Thomas Breen photo
Joyner, Goldson at Monday’s board meeting.
As the end of the school year approaches, two administrative questions loom over the near future of the district: Will the city have a new charter school come this fall? And who will be hired to lead the district as its new superintendent?
Continued delays at the Board of Education mean that New Haven students, teachers, and parents will have to wait at least a few weeks longer for answers to both of those questions.
At its bimonthly meeting at the L.W. Beecher School on Monday night, the board did not vote on, or formally discuss, a controversial resolution to create C.M. Cofield Academy, an all-boys’ local charter school championed by Newhallville’s Rev. Boise Kimber. But the school proposal’s very absence from the meeting’s agenda nevertheless proved to be a fertile topic for frustration and debate.
Board member Darnell Goldson, who had formally proposed the resolution at the board’s previous meeting and who has been a strong ally of Kimber in his push to establish the new charter school, voiced his discontent at the delay during a heated 15-minute exchange with board president Daisy Gonzalez at the beginning of the meeting.
“I believe this was a deliberate attempt to block my ability to bring my resolution to this board because you do not support it,” Goldson said, accusing Gonzalez of acting in bad faith when she did not invite or solicit input from Goldson during an agenda-setting meeting last Thursday that she had with board member Dr. Ed Joyner and Interim Superintendent Dr. Reggie Mayo.
“That is unfair,” Goldson continued. “I hope we do not see more of this in the future, because when we changed leadership at the board, we said very specifically that we would not do this kind of stuff anymore. And now, at the second or third meeting that you’ve chaired, here it comes again.”
Gonzalez called the omission of the Cofield Academy resolution from the agenda an oversight on her part. Although she would not identify exactly who had put together the agenda, she took full responsibility for not properly vetting the list of topics for discussion. Some board members have expressed reservations about the proposal for various reasons: Cost, concept (teaching boys separately, functioning as a city charter school), and process. (It began soliciting students and had a spot on the board’s website and at a recruiting fair before it even came up for consideration.)
“There’s a larger issue here,” Goldson said. “We agree as a group to follow certain rules and procedures, and to have a transparent process. We did not follow those rules. I work up in South Windsor, which is nearly an hour away. I don’t need to drive all the way down here if I’m just going to be window dressing for this leadership team.”
Kimber: “I’m going to talk tonight.”
Later in the evening, Rev. Kimber spoke with passionate frustration in support of the new charter school, offering a defiant speech that far exceeded the bounds of the three and a half minutes allotted to each speaker during the public participation section of the meeting.
“This is about educating our children, our boys,” he said, looking to counter testimony offered right before he spoke, by former board member Alicia Caraballo. Caraballo argued that Cofield Academy would incur significant staff and building costs for the city while only serving 100 students, dividing them from their peers by race, and still maintaining a fair amount of regulatory independence as a charter school.
“This ain’t even about me,” Kimber said. “This is about the kids, young boys who have no future without somebody going and helping them. I’m appalled at the rhetoric and the conniving, and I’m going to talk tonight, because I’m not going to talk about this anymore. So you all are going to sit and listen. I hear what you are saying about segregation. But we are currently segregated by zip code. I grew up in segregation, under the leadership of George Wallace in Alabama. I went to an all-black school. Dr. Mayo went to all-black college. Mr. Joyner went to an all-black college.
“With this board or without this board, I’ll be back. Because this project is about our children. And I would hope that this board here would put a comprehensive plan together that would teach boys and girls how to read, write their names in cursive, and do math. ”
Still Searching for a Search Firm
Dawson, Mayo.
One of the topics that did make it onto the agenda was an update from the board’s governance committee on the search for a new superintendent.
Board member Che Dawson announced that his committee is still deciding between firms to hire to conduct the search. He said he would not be able to present a final recommendation for a search firm until the next board meeting.
Since the ouster of Superintendent Garth Harries in October, previously retired Superintendent Reggie Mayo has been serving as interim superintendent, making $750 per day for a maximum of $130,500 during a tenure initially expected to end in June.
However, after Dawson announced at last month’s meeting that the board was still deciding between three search firms, Mayo agreed to extend his tenure as interim superintendent as the search for a permanent replacement plods along past the original schedule.
Dawson and his team had narrowed the group of three search firms down to two, and had even tentatively picked a top choice. But that top choice proved to be a riskier bet than he had initially realized.
“In defense of Che,” Ed Joyner said, “he recently found out that one of the search firms we were considering had done a horrible job in a particular school district just like ours, even though they had done a pretty jazzy presentation. You can’t find a good superintendent based on the charisma of the presenter. So when Mr. Dawson got that information, he decided that that firm had made some egregious errors and that we should not consider them. We don’t want to rush too fast and hire the wrong people.”
Reluctant to go with the last remaining firm simply by default, Dawson said that he had invited that firm to re-present before the governance committee during its meeting on March 20. After that presentation, he said, he will submit a final recommendation for a search firm to the larger board for approval.