Melissa Bailey Photo
“What do we want? Textbooks!”
“When do we want them? Now!”
Students marched that message from their high school to City Hall, as they took school reform off-script and ended up with a face-to-face meeting with the mayor.
The group assembled Tuesday afternoon to protest looming cuts to teaching and classroom resources in next year’s budget. They called for cutting administrators’ salaries instead.
The students from Wilbur Cross High School drew a battery of attention from police, media and authorities during the peaceful protest, which stretched out for five hours after school Tuesday. Their principal was not amused, and they were initially rebuffed at the mayor’s office. But they persisted and ended up getting a lesson from the “main man” they were looking for.
The protest began after the dismissal bell rang at Wilbur Cross High School. At the corner of Cold Spring and Orange streets, students were greeted by four police cruisers and two cops on motorcycles.
Sgt. Ricky Rodriguez, who’s in charge of the school-based police officers, said the cops were there for students’ safety in case the protest got big.
In the end, two dozen of the 1,200 students at Cross gathered for the march.
Before a throng of reporters and observers, organizer Isaiah Lee, a junior at the school, outlined the group’s demands. He called for cutting “excessive spending” on administrators and making sure any budget cuts hit administrators as well as those lower down the totem pole, such as nurses and teachers. He called for “equal distribution” of cuts between administrators and teachers, and between administrators and resources like textbooks.
The protest comes in the wake of 42 layoffs in the city schools. The Board of Education may make another 70 layoffs by the end of the summer, depending on attrition, the state budget and whether the district can scape together outside funding, according to Mayor John DeStefano.
Lee said before the protest, schools Superintendent Reggie Mayo offered to schedule a meeting with the group. Members of the elected student council chose to pursue a private meeting with the superintendent instead of a public protest, he said. But Lee didn’t want to call off the event.
“These are politicians,” he explained. “They know how to brush things under the rug.”
While the students earned a respectful hearing from Mayor John DeStefano, their protest — advertised in flyers throughout the school — earned the brush-off and rebuke from their principal, Peggy Moore.
Moore, the head of the administrators’ union, at first said she didn’t want to comment.
“This is a group of students who have chosen to challenge what the Board of Ed and the superintendent is doing. And I don’t want to give credence to that,” she explained.
She then added that her students have the right to free speech, but “the students should have gone through the right channels to get the right data” on how much is spent on administrative versus other costs.
She added that she and her seven assistant principals often work 12-hour days.
“We don’t go home at 3 o’clock here,” Moore said. “Until you walk in my shoes, you can’t criticize me.”
Down the street from Moore’s office, Lee began passing out stenciled signs reading “Student Power,” provided with help from the New Haven People’s Center. That was the only help the student group got in planning the event, Lee said; the protest wasn’t affiliated with any political organization.
Jorge Seda, a junior, slipped a sign over his head, tethered with old shoe laces. He said students at Cross are not getting the resources they need. For example, he said, his American Vision textbook is out of date and the pages are scrawled with gang signs and pictures of genitalia.
The graffiti is a symbol of “lack of investment” in kids, he argued.
He followed Lee in a procession down the Orange Street sidewalk toward downtown.
Lee stepped off the curb and started chanting without first glancing at the traffic signal. A photographer urged the group to wait for the light. They did.
“When students’ rights are under attack, what do we do?” Lee shouted again as the group got safely moving.
“Stand up, fight back!” came the reply.
The two dozen students were accompanied by a half-dozen adult supporters from the activist groups Unidad Latina en Acción and Teach our Children.
As they processed down the sidewalk, four cop cars crept alongside. Two motorcycle cops stopped traffic at major intersections so the students could cross safely.
They walked at a swift clip through sunny East Rock, laying out demands.
“What do we want? Textbooks! When do we want them? Now!”
“What do we want? Social workers! When do we want them? Now!”
“They say cut back. We say fight back!” Lee called out to the group.
The chants unfolded along the way. “I’m going to keep doing this ‘til I can hear you, people!” Lee warned at one point when the response fell below expectations.
Like the chants, the exact nature and timing of the protest unfolded along the way in a haphazard fashion.
When they reached City Hall around 2:45 p.m., one group of students gathered on the Green. Lee and some others headed upstairs in search of the mayor.
