Melissa Bailey Photo
If their kids’ schools don’t shape up in three years, parents like Margo Bradley will be able to recommend a dramatic overhaul.
Bradley, who helps lead parent groups at two different New Haven public schools, showed up at a downtown auditorium Monday night to learn about the powers vested in her by a new state law. (She’s pictured above with her daughter Jalece, a seventh-grader at Wexler/Grant elementary school).
The law, spearheaded by New Haven state Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, Bethel state Rep. Jason Bartlett and the legislature’s Black and Puerto Rican Caucus, requires low-performing schools to create “governance councils” comprised of parents, teachers and community leaders to advise the principal on school policy. It’s one overlooked piece of broader education reforms that the caucus pushed through the legislature in May.
About 40 education activists spread out in the downtown Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School auditorium Monday to learn about the law in a forum hosted by The Connecticut Black Alliance for Educational Options.
According to the law, schools that perform poorly on standardized tests will be required to set up a School Governance Council made up of seven parents, five teachers, and two community leaders, all elected to their posts. A representative from the principal’s office will serve as a non-voting member, as will two students in each participating high school.
The new panels will be advisory only. Their goal is to allow parents, teachers, staff and students to “work together to improve student achievement in the state’s lowest-performing schools,” according to Judy Carson, the school governance program manager at the state Department of Education.
The panels won’t directly manage the school, enter into contracts, make admissions decisions, or get involved with matters governed by union contracts. They will advise the principal on “any other major policy matters affecting the school,” Carson said. At a minimum, they have to develop a written parental involvement policy for the school, and to approve a “school compact” outlining how parents and school staff can work together to help kids learn.
Perhaps most significantly, parents will have the option to suggest dramatic changes once the council has been in place for three years. If the school still has not improved in three years, the panel may vote to recommend that a school be “reconstituted” using one of six models approved by the feds or the state.
For example, the council at Wexler-Grant could recommend that it become a “turnaround” school to be overhauled, like Katherine Brennan or Domus. Any recommendation must be heard by the school board, which has to accept, reject or modify the proposal.
If the council and the school board can’t agree on the reconstitution, the state Department of Education will step in and make that decision, according to Carson (pictured with Fay Brown, a research scientist at Yale’s Child Study Center).
Only 25 schools per year may be reconstituted in this manner, Carson said.
While many schools already have parent groups as required by Title I funding from No Child Left Behind, the difference here is that the state is taking a role in the parent involvement process for the first time, noted Paul Wessell, director of CT Parent Power. The state education department is also required to report back to the legislature on how many councils have been set up, the number of schools that have been reconstituted, the level of parental involvement, and student progress.
Margo Bradley welcomed the chance to get even more involved in her kids’ schools. She happens to be PTO vice-president at one of the schools that will feel the most immediate effect of the new law, James Hillhouse High. Based on low test scores in the spring of 2009, Hillhouse was placed on a short list of 14 Connecticut schools that are required to put together a school governance council by Jan. 15, 2011. Schools on that list scored in the state’s lowest-performing 5 percent and failed to make Average Yearly Progress in math and reading at the whole school level, as defined by the No Child Left Behind Act. Three others landed on that list in New Haven: Wilbur Cross High, Hill Central Music Academy and Katherine Brennan in West Rock.
Bradley said she will likely be running in an election for one of the 14 elected spots on the school council at Hillhouse, where her daughter is a senior.
Next year, she’ll have the chance to run again at her other daughter’s school, Wexler/Grant. The Dixwell neighborhood elementary school will join a second wave of 184 schools required to have school governance councils in place by Nov. 1, 2011. Wexler/Grant is one of 23 New Haven schools on that list, which comprises schools that failed to make Average Yearly Progress in math and reading at the whole school level.
Much discussion at the hour-and-a-half meeting surrounded how these new parent-teacher groups would fit with existing ones. All schools in the district already have School Planning and Management Teams (SPMTs) or similar groups involving parents, staff, teachers, students, union reps and community people. Those are volunteer boards.
Laoise King, external affairs chief for the city schools, asked what would happen to those groups that are already functioning well. Can their leaders transfer over to a new school council?
The answer is no, Carson said: All leaders must face election to stay on the new school council. The district must also provide training for the new school council members. The state is providing no money toward training, Carson said.
That means the state will have little recourse to hold districts accountable for failing to train parents, since it can’t withhold money from the districts as a way of reprimanding them, pointed out Dwight activist Curlena MacDonald.
The setup drew concern from Susan Papa, who sits on the SPMT at both Edgewood school and Wilbur Cross. She raised concern that Cross, which is currently being overhauled into small learning communities, would be “stretched too thin” to take on the additional task of transforming its parent group into a new one by Jan. 15.
She said the SPMT is “well-functioning,” and has participated in key school decisions, including interviewing recent candidates for principal. “It would be a shame to lose” a group that works, she said, and have to “start from scratch.”