Christopher Peak Photos
Parents, teachers, students blast transfers, Birks Monday night.
The Board of Education temporarily halted the superintendent’s plans to cut 53 teaching positions until its members can see how any personnel reductions fit into the district’s overall budget-balancing plan.
They unanimously made that decision at Monday night’s board meeting before a packed audience that took up every seat in Celentano School’s cafetorium.
After checking with their lawyer in a brief executive session about their authority, the board members quickly tabled the 53 planned involuntary transfers.
“If we don’t want to be like some of the other urban districts, we will do everything within our power to ensure that we maintain a high-quality curriculum in our school and high-quality teachers that are connected to our children,” said Ed Joyner, one of the board’s two elected members, who proposed tabling the transfers. “The kids themselves are crying to us for relief, and we cannot let one person, under any circumstances, have the kind of authority to do something that would put kids at risk.”
Ed Joyner: No one has authority to put kids at risk.
Darnell Goldson, the board’s president, tasked a newly convened deficit mitigation committee (co-chaired by Jamell Cotto, a former board member, and Jill Kelly, a parent at Engineering & Science University Magnet School) with recommending a set of comprehensive cuts. Goldson added that the committee, whose meetings will be public, should report back about whether to go ahead with the 53 teacher transfers within two weeks.
That didn’t stop students, parents and teachers from speaking for more than two hours about what still remains at stake, as the district confronts a projected $30.7 million deficit in the fiscal year that begins next month, for which it still has not released a line-item budget.
Red For Ed
Darnell Goldson appoints a deficit mitigation committee.
More than 50 people — many of them wearing red like striking teachers in Los Angeles and Denver — waited their turn to speak, with the last ones finally taking the microphone past 9 p.m.
They included a Yale-bound valedictorian and a blue-haired fifth-grader, recent college graduates and their parents, a minister and a sorority sister, teachers who were targeted for transfers, a teacher who’d received last year’s layoff notices, and teachers who hope they’re staying put.
For three minutes each, they spoke about how the reductions — primarily to elementary education and humanities classes — would devastate students next year.
They urged the board to set up a more collaborative process for figuring out what the school district could go without next year, holding off on cuts to the classroom until they’d scoured the budget for all other alternatives.
Throughout, they also faulted Superintendent Carol Birks for what one speaker called a “lack of leadership.” They said she prioritized administrators and consultants over teachers, spread distrust with a secretive budget process, and deceptively threw principals “under the school bus” to avoid her own answerability.
Several echoed a call from NHPS Advocates for Birks to be dismissed, saying her handling of the 53 teaching reductions proved that she’d never been up to the job of leading New Haven’s school system in the first place.
Nico Rivera: We showed up.
Nico Rivera, one of the board’s two non-voting student representatives, got the crowd going with a fiery speech about how the 53 involuntary transfers — on top of last year’s budget cuts that shuttered schools and laid off teachers — threatened to shatter the feeling that students had “a family away from their family.”
“The students and staff of New Haven stick together, and it shows in numbers,” Rivera said, pointing to the crowd. “This is a force to be reckoned with.”
He asked any of the teachers who’d been targeted for an involuntary transfer to stand up. They did so, tentatively at first, as the crowd cheered them on.
Laurie Gracy, an accounting teacher at Metro, stands up.
Soon, other teachers rose up alongside them. “Stand up! Fight back!” a chant began. “Stand up! Fight back!”
“We use this to show that we won’t stop until we get the school climate that positively affects our future,” Rivera said. “We have signed petitions, we have protested, we have shown these teachers mean the world to us. To add, they have done their job for as long as they can. They do not deserve to be repaid by moving them away from the place they call home and the place they feel most comfortable in.”
Other students later said that their lives had been changed by teachers whose positions were now at risk.
Rico Escalera, a recent graduate from Southern Connecticut State University who’s working to become a certified public accountant, said he first learned about the career opportunities through accounting classes at Metropolitan Business Academy — a concentration that might not exist next year.
“Ms. Laurie Gracy was a very influential teacher for me throughout my four years, and learning that she will be involuntarily transferred to a different position basically broke my heart, because my sister is in her accounting class right now,” Escalera said. “Taking that teacher away from her and her future classmates basically strips them of the opportunity that I had and took advantage of.”
Other students said the budget cuts had been sent their schools into turmoil. High school counselors have been telling students to collect letters of recommendation for college now, in case their favorite teachers leave. And even elementary school students said they’ve noticed the disruption.
“My job, as a student, is to learn. This is made extremely difficult when you are cutting the teachers that are helping me grow,” said Sebastian Bianchine, a fifth-grader at Worthington Hooker School, barely visible over the top the podium. “You are throwing the teachers overboard, sinking students’ dreams with it.”
Teachers who were being transferred out, many of them speaking publicly for the first time, said they didn’t want to go. They said they’d built invaluable relationships with their students — true connections couldn’t be replaced by online programs like Khan Academy, as one teacher put it.
“I’ve given everything I can — my heart, my soul, my pockets, my home, whatever I needed — to reach my children,” said Michael Martone, a longtime math teacher at Co-Op High School. “I’m coming from a point of confusion because in the contract, it says that this is what’s best for the school system [to involuntarily transfer teachers out]. But I can’t imagine how I’m not a part of that, after 21 years of dedication.”
Birks: I Trust Principals
Carol Birks: Doing what the principals asked.
After Rivera’s speech, Superintendent Birks said that she was simply following recommendations from principals about which teachers they could do without. She said those building leaders were told “countless times” that they should report back if they felt like the cuts would put their “academic program at risk.”
“We will not put the students in jeopardy at all,” Birks said. “We have to rely on their principals and their expertise, because we’ve empowered them to be human capital managers within their schools.”
Rivera challenged her, saying he personally heard from principals that they felt they’d had no choice.
“It’s more like, ‘My boss asked me for something, so I’m going to do it.’ Me personally, I believe that this wasn’t the choice of the principals. The principals listen to whoever they take the lead from,” Rivera said, drawing out his words as he turned to face Birks. “They had to listen to the people above them.”
Judy Puglisi, Metro’s former principal, later backed him up, saying she’d heard the same thing too. She said numerous principals had told her that Central Office gave each school a set number of positions to eliminate. She said principals were told to send over a list of names or administrators would make the choices for them.
“This could hardly be described as a collaborative process,” Puglisi said. “This lack of honesty from our school system leaders is shocking and disheartening.”
During the two-hour public comment that followed, several speakers added that the proposed elimination of 53 teaching positions had narrowed the terms of the discussion.
Rather than talking about the real need for more bilingual education, more social-emotional supports and more course offerings — especially at neighborhood schools that don’t get a funding boost from the state — the district was seemingly left with the choice only of which teachers might be saved next year.
“When I graduated from Hillhouse in 2010, I didn’t even have an AP Statistics class,” said Amber Moye, a former Celentano teacher. “Although I think it is amazing that students have the cultural opportunities to engage in such courses, think about the students that don’t. I hope that, at some point, we are able to come to the table with less divisiveness and a willingness to work together for the 22,000 students that we serve, some of them that don’t go to Metro, Co-Op or Career.”