Hillhouse advocates (clockwise) Pamela Cummings, Sara Armstrong, Haruki Cubeta-Yonamine, John Saksa, Raven Mitchell, Karalyn Meineke, Leslie Blatteau, and Kevin Barbero.
All is not well at the city’s second largest public school, according to a group of Hillhouse High School educators and parents who raised the alarm to the Board of Education about overburdened staff, too many teacher vacancies, inadequate support for students, and inconsistent communication from school and district leadership.
A “full-service community schools” model — with expanded arts and athletic programs, and after-school support for families and students alike — is coming to two Fair Haven public schools, thanks to a five-year, $2.5 million grant recently awarded by the U.S. Department of Education to the Clifford Beers Community Care Center.
A TikTok-focused English project for High School in the Community (HSC) sophomore Diana Robles brought her to the realization that “when I read a news article, I sort of just believe what it says.”
Now she thinks twice — about where the story was published, and about its credibility and potential bias.
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Lisa Reisman |
Dec 8, 2023 2:23 pm
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Inside the Westville Community Nursery School.
Mud happens and wet happens and messy clothes happen and it’s all good.
Those are the words of author and play space designer Rusty Keeler about risky play, a philosophy that involves, in simplest terms, letting kids be kids, and is practiced at Westville Community Nursery School, a place where the tradition of jumping on mattresses has passed from generation to generation.
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Maya McFadden |
Dec 6, 2023 11:17 am
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Testing forces inside Kara Bartunek's third-grade class.
Conte West Hills School third graders Olivia and Deon played tug-of-war in their classroom — not to see who was the strongest, but instead to conduct a science experiment to learn about forces.
Briggs left the shelter grateful for a warm place to spend a cold New Haven night. Pizarro arrived at school with compassion and understanding that all city dwellers deserve a safe place to lay their heads.
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Maya McFadden |
Dec 5, 2023 11:46 am
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Metro French teacher Dylan Senderoff (right) encouraging students to find "Algérie" and "Cambodge" on an inflatable globe.
“Se lever,” Metropolitan Business Academy French teacher Dylan Senderoff instructed his students while motioning his hands for them to get up from their seats.
It was almost the end of class, and time to play “Jacques a dit” — a Francophone riff on “Simon Says” that would help students identify their tête, nez, ventre, and cou, all while building their vocab through immersive play.
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Laura Glesby |
Dec 4, 2023 12:34 pm
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Barack Obama students, recognized by state, cheer on their teachers.
Principal Jamie Baker beamed at the hundreds of Barack Obama School students seated before her in the cafeteria. “How are the best scholars in the United States doing today?” she called out.
Inside the new warming center at the former Strong School on Orchard.
Forty-seven sleeping mats laid out in a shuttered school’s auditorium are now available to lie down on at night for those without a home, as the city opened a new overnight “warming center” at the former Strong School on Orchard Street.
Baz Holmes Poynter, proudly trans and gay, after she told alders “how it is to be me.”
Kids will sometimes make mean comments when fifth-grader Wesley Bianchine uses the teacher’s restroom at school. But all the other bathrooms are designated for either boys or girls, leaving non-binary kids like Wesley without another place to go.
“The world is not organized for transgender children,” Wesley said to a panel of alders and an audience of over 50 people.
And as a stream of students, parents, and educators insisted, New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) should help change that.
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Maya McFadden |
Nov 29, 2023 3:38 pm
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"School Closed," for now, at 540 Ella T. Grasso.
A flood resulting from a failed HVAC valve and gasket has ended on-site and in-person programming at the city’s Adult & Continuing Education Center in the Hill for the remainder of the calendar year.
Nearly half of high schoolers attending a West Rock environmental charter school were “chronically absent” during the first two months of the school year — an uptick that school leaders are working to address through everything from perfect-attendance recognitions to home visits and family meetings to recommended withdrawals.
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Maya McFadden |
Nov 22, 2023 8:29 am
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Student composters at work in Cross's cafeteria back in June.
This Thanksgiving season, Wilbur Cross sophomore Manxi Han is thankful to have a home that is not routinely submerged in several feet of water as sea levels rise, for access to food despite climate change-related disasters destroying farm lands, for healthy and clean air year-round, for minimal heat waves as the earth’s temperature rises, and for biodiversity as rates of extinction increase.
