Melissa Bailey Photo
Marisol Sampedro trekked across town on her day off to celebrate a milestone, help her daughter with her math skills — and do her part in one school’s effort to get parents more involved.
Sampedro helped Citlaly, who’s 6, fill in a pattern of colors on a grid of 100 squares.
“Red, yellow, purple, which comes next?” Sampedro asked her daughter in Spanish.
Sampedro, who’s 26, was one of eight parents who showed up at the Hill Central Music Academy on Thursday to spend time with their first-grade children. They were invited to celebrate the first 100 days of school. Citlaly hasn’t missed one, according to her mom.
The day highlighted the challenges — and successes — of getting parents involved in a neighborhood school that’s being housed in a swing space across town.
The day’s activities were paid for by federal Title 1 money set aside to encourage parental involvement in schools that serve low-income families. The point of the event was to get parents in the door to the school, so they can help close the achievement gap between poor minorities and their suburban counterparts, said Elizabeth Hick, the K‑8 Instructional Math Coach for New Haven public schools.
Parental involvement is a focus of the city’s nascent school reform drive, which aims to close the achievement gap by 2015 through a range of aggressive tactics. That means in five years, New Haven Public Schools aims to reach the state average of students performing “at goal” on Connecticut Mastery Tests.
At Hill Central, students have a long way to go. Last school year, Hill Central ranked last in the district, with 6.2 percent performing “at goal,” according to ConnCAN. The state average was 62.7 percent.
Thursday, school staff faced two big obstacles to getting parents in the door. First, the weather: Due to Wednesday’s snow storm, school was delayed by two hours, and many students didn’t show. Second, the location: Hill Central is a neighborhood school, normally housed on Dewitt Street in the Hill. While the Dewitt Street building is being rebuilt, students are studying in a swing space on Quinnipiac Avenue, over three miles away.
At the Dewitt Street school, parents would often walk their kids to school. Transportation to the new site has been an issue, school teachers said. The challenge was evident on November’s report card night, when the school fared in the bottom third of the district for parent turnout, with only 53 percent of students’ parents attending.
The challenges were also evident Thursday, as Hick and the school music teacher made their rounds through grades K to 2 celebrating 100 days of school. At 12 o’clock, they arrived to a room of two squirming Kindergarten classes. No parents showed up to see their kids count 100 green apples, sing a 100 Days of School song, recite a rhyming poem, or get certificates declaring them “100 days smarter.”
First grade was a different story, at least in Ms. Morales’ class. Darytzabel Morales, a 30-year-old native of Puerto Rico, is the energetic leader of the first grade’s bilingual track. The school has a separate track for Spanish-speakers in grades K to 3. They learn at first mostly in Spanish, and transition to a regular English-only education by the fourth grade.
Morales’ 18 students speak Spanish as their native tongue. Their parents hail from Mexico, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Peru. Despite juggling jobs and families, they’re pretty good about showing up to school, Morales said.
On Thursday, 10 students in Morales’ class came to school after the snow delay. Seven parents came to see them.
“That’s a great turnout,” said Morales (pictured). “The Spanish-speaking population is pretty good with that.”
Around 1 o’clock, parents and kids marched upstairs for the 100 days celebration. Morales’ class had by far the strongest showing: Only one person, a grandmother, showed up for the other two first-grade classes, which are English-only. Morales said the parents in her class tend to have a greater turnout: “it’s a fact.” One day, she said, a father walked three miles from the Hill neighborhood to talk to her after school.
Lacking daycare, parents often “bring the whole family” to school, she said.
Thursday, one couple brought a toddler to Morales’ class.
“Pee pee!” the little one announced at one point, sending a few giggles across the room.
To celebrate the 100-day mark, parents squatted in tiny classroom chairs around the edge of their room as their kids listened to a teacher read aloud from the book “100 Days of Cool.” They smiled as their kids donned stylish cardboard glasses, their eyes peering through the big O’s of 100. The kids got up and stomped 100 times on the floor — an exercise designed to give students the feeling of what 100 really means, according to Hick, the math coordinator.
Then the parents set to work helping their kids. The task: Use crayons to color in 100 squares using a pattern. The activity builds a foundation for kids to understand multiplication, Hick said.
Citlaly and her mom chose their crayons. When her daughter’s attention wandered, Sampedro kept her on task.
“No. Yellow goes here!” Sampedro advised.
Mom chose to forgo the spread of cookies and grapes and stay in her seat, working with her daughter. Sampedro has two kids at Hill Central. She said she reads with them every night. Originally from Mexico, she finds time between housecleaning jobs to come to her children’s school. She said she’s been in five or six times already this school year.
“It’s important,” she said.
After the celebration, Sampedro followed her daughter back downstairs, where Morales was wrapping up class for the day. The teacher showed off the morning’s activity. The kids worked on counting to 100, in a festive Latino fashion, with grains of rice and beans.
“That’s our main dish,” explained Morales. The kids glued the rice and beans onto pieces of paper, then practiced counting by twos, fives, and 10s. The activity capped several days of getting the students excited for the 100-day milestone, she said.
“I psyched them up,” she said. “They got to feel like they’re cooking.”
At dismissal time, parents took home two assignments to complete with their kids. The goal is to “link school and home,” Hick said, by giving parents activities to do their kids. At the end of the week, she’ll be sending home a packet of suggested parent-child math activities, in English and Spanish.
A lot of kids don’t do much learning at home because their parents can’t read and write, don’t have a high level of education, or simply don’t read with their kids, Morales pointed out. When parents do get involved, she sees the difference.
“It’s clear when they make an effort and they do care,” she said.
Parents who attended Thursday’s event took home certificates pronouncing their students “100 days smarter.” Sampedro was asked if her daughter is indeed 100 days smarter since the first day of school.
“Oh yes,” she said. “She hasn’t missed a day.”
Read more stories on the city’s school reform drive on this page.