Paul Bass Photos
Students protesting outside Amistad High.
Green: We were heard.
Following a mass walkout at Amistad High School, students are pushing to help rewrite discipline rules and train teachers about how to deal with black and brown teens.
Officials said they’ve heard the students and are considering those ideas as well as others to improve the climate at the charter high school on Dixwell Avenue.
Hundreds of students protested outside the school Tuesday rather than attend classes to call attention to what they say is a racially insensitive atmosphere: an unfair discipline code and a lack of black or Latino teachers for a school with a black and Latino student body. (This story details Tuesday’s events.)
Students leaders pressed that case Tuesday afternoon during a meeting at the school with Amistad’s outgoing and expected new principal, as well as co-CEO Dacia Toll and regional superintendent Jeff Sudmyer of Achievement First (AF), the charter organization that runs the school.
“I think the protest worked,” student organizer Kordell Green said Wednesday.
He said AF brass “handled it well.” Students were marked absent for staying out of school Tuesday, but did not suffer academic consequences or get barred from bus rides home as originally threatened, Green said. And at the 5 p.m. meeting, Toll and other officials listened to the students and began brainstorming solutions.
Green said proposals included having students spend the summer working on revisions to the discipline handbook. Under the current discipline “merit system,” demerits start at a minimal Level 1 for small infractions and go to Level 3 for more serious ones. A Level 2 demerit automatically gets a student detention. Three Level 1 demerits send a student to detention. Students complain they can now be suspended for playing cards during lunch, for instance. They charge that teachers arbitrarily hand out demerits, often based on favoritism.
In addition, Green said, students want to sit in on teacher training days to weigh in on how to interact better with teens of color.
Sudmyer at Tuesday’s protest.
Sudmyer Wednesday called the proposals “good ideas. We’re going to use our future meetings to really commit to the exact next steps.” He said another idea is to have “scholars [Amistad students] give us some feedback after a [prospective] teacher gives a guest lesson, giving them a voice in that process.”
A follow-up meeting is scheduled for next week.
Alders and state legislators sat in on the 5 p.m. meeting Tuesday. One of them, State Sen. Gary Winfield, called the meeting “powerful. The adults who came to support the young people allowed them to do the speaking. They listened and echoed back what the students said, allowing the students to clarify if they were correct or not.”
“I thought the students were outstanding. They were thoughtful. They were reasoned,” Sudmyer said.
“I think they were understanding and they were more aware of problems this time,” another student protest participant, Akira White, said after attending a mid-afternoon meeting with school administrators. “Our voices were heard. They are now taking action to help us and to hear what we’re trying to say.”
Principal In Waiting
Also present at Tuesday meeting was Morgan Barth, whom AF has “nominated” to become Amistad’s new principal next academic year, according to Sudmyer.
Barth’s appointment needs formal approval from the AF board.
Kordell Green (shown in the video speaking at Tuesday’s protest) said he had a positive impression of Barth: “I think he seems like a decent guy. By him being in that meeting, he gets a feel of what we want to see in a principal. I think he gets a sense of how the school should be run.”
One parent, Lakisha Franklin, contacted the Independent to voice concerns about that appointment. Franklin’s son is a junior at Amistad. He has been at AF schools his whole career, including attending its Elm City College Prep Elementary school in Wooster Square. She said she had negative experiences dealing with him at the time. “You’re going to already have another Caucasian principal who has bad experiences with the parents,” Franklin said. “It’s not an open process. They didn’t include the parents.” (While criticizing the school’s response to Tuesday’s protest, Franklin said overall her son has received a good education at AF schools, where many dedicated teachers “love the children” and offer the kind of education her parents had to send her to parochial school to receive.)
Sudmyer said AF consulted the parent leadership council before recommending Barth. It has also set up three opportunities this coming week for parents to meet him. He said Barth has a “really strong record” at AF schools; he currently serves as assistant regional superintendent. He has also served as principal of an AF middle school in Bridgeport. In between the Elm City Prep and regional superintendent gigs, he served as director of the state Department of Education’s Turnaround Division for 18 months from 2013 – 15. He taught at Elm City Prep for four years before becoming principal; he began his career in the classroom in Arkansas in the Teach for American program.
His tenure at Elm City Prep generated some controversy because he hadn’t received public school certification in Connecticut. The state passed a law in 2010 allowing charter school teachers and administrators to work without traditional Connecticut certification. A graduate of Williams College, Barth earned a master’s in school administration from National Louis University in Chicago.
Barth said Wednesday that he agrees with the students that Amistad needs to do better in recruiting teachers of color and setting high standards while also promoting “wonderful, loving relationships with students and families.”
“I’m incredibly excited by the opportunity. Amistad is a great school with amazing students and a great faculty. It’s a real privilege to join the team,” Barth said. “It’s particularly fun and inspiring to me since I’ve had the chance to teach and be the principal of a lot of the kids there. It feels like a homecoming to see the older, wiser version of kids I knew in their elementary and middle school careers.”