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Nora Grace-Flood |
Nov 21, 2023 11:01 am
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F.A.M.E. Middle Schoolers from dance Cumbia with their senior citizen counterparts in Fair Haven.
Fair Haven school kids filed into the Atwater Senior Center to keep their senior counterparts company in advance of Thanksgiving — and to dance cumbia with New Haveners like 73-year-old Yvonne Sheppard, who said the celebration was less a loneliness intervention than it was a special occasion among a vibrant city full of friends.
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Maya McFadden |
Nov 17, 2023 9:22 am
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Margaret Stevens in her "life skills" classroom.
When Wilbur Cross English teacher Margaret Stevens told her class of multilingual students that the word of the day was “invent,” her students put their fingers to their bottom lips to feel the vibrations as they pronounced the word aloud with a “va” sound rather than a “ba” sound more familiar to Spanish speakers.
That exercise took place as part of a new effort at the East Rock public high school to teach “life skills” to students with special needs who are also still learning English, along with peer mentors, all in one class.
Gemma Joseph Lumpkin: "Homelessness can happen at any point."
There are currently 567 New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) students couchsurfing, “doubling up,” sleeping in cars, living out of shelters, or otherwise without a stable home — a jump from 281 at this time last year — representing a spike in youth homelessness that district leaders attribute to increased family migration, domestic violence, and a broader housing affordability crisis.
City police arrested an “emotionally disturbed” man after he stripped his clothes outside of Lincoln-Bassett Elementary School while in possession of a firearm.
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Thomas Breen |
Nov 10, 2023 11:29 am
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U.S. Attorney Vanessa Avery, with First Assistant U.S. Attorney Alfred Pavlis.
The hackers who stole roughly $6 million from city coffers earlier this year spent a month monitoring the “compromised” email account of a school district staffer before impersonating the district’s bus contractor, convincing the city to send a fake company real funds, and then shuttling that money between a handful of different bank accounts — including one steeped in cryptocurrency.
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Maya McFadden |
Nov 8, 2023 12:11 pm
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Nataly Magana with a doll she uses to help explain to child hospital patients what they're going through.
Nataly Magana told a classroom full of New Haven Academy students that she once considered becoming a teacher herself.
But instead she took a different career path — one that also involves counseling young people in need and helping them stay calm and flourish amidst challenging circumstances — as a certified child life specialist at Yale New Haven Hospital.
Teens protest outside the New Haven Free Public Library.
The Amistad Wolfpack Drumline (including Alanah Wali on the cymbals) performs outside Beinecke Library.
When Alanah Wali joined a hundred of her high school peers to protest a national surge in censorship of literature about race and sexuality, she thought about the American laws that forbade enslaved Black people from learning how to read.
“Our ability to read should not be taken for granted,” she said.
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Lisa Reisman |
Nov 6, 2023 12:54 pm
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Volunteers, including Stacey Smith and Eva Bermudez Zimmerman, assembling a child's dresser.
“No light bulb,” a volunteer called out on a recent afternoon at a two-story, one-family home in Fair Haven Heights.
The lamp that needed a bulb was among the community donations at the first-ever Furnishing Day, which saw a revolving group of 60 friends, neighbors, and board members assembling furniture, hanging pictures, and stocking the pantry in the newly-built structure.
They were preparing the house for two early childhood educators at Friends Center for Children to move into, and live rent-free, with their children later this month. While sharing the kitchen, each family will live on one floor.
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Maya McFadden |
Nov 3, 2023 2:31 pm
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Toni Thorpe, Royce Hatfield, Richard Cowes, Sara Gonzalez, Latoya Armstrong, and Stephanie Paris-Cooper.
Every day last spring, Latoya Armstrong dropped her daughter off for camp at the Q House.
One day in April, on her way out she scanned a flyer QR code to learn about the programs at the Dixwell community center and found a perfect fit for herself: GED classes by the New Haven Adult & Continuing Education Center.
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Maya McFadden |
Nov 3, 2023 8:49 am
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"Try to Survive" Movie Trailer
"From the Death" Movie Trailer
"Revenge" Movie Trailer
Despite New Haven having no more movie theaters, it isn’t lacking in young, creative, and spooky-loving moviemakers — particularly at John S. Martinez School.
Hillhouse High School’s auditorium now has a new, leak-free roof thanks to a nearly $300,000 replacement job completed in six months, rather than a year — as was originally predicted for the construction.
