Melissa Bailey File Photo
Clemente students celebrated the opening of a new school building last fall.
Principals at Wexler-Grant School and Roberto Clemente Leadership Academy will get the rare power to pick a whole new slate of teachers next year, as their schools become the next to undergo major reforms.
That news came Monday, when the city school district announced plans for five schools that scored low marks in the latest round of evaluations as part of the mayor’s school reform drive.
Based on test scores and school environment surveys, the five schools rank in the lowest category, Tier III. Three of these schools, James Hillhouse High, Wilbur Cross High and Hill Central Music Academy, are already overhauling the way school is run this year, in order to qualify for millions of federal dollars in School Improvement Grants. Those three will be considered Tier III Improvement schools like Barnard Environmental Magnet Studies School.
Hillhouse and Cross, which both got new principals this year, will continue with their reforms, which have included breaking the school down into smaller learning communities. Following in the footsteps of Barnard, Hill Central teachers will extend their day to add 60 to 90 minutes of prep time, and their teachers will eat lunch with students, schools spokesman Chris Hoffman announced in the release.
As official “turnaround” schools, Wexler-Grant and Roberto Clemente will face more drastic changes.
Melissa Bailey File Photo
Leroy Williams (pictured), Clemente’s principal for over 16 years, will be leaving at the end of the school year, Hoffman announced. Principal Sabrina Breland, who just took charge of Wexler-Grant this year after leaving the Urban Youth Center, will stay on as the school’s principal to oversee the turnaround — just as Karen Lott did at Brennan/Rogers in West Rock, the city’s first in-house turnaround school.
Like Lott, the principals at Clemente and Wexler-Grant will get tremendous power in picking their staffs for next year. All the teachers at those schools have to reapply for their jobs if they want to stay. If they don’t want to, they’ll be guaranteed jobs elsewhere in the district. At Brennan, few teachers ended up staying, and Lott brought in a slew of new faces to the school.
The principals will help rewrite their schools’ work rules, which will likely include extending the school day, as Brennan/Rogers did. Those changes haven’t been hashed out yet, but Hoffman shared a couple of the changes.
Teachers at Clemente will stay at school longer to prep for classes, and will take on student advisory responsibilities during the day. Wexler-Grant will “focus on entry and dismissal and other transitional periods to ensure that students arrive in classrooms focused and ready to learn,” Hoffman said.
It’s still possible that the district may hire an outside entity to take over management of Wexler-Grant or Clemente, as the Stamford-based charter group Domus did with Urban Youth. That decision has not yet been made, Hoffman said.