After enthusiastically overseeing the rebuilding of schools all over New Haven for a decade, Sue Weisselberg is returning to the Capitol.
Weisselberg, coordinator of the city’s $1.5 billion school construction program, has been named chief legal counsel for the House Democratic Caucus, the speaker of the House announced Tuesday. She is set to start work in Hartford at the end of November.
“It’s great to be able to attract a person of Sue’s experience and achievement to the House Democrats,” wrote State Rep. Chris Donovan, speaker of the House, in an email to legislators Tuesday.
She’ll return to familiar stomping ground: Weisselberg served as counsel to House Democrats from 1985 to 1986. In the early 1990s, she headed the Capitol office of the state Office of Policy and Management.
She said Tuesday that she’s looking forward to returning to a changed landscape at the Capitol: When she served as counsel to the House Democrats in 1985, she was the only full-time attorney and the Democrats were in the minority.
“To be in the majority is very different, and I wanted to experience that,” she said. “While the budget is frustrating and difficult, I think it offers the opportunity to look at how the state delivers services.”
Weisselberg said she looks forward to working on a range of issues beyond education, including health care, campaign finance, and criminal justice.
“I’ve always liked Chris Donovan, and I’m looking forward to working for Chris because he is a very considerate and insightful leader,” she added.
As for the work she’s done in New Haven? “It’s been very rewarding, and I’ve certainly loved it,” she said.
38 Schools
In New Haven, Weisselberg is best known as the coordinator of Mayor John DeStefano’s $1.5 billion effort to rebuild or renovate every city school.
From 1998 to September 2009, a total of 31 city schools have been rebuilt or built new. Four more new schools are in construction, and three are in design. Weisselberg has guided each one. Some have proved proved contentious. Each aimed to make students proud of their school.
“We built the buildings to be strong places of learning,” Weisselberg said. “I really feel that they’ve become that, that they make a difference in a student’s life.”
Weisselberg has worked on the school construction program from its infancy. At first, she worked as a consultant: When she returned to New Haven from Capitol in 1995, she started Weisselberg Consulting LLC, in part so that she could work part-time and spend more time at home with her two sons. She worked with the city school board as a consultant on the school rebuilding program as well as Y2K compliance. By January 1998, when the project got underway, she was working full-time with the city schools. She closed her consulting business and became an official Board of Education employee in Sept. 2007.
The program allowed the city to shift away from hard-to-manage middle schools toward a K‑8 system. It was based on a new framework for construction, in which a school-based construction committee — comprised of teachers, staff, parents, neighbors and the local alderman — advises the construction plans. Weisselberg said the net result has been more input and satisfaction from the neighborhoods.
In recent months, as the school construction project wraps up, Weisselberg has joined in the city’s effort to focus on what goes on inside the classrooms. The mayor has launched an ambitious school reform plans that aim to close the achievement gap by 2015, cut the dropout rate in half and ensure every student can go to college.
The reform effort is “an opportunity to take our efforts to the next level” after rebuilding the schools, Weisselberg said. She has mixed feelings about leaving at this critical point in time.
“It would have been a great opportunity to also have worked on that, and to have helped it move along, and I regret missing that opportunity, and seeing the last parts of the school construction be completed” she said. “But I just felt like this [new job] was such an exciting opportunity.”
One of Weisselberg’s sons is a junior at UConn; the other is a high school senior, applying for college. That timing was part of the decision to change jobs at this juncture, she added.
Schools spokeswoman Michelle Wade said the school district will greatly miss her. The district has not yet made a decision about how to move on — whether it will find a replacement school construction coordinator or divvy up the responsibilities in a different way, Wade said.
Weisselberg, who lives in Westville, has a law degree from UConn. Before she got involved with city schools, she worked as assistant corporation counsel in New Haven City Hall; director of intergovernmental relations, legislation and projects in New Haven’s Chief Administrator’s Office; an associate with Evans & Baldwin of New Haven; a law clerk to U.S. Magistrate Arthur H. Latimer in New Haven’s U.S. District Court; and managing editor of The Connecticut Law Tribune.
In her new post, she replaces Laura Jordan, who left the position earlier this month to join the Connecticut Hospital Association. Weisselberg’s new salary will be $135,000.