Schools Promise ​“Choice” Improvements

Cindy Cadet hadn’t realized her daughter needed to register for a lottery to get into kindergarten or to get into a neighborhood school — so she petitioned the city and district for months until she got her choice.

Cadet is one of many parents who struggled to navigate the ​“school choice” process, as the district transitions to a system intended to allow students more options and less chance when enrolling in local public schools.

Around 7,773 students applied for 5,203 seats in New Haven schools for this academic year.

Schools officials presented their vision for a new system to the Board of Alders Finance Committee at its most recent meeting — showing how they worked to take more New Haven students off wait lists for magnet schools and to more evenly spread out transience across all schools.

“We can’t eliminate anxiety. We can provide the tools to navigate it,” said Superintendent Garth Harries.

They said they are working on a policy to determine how students are moved around after the lottery process ends through the start of the school year. And they deliberately decreased kindergarten class sizes in three low-performing schools — Lincoln-Bassett, Wexler-Grant and Troup.

Last year, the school lottery was changed to be called a ​“school choice” process, to reflect the fact that students had better chances of getting into a school in their neighborhoods or where they have siblings.

Cadet had wanted her daughter to attend Ross/Woodward School, the magnet school in her neighborhood, since her daughter was 3 years old. She submitted Ross/Woodward as her first choice for her daughter to attend preK3, preK4 and kindergarten. Parents can list up to four ranked choices. Each time, Cadet was on the wait list — pretty far down on the list.

“I was in the 30s each time,” she said. ​“How is it that I applied three years in a row and my daughter is in the 30s?”

In the meantime, Cadet said, her daughter enrolled in Bishop Woods School, her local neighborhood school for preK3 and preK4.

Her next roadblock: kindergarten. Her daughter had gotten used to Bishop Woods after two years there and she wanted to stay. Cadet said she didn’t realize she had to apply for her neighborhood school, especially since her daughter was already enrolled. She thought the process was only for magnet schools.

The application process for the 2015 – 16 school year was the first to integrate the kindergarten lottery process for neighborhood schools with the magnet lottery process, said Sherri Davis-Googe, who took over as director of choice and enrollment in 2014.

She said officials tried to communicate the changes through information sessions at schools in March and by reaching out to families of preK students already enrolled at schools.

The new system also has parents who want to transfer their kids between schools go through the lottery process in the winter instead of lining up in the district offices in July and hoping for an empty seat. ​“The goal was to bring equity in bringing families to neighborhood schools,” Davis-Googe said.

Knowing not all parents would get the message, Davis-Googe said she allowed parents to enroll students in neighborhood schools with no wait lists in the summer for this academic year. Cadet contacted Superintendent Harries, Davis-Googe and even the mayor to get her kid into Bishop Woods when she was waitlisted at Ross Woodward.

Finally she got a letter June 29th that told her she had a seat reserved at the neighborhood school.

Cadet said she was disappointed with the overall process. Her daughter received none of her magnet school choices and was waitlisted for Ross Woodward, East Rock School, Worthington Hooker and Conte-West Hills schools.

“If you’re going to give four options, one of the four options should be where your kid is going,” she said. Instead, her daughter was placed in Quinnipiac School, a K‑4 magnet school. Cadet thought that school ​“looked run down” and she didn’t want to have to go through the lottery process again for fifth grade.

“I don’t think it counts as school choice,” she said.

Chance Or Choice

Davis-Googe (pictured at last Wednesday’s alders hearing) argued that the process is not about getting each kid into her or his first choice, but about making sure as many kids as possible have access to schools across the city.

“With choice comes challenges,” she said. ​“Choice is not about being able to choose. It’s about having the ability to look at other schools” outside of one’s neighborhood that better fits a child’s needs.”

Parents have been clamoring for statistics around the lottery process for years, saying they were going into the lottery without knowing their chances of being accepted at any given school. At the request of a parent advocate group in 2013, the district first released full data on the number of students who applied and were accepted to each school, the number of students who had neighborhood or sibling preference for each school, and the number of students accepted to each school that labeled it their first, second, third and fourth choice.

But last winter, parents who attended the school choice fair expressed their concern that their children would not be able to attend any of their preferred schools. Principals of schools that typically have lower applicant numbers worked hard to convince parents their kids would succeed there.

This fall, parent and Ross-Woodward magnet resource teacher Ashley Stockton has repeatedly asked for a long list of data points at Board of Education meetings. She cited this CT Mirror article arguing students had low chances of getting their first choices in Hartford’s magnet lottery, saying she wanted a chance to calculate those numbers for New Haven.

Davis-Googe, who used to be the assistant director of regional school choice in Hartford, said she didn’t want to play into the politics of the numbers.

She gave Stockton two sets of data—the number and percent of students placed in each school separated by how they ranked the school, as well as the number of students in each grade who applied per school per ranking.

Davis-Googe said she could not calculate exact chances of getting into each school, because the odds vary each year, depending on the number of open seats at each school and how many applicants have siblings at the school each year, among other factors. Students applying for the starting grade in a school have a better chance of acceptance than those applying for an upper grade, she said.