At the mayor’s office, the student delegation was offered a meeting with Will Clark, the $146,016-a-year chief operating officer who wields considerable power over the school district, negotiating labor contracts and handling the budget.
The students declined the offer.
Standing on a picnic table on the Green, Lee (at left in photo) explained why.
“We want to talk to the main men,” Mayor John DeStefano and Superintendent Mayo, Lee said — not the mayor’s “lackeys.”
Lee declared he would wait until the mayor got back to his office.
As the students waited outside, Clark issued a rebuttal to reporters.
He suggested students were being misled as to the amount of money spent on school resources.
For example, the Wilbur Cross section of the new school budget proposal lists the school budget for textbooks as $60,300, slated to shrink to $26,541 next year.
Clark (pictured) said that may not reflect the real amount of money spent on books at Cross. That’s because the district is still transitioning to the new way of school-by-school budgeting, so certain expenditures are still listed in a centralized part of the budget. For example, Cross got 300 computers last year through a grant; purchases like that one may not be listed in the school-based budget.
“People are looking at that and assuming the wrong thing,” Clark said.
He added that textbooks are meant to provide the basis for a class, but teachers will supplement them with the Smartboard, printed articles or online resources. Plus, they’re not replaced on an annual basis, so the textbook expenditure isn’t annualized, Clark argued.
“I don’t think they’re appreciating the breadth of the supplies.”
The district spends $11.5 million on salaries for principals and assistant principals, according to the school budget.
Across the district, there are 37 central office staff making over $100,000. In addition to principals at 45 schools and programs, there are 49 assistant principals districtwide, all of whom make six figures.
Click here to view a list of assistant principals and central office staff in that category.
With a budget of $375 million, the number of administrators is not that high, Clark argued.
For example, he said, Cross has a $12 million budget and eight administrators, Principal Moore and seven assistant principals. Four assistant principals each run a “small learning community,” which is basically like running a school, Clark said. Another handles discipline. Another coordinates English; another is in charge of science and math.
“When you look at the number of staff, I don’t think those numbers are crazy,” Clark said.
One of Cross’s seven assistant principals, Sheila Williams, is being reassigned to John Martinez School next year, he added.
The district is still facing a $14.5 million budget gap for next year.
Clark said there would be more cuts — “and those cuts will need to be across the board.”
After Clark walked back to the Board of Education, the students made a second attempt to speak with the mayor at 5 p.m. A new group of students, some from Educational Center for the Arts, showed up and held a peaceful sit-in in the City Hall atrium.
At 5:10, Mayor DeStefano walked up the stairs to his office. He met with Lee and two fellow Cross students, sophomore Sophie Dillon and junior Jordan Moye. They sat down at the end of the mayor’s long conference table.
They sat down face to face with the mayor for almost an hour.
When he emerged around 6 p.m., Lee said he has a clear next step in the quest to cut administrators’ salaries. He’d like to push for a policy that when the city is facing budgetary troubles, administrators’ salaries would be cut. He said the DeStefano told him that the city can’t just cut administrators’ salaries; the city would have to reopen the administrators’ contract. DeStefano sent Lee to Clark for a lesson in labor law.
Lee said he intends to meet with Clark on the topic.
Then Lee talked tough: He said if the mayor fails to take any stance supporting teacher resources over administrative salaries, then “he isn’t fit to be running the city.”
Lee’s two counterparts said they disagree with that last statement. They said the mayor laid out the financial challenges the city’s facing and his argument that the cuts need to come from pension and health care plans.
Sophie Dillon called the meeting “very helpful.” “It was really great that he sat down with us.”
“He actually took the time to give us respect as young adults,” added Jordan Moye.
In a debriefing with reporters, DeStefano said he reminded the students that if they have complaints with their school, they can give their input to their elected student representatives and write on the district’s new school surveys.
But he called their questions “fair.”
“I think what they’re really interested in is how to make their schools effective learning environments” in a time of financial hardship, DeStefano said.
He said he recognizes the need to spread cuts across the board, but he has a different solution for doing that: “The way for everybody to do a little is on pensions and health care.”
DeStefano closed with a note of realism. Given the financial state of the city, “there’s going to be fewer teachers and fewer administrators” next year.
“We are not done sizing down,” he said.