Final drama: Board prez Joyner signs contract.
Christopher Peak Photos
Birks: Highest-paid city official.
Carol Birks will spend the next three years as superintendent of New Haven Public Schools, according to an annual contract starting at $235,000 that the Board of Education approved Monday night by a 5 – 2 vote.
After a contentious yearlong search — ending with a final show of discord among school board members on Monday night — Birks officially got the job. She won the agreement on a 5‑to‑2 vote at a sparsely attended special meeting at L.W. Beecher School.
Starting on Mar. 19, 2018, Birks will leave her current job as chief of staff for Hartford Public Schools and head down to New Haven, where she’ll soon have to become a resident. She’ll take the lead in a district that has been watched over on an interim basis by former Superintendent Reggie Mayo for 14 months, after the last superintendent, Garth Harries, took a buy-out deal in October 2016.
The Agreement
By contract, Birks has three years in the new job. With a 90-day notice, she can leave at any time, but the board can fire her only ”for cause,” according to a one-page summary the board received, without providing a golden parachute. If the board tries to terminate her employment “without cause,” Birks will get a 90-day notice, plus a payout of all remaining salary and benefits. The parties can also mutually agree to walk away at any time.
The three-year agreement technically appears to run contrary to the Board of Education’s existing policy. A provision that hasn’t been updated since 1999 states that superintendents should be appointed to one-year terms if it’s their first job in New Haven. The city charter revision, which likely supersedes the board’s policy, changed the rules so that all department heads city-wide get appointed to four-year terms — to the extent it’s allowed by state law, which for school superintendents is three years.
Birks will start out earning $235,000 annually, making her New Haven’s highest-paid employee by far. She clocks in above Police Chief Anthony Campbell’s $162,000 salary and former Superintendent Harries’s starting salary of $193,000. But she’ll still earn less than her peers in Connecticut’s other big urban school districts. Both Hartford and Bridgeport pay $260,000.
She’s guaranteed a 2 percent raise in her second year, and the board can determine whether to pay her more in her third year.
Birks will also qualify for numerous benefits. There’s a $10,000 payment into a tax-sheltered annuity (the public-school equivalent of a 401(k) retirement plan), with a 2 percent increase in the second year. She’ll also get the same health insurance, vacation days and sick leave as other administrators; life insurance at two times her salary; a district-provided car, with money for gas, oil changes, insurance and repairs; a smartphone, a laptop, a tablet and a home printer; and, if approved by the board president, reimbursements for professional and civic organizations.
Birks agreed to move her residence to New Haven by July 1, 2018. The board will reimburse her for “reasonable and necessary” moving expenses.
The contract is largely based on the agreement the board signed with Harries. Birks’s agreement, however, leaves the format of an annual evaluation undecided, for the board and superintendent to work out later.
Who’s Going To Sign It?
Jamell Cotto: Don’t try any tricks, Ed.
By next spring, a very different Board of Education will be calling the shots. Two members who initially voted against Birks’s appointment — Carlos Torre and Che Dawson — will be replaced by Mayor Toni Harp’s new picks. That leaves Ed Joyner as potentially the lone voice of dissent.
But on Monday night, at the last board meeting before those numbers flip, the Board of Education carried on with its usual rancor.
After the board returned from a 40-minute-long executive session, Jamell Cotto, the appointee who replaced the board’s late president, Daisy Gonzalez, tried to foil a plot. Reading a pre-written motion, he implied that Joyner, as president, and Torre, as vice-president, might try to keep Birks out of the job by not signing the contract. So he motioned that Darnell Goldson, as secretary, be allowed to sign if the other two were “unavailable or unwilling.” Goldson seconded it.
Joyner: What’s going on, Jamell?
Torre called Cotto’s move “ridiculous.” No such scheme existed, he said, and antics like it were exactly why the superintendent search had engendered such mistrust.
“I can’t even call it childish because that would be insulting to children,” he said.
If anyone came prepared with a “plan,” Dawson added, it looked like Cotto.
“I’m not trying to create unnecessary tension, but we’re starting off in a way that’s assuming tension,” he said, before the vote. “I’m wishing Dr. Birks much success, and I support her, now that it’s determined she’s our superintendent. But it seems like we’re assuming some negativity or malice. I don’t want to do that either.”