She said she wants parents to have information to guide their decisions, but doesn’t want to lead them away from considering a wide range of schools.

“I hear, ​‘I’ve been applying to this school for x number of years.’ Well, it’s not working. What are the other choices so we can help you? That’s what happens when you put all your eggs in one basket,” Davis-Googe said.

Instead, she included a data chart in the school choice pamphlet detailing the number of available seats per school in last year’s process as well as the number of applicants per grade level who had neighborhood preference, sibling preference or no specific preference.

The chart shows that Cadet, who had neighborhood preference for Ross-Woodward, was competing with 41 parents with similar levels of preference for 25 available kindergarten seats for this academic year. She was also competing with 51 parents for 37 available seats at Bishop Woods.

By looking at information for last year’s lottery, Davis-Googe said, parents can make informed choices on which schools to rank in what order.

Paring Down Wait Lists

Alders at Wednesday’s committee meeting asked Davis-Googe, Superintendent Harries and district Chief Financial Office Victor De La Paz for an update on how they managed the waitlists for magnet schools this year, after they admitted to managing it poorly in previous years.

The state funds local magnet schools based on a count of how many New Haven and suburban students they enroll by Oct. 1 each year. Last year, 193 seats in magnet schools were unfilled after Oct. 1, meaning the district lost funding and that many families did not get a chance to send their kids to preferred schools.

This year, that number dropped to 126 as magnet school enrollment increased, De La Paz said. (Click here to read all about that.)

And officials decided to continue enrolling New Haven students until early November — even though that meant not getting state funding for those students placed, he said to alders Wednesday.

“We emphasized New Haven student enrollment,” Harries said.

Davis-Googe said officials worked hard to ​“backfill” seats at magnet schools with students on the wait list, when accepted students didn’t show up in the fall. But that was done on a case-by-case basis, she said. ​“If a fourth grader comes in and there’s a seat here in an interdistrict magnet way across town, we will make the decision for the family the best way we could,” she said.

She outlined the overall process for the alders. District officials backfilled seats from May through June, as students left the district, and then filled those seats from the wait list in July. In August and September, they tracked down students who were likely not going to show up at school that fall and filled their seats, ​“aligning the process to the Oct. 1 reporting so we could be at capacity,” Davis-Googe said.

In mid-November, could you have filled those 126 empty spots with New Haven students? asked Fair Haven Alder Ernie Santiago (pictured left).

“We did that more than we have before and as much as we felt we could,” Harries said.

“Some parents wanted their kids at those kinds of schools. It seems like if you don’t get the money, you don’t fill the seats,” Santiago said.

De La Paz said that wasn’t true this year. They added 26 students to magnet schools after Oct. 1, knowing the state would not fund those seats, he said.

Dixwell Alder Jeanette Morrison praised officials for their work this year. She was one of the most vocal critics of the way they handled the process at a similar meeting last year.

“There’s no rule saying you can’t take the 126 and make them New Haven students,” she asked them to clarify Wednesday. ​“But if you did that, one of the issues would be you won’t get the money for those students to pay for teachers” and other resources.

Davis-Googe explained that interdistrict magnet schools also need to follow strict standards holding them to specific ratios of suburban and local students to get grant money.

Part of the problem with filling all 126 empty seats with New Haven students is that it decreases the likelihood of filling them with suburban students in future years, since students tend to stay at their schools once placed, Harries said. Suburban students are funded at higher rates than local students by the state — close to $7,000 versus $3,000 per student.

“Financially, you could say we left $1 million on the table” by prioritizing taking New Haven students, De La Paz said.

East Rock Alder Jessica Holmes asked which schools had vacancies and why, based on this PDF of magnet enrollment. ​“Who gets to choose whether or not they want to take people” and increase or decrease their enrollment? she asked.

Harries said gaps in students from year to year were relatively small in most schools. He said they are looking into increasing enrollments at some schools that are more popular to ​“tighten the process between enrollment and HR.”

Both the district and the individual schools are responsible for recruiting students each year, Davis-Googe said.

Holmes asked whether the district was changing its policy on which schools were taking students after Oct. 1. Harries said they are dispersing students who enter the system midyear among more schools, instead of just a few.

Morrison wanted to know whether that would help Wexler-Grant, in her neighborhood. ​“You treat my school like a drop-in school for whatever person that decides to come to New Haven,” she said. ​“Has that mindset changed?”

“The orientation of that issue is changing,” Harries said. Though a disproportionate number of students mid-year are still going to Wexler-Grant, ​“we’ve been asking magnet schools to accept more students after Oct. 1

Part of the school choice and placement process this year included reducing kindergarten class sizes to 22 and 23 at Wexler-Grant, Lincoln-Bassett and Troup schools. Harries said they aimed for 20 students per class and would ideally just have 18 per class.

Is that working? Holmes asked.

“It’s early days,” Harries said. He said they would be tracking markers such as test scores, attendance and academics to see if it helps students long term.

The school choice process starts with a school fair at Floyd Little Athletic Center Feb. 3 from 6 – 8 p.m.