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In describing his ideas for boosting education in New Haven, mayoral candidate Marcus Paca talked about how two teachers and an adult neighbor once reached a Hillhouse High School student who was struggling with his parents’ divorce and the death of his friends.
That student was Paca himself. Before coming to Hillhouse in the early 1990s, he said, he had thrived as a student at Edgewood and Sheridan schools. Then his parents’ split threw him. So did the impact of gun violence raging in New Haven at the time. “At least two dozen [students] I knew personally were killed,” he recalled. “It put me on edge.”
His grades dropped. His attitude sagged.
A teacher, Robert Gibson, noticed. He asked Paca to remain after class. He asked him what was wrong. They talked through what was happening in his life.
Meanwhile, at home in the Newhallville neighborhood, a neighbor named Jo Ann Pearson noticed Paca walking his dog and invited him in for cookies and ice cream. Pearson, an alderwoman at the time, connected him to the campaign of Mayor John C. Daniels, Paca recalled. She also helped him land a spot on the Young Adult Board of Police Commissioners, a group formed at the dawn of community policing to involve teens. Paca met the police chief and participated in discussions about how to make the city safer.
He recalled “how important it was for me that adults listened to my ideas. Young people have good ideas. They can give good advice.”
Another Hillhouse teacher, Burt Saxon, noticed Paca’s budding interest in politics and put him on a debate team. Saxon stoked Paca’s interest in politics, which would lead him to major in political science and dive into political campaigns at Hampton University before returning home and earning a masters in business administration at Southern Connecticut State University.
Now, at 39 years old, Paca is seeking the Democratic nomination for mayor in New Haven. Ideas for how to improve public education form one of five main issues sections of a website he produced upon announcing his campaign three weeks ago.
In an interview about his education platform over coffee in Wooster Square Thursday, Paca said those personal experiences helped guide his conclusion that the public schools should involve students more in decision-making, prepare them better for new-economy jobs, and do a better job sharing and expanding “best practices” — that is, ideas that are already working.
“They’re Teaching Us”
Like injecting student voices into the adult decision-making process, the way the police did with the young adult board. He praised the recent addition of two student positions to the Board of Education. “A lot of times they’re teaching us more than we’re teaching them,” Paca said. He proposed forming a millennials commission to add young adults’ views into city policy.
Another idea Paca said he has seen work firsthand: Setting up advisory boards of alumni and local business and government and not-for-profit leaders at individual schools. He serves on one such board, at ESUMS (the Engineering and Science University Magnet School). He has seen how such boards can help schools raise money and connect adults with students, he said. He proposed replicating those boards at schools across town.
Paca’s platform calls for convening “best practices roundtables” for educators to discuss successful ideas, he said.
“Dual language” curricula are one such success, he argued. Three schools — John C. Daniels, Columbus, and Clinton Avenue — operate on such curricula. Students attend classes conducted completely in Spanish one week, in English the next. Paca said he would look to incorporate that approach in all K‑8 schools in the system. He would stick with Spanish as the second language, given the city’s significant Spanish-speaking population.
Kids learn languages best when they start young, he noted. He also said bilingual proficiency gives graduates better job prospects.
Speaking of job readiness, he also vowed to develop more tech-training courses in schools throughout the system, including at the middle school level. The Harp administration launched an afternoon program for “Youth Stat” students called Career Pathways TECH Collaborative. Paca argued that such courses — in carpentry, robotics, coding — should be available to all students. He said he saw firsthand in a previous job, at Bridgeport’s The Workforce, Inc., that young people had trouble landing good jobs because they lacked tech training.
Paca returned to his experience at Hillhouse to call for a focus on improving guidance counseling. “When I went to Hillhouse, I had the same guidance counselor from ninth to 12th grades,” he said. In the past year students have complained about running through a series of counselors over four years there, and overall not receiving the kind of college prep guidance their peers receive, say, in the suburbs. (Read more about that here.) Paca said students tell him they search the internet to try to find the college information they need.
“Why was it a priority back then, and it’s not a priority now?” he asked of guidance counseling.
Harp: Set Priorities
Asked for her response to Paca’s education platform, Harp said she too favors dual language schools, tech ed, advisory councils, and better guidance counseling. She argued that the city doesn’t have enough money or enough major institutions to spread those ideas to every school. “You have to pick and choose where you are going to get the best outcomes,” she argued — dual-language curricula in schools with more Spanish speakers, for instance, advisory councils at schools most in need of turnarounds. Harp said that she would focus more on basic skills that underpin tech work — math and reading — through middle school. She said she plans to release a report in the next week or two from her reading commission containing ideas for improvements in that area.
In general, Paca said, he would seek to build a more collaborative relationship on educational issues than he said Mayor Toni Harp has had with the Boards of Education and Alders. The administration has clashed with the alders over several education issues over the past year and a half. Harp served a year as president of the ed board, saying she wanted to inject a sense of urgency into the quest to raise test scores and boost reading, including launching a Saturday reading academy. Paca called that decision a mistake and said he would not seek to serve as ed board president: “The mayor has enough on his or her plate.”
The Harp administration has come under criticism for working with the Rev. Boise Kimber to create a new all-boys charter school. (Read more about that here and here.) Paca was asked his position on the proposed school. “We don’t know enough about his school proposal to give an opinion,” he responded. “But since the mayor is backing it, she should explain more on why she supports it so folks can make an informed decision.”
Harp responded that an all-boys schools would offer another option to students who need it. “Young men who are disengaged and really need to focus on education without distractions that some say having both genders creates,” she said. “It really focuses on developing for male students a sense of pride and a sense of brotherhood and community that helps those who are most disengaged stay engaged in education.”
She said an all-girls school would also probably be in the offing. New York’s Eagle Academy, which would help New Haven’s version get started, has proved the model works, she argued.