaway said he gets that equivalent of funding for about 38 students, as enrollment gradually increased throughout the year. Next year, he expects to have 40 or 50 students throughout the year. New Light teachers work there part-time, and spend the other part of their time at another alternative school, Polly McCabe.
Members of the Board of Ed questioned the “alarming” discrepancy recently during discussions about next fiscal year’s budget proposal. “Why is the per pupil funding so high for [alternative] schools, and are we getting sufficient value?” they asked in a series of questions published on the district website.
Victor De La Paz, the district’s chief financial officer, responded that students at alternative schools need more personal attention with smaller staff ratios. The per-pupil budget for alternative schools might never decrease to the level of traditional schools; in fact, it might increase, he told the Independent.
Principals at all alternative schools, and some neighborhood schools, argue their funding should not be calculated using Oct. 1 enrollment data, De La Paz said. The district had considered saving a monetary “reserve for transient students,” he said, but the city did not completely fund the budget so that is “off the table for now.”
De La Paz said the district is considering changing the way it calculates enrollment at alternative schools, especially since many students at those schools do not show up every day. Attendance rates are at 60 percent. “Although there are twice the number of kids, it doesn’t feel like twice the number of kids,” he said.
But many of those students, when not in the school building, are getting work and internship credit outside of school toward their high school graduation. De La Paz said the district would consider factoring that into the attendance rates or consider funding schools by a projected average enrollment, instead of Oct. 1 enrollment.
Likely, this will not be decided by the time the district makes funding decisions for the upcoming fiscal year, he said.
“Alternative” Alternatives
Right now, a “working group” is figuring out exactly how to redesign the district’s alternative schools. The district plans on allotting around $350,000 in order to facilitate certain changes such as expanding the sizes of alternative schools and creating a centralized internship program.
A group of district teachers and administrators took a field trip to a few New York City alternative schools a couple of weeks ago, in order to get ideas on how to make New Haven’s alternative schools more appealing and fulfilling educational options.
Many of the NYC schools they saw were run by strong partnerships between principals and community-based organizations, both of which are responsible for students’ academics and emotional health. Conaway said at the end of the trip that he is interested in having New Light be the “guinea pig” for piloting the partnership model in New Haven.
Youth Stat is the closest New Light has to a strong community partnership. School leaders have to be creative about how they motivate kids, some of whom lost interest in school long ago.
Velazquez argued with New Light teachers about the extent to get involved in one student’s post-graduation plans. The student had flipped through several different ideas even in the past week – corrections, retail, law enforcement.
“We can’t just get them to graduation. Our job is to connect them with something after graduation,” Velazquez said.
But others in the room said that career confusion is normal for a teenager, that the student should be guided but not pressured. Camarco said New Light staff had taken the student to visit Gateway Community College’s campus. Often, graduated New Light kids return for guidance and support; graduation is not the end of the line.
And students normally need more than just academic support. “We have kids who don’t understand that the opportunity they get at New Light, particularly after they failed, is the best opportunity they will get,” Conaway said.
Not all have “bought into it,” Stephenson said. “They think it’s just more adults playing the same game.”
“The other thing is that students get out of academic shape. They get too flexible,” Conaway said. “I bought into the flexibility.” New Light students are divided into two cohorts – morning and afternoon – to accommodate students who have other daily commitments or do not want to come to school for full days.
“Our success at New Light, sometimes it doesn’t look pretty. But it’s working,” he said. Sixteen students are on track to graduate in June – exactly twice the number that graduated in 2013.
A summer “fifth-term” called “Beyond the Bell” is pending Board of Ed approval and funding. Stephenson said it would give students “consistency” and let teachers “keep them in school as long as we can.”
Third Chances
Conaway said it’s important to think “way beyond the traditional opportunities” when pushing New Light kids toward graduation. “We deal with incarceration, runaways, Department of Children and Families placement,” he said. “We’re 100 percent Youth Stat … Every last one of our students is a second or third-chance student.”
Students stay at New Light for an average 5.25 years. Conaway said one of his students works at a factory making more than $300 weekly, but wants to stay in school and attend classes on Fridays. Conaway said the student couldn’t still be enrolled in school going to classes one day a week; Conaway looked into ways to get the student a GED through New Light. Stephenson came up with the idea to help the student get job skills and GED training at New Light, so he was working on both academic and career goals.
It’s “commendable” that the student continued to think about school, even after getting a full-time job, Stephenson said.
“Five years ago, I would’ve never said to a kid, ‘Go to work.’ I would’ve said, ‘Get your high school diploma,’” Conaway said.
Born in Georgia and raised in New Britain, Conaway has changed his views on education.
He is the first person in his family to get a high school diploma, attend college, get a bachelor’s degree, or get a master’s degree. Of the kids with whom he grew up, maybe two or three attended college.
“The whole crew would laugh at me if they knew I was a principal. They’d say, ‘I wouldn’t send kids to your school,’” he said with a laugh.
Just like his New Light students, Conaway didn’t like school as a kid. He was “involved in the juvenile justice system,” grew up in housing projects, didn’t trust law enforcement officers. He was “suspicious about the system.” He was “paranoid about racial relations … I didn’t trust authority and the authority I saw was white,” he said.
“As I got older, I relaxed my myths and started dealing with facts,” he said. Mentors pushed him toward social work and then toward education. It took him five and a half years to finish his undergraduate degree in social work at Southern Connecticut State University.
His experiences allow him to tell his students firsthand “not to be afraid of failure. Success is better after failure. I’ve failed a lot,” he said.
As he heads toward the last five years of his career, Conaway hopes to take a whole lot of kids across the finish line with him.