“The fact is we’re not making any assumptions,” Goldson answered. “We’re looking at history.” He said that the board’s internal division had already held up the contract’s signing. “We have to get it signed tonight,” he said.
Dawson flipped from his prior position on Birks and voted for the contract, along with the other four others who’ve consistently backed her. Joyner and Torre both voted against it.
Outnumbered, Joyner signed his name.
“I want her to be successful. She’s now captain of the ship, and we can’t have the ship sinking,” he said. “And I don’t know if we can have another year of what we went through. It’s too damaging to the system.”
“It’s finally over,” Mayor Toni Harp agreed. “It was a long, difficult, often contentious process. But we now have a superintendent, and we can move our district forward.”
Removing “Handcuffs”
What can Elm City schools expect from their new superintendent? Birks described some of the changes she foresees at a public forum last month.
For starters, she said, she wants a school improvement plan with clear goals and data-based metrics. Then she’ll line the budget up with priorities and share results at quarterly forums.
Birks said she plans to add job responsibilities for three “handcuffed” directors of instruction, expand the YouthStat program for at-risk kids, partner with outside organizations on socio-emotional learning, and build a more cohesive relationship with charter schools.
Early on, Birks will also have to repair deep divisions over her selection — a smoothing-over she hasn’t yet attempted, turning down meetings with parent and student leaders who called her plans controversial and the search process a sham.
“Total Transparency” vs. Hiding Out
Birks, at a November forum: “You will have total transparency.”
As the search neared its finish, Birks faced tough scrutiny.
Within five days after she came out on top in a straw-poll vote of board members, 1,800 signatures from parents and students demanded another choice. Birks’s defenders, like board member Darnell and Jason Bartlett, the mayor’s liaison to the school board, called the attacks untruthful and unfair. In particular, they said claims about sorority membership and charter-school connections that opponents made went too far.
At her one public appearance, at the Nov. 14 community forum with superintendent finalists, Birks said in her closing statements, “When you have me as your superintendent, you will have total transparency.” So far, though, after the community outcry, she’s remained elusive, declining meetings with community groups and withholding records about her current job performance.
In recent weeks, Birks declined invitations to meet with a parent group and the student council. Bartlett told the Independent that she was too busy with her current job. However, last Thursday, Birks showed up for a lunch with Mayor Harp and Bartlett at the Omni Hotel during the African American Mayors Association conference, and she made an appearance that night at a holiday party for New Haven’s principals.
For the last month, since a Nov. 19 rally at City Hall, Birks has also not responded to calls or emails from the Independent, including several messages left on Monday night. Instead, Bartlett has fielded interview requests.
Records Withheld
Records about her Birks’s past employment have also been kept secret. Hartford Public Schools rejected an Independent Freedom of Information Act request for Birks’s annual performance evaluations leading up to her recent promotion. After a 10-day waiting period — an extra week that the law gives beyond the normal deadline, so the district could contact Birks about any potential invasion of privacy — a labor relations specialist in Hartford said the evaluations were off-limits.
A provision in state law, amended in 2013, exempts the evaluations of all Connecticut educators below the rank of superintendent, with the intent of discouraging parents from “shopping” for teachers with better performance reviews. There is an exception, though, if an educator consents in writing to the release, which Birks apparently did not do.
Hartford Public Schools did say, though, that it had found no records of misconduct by Birks — a separate category of personnel records that must be disclosed — dating back to June 2013, when she started in the district.
Previous coverage of the superintendent search:
• Wanted: Schools Chief To Rebuild Trust
• Infighting Puts Super Search On Hold
• Super Search Gives Nutmeggers 2nd Look
• “Tonight Has Been An Embarrassment”
• 2 Superintendent Candidates Withdraw
• Read Their Resumes
• Supe Candidates Split On Charters
• Student Rep: School Board Should Reconsider
• Opposition Mounts To Birks
• Highsmith: No Deal For #2
• Divided Ed Board Selects Birks
• Ed Board Combatants Urged To Apologize
• Democracy Inaction — Or In Action
•Walkouts Called Off — For Now