Contributed Photo
As 75 percent of teachers depart Clemente school, 22-year-old Larissa Spreng is moving to New Haven to teach her new students to be scientists at school reform’s newest experimental lab.
Spreng (pictured), a Teach For America member hailing from Ohio, is one of 10 new hires at the Roberto Clemente Leadership Academy, a “turnaround” (i.e. longtime low-performing) school being taken over by a private for-profit outside contractor.
The turnover comes as the school district embarks on a new experiment to fix a failing school. In May it hired New Jersey-based for-profit company, New Jersey-based Renaissance School Services, LLC, to manage the pre-K‑8 school, which serves 538 students in the Hill.
Renaissance is the second outside entity, and first private company, to take over a city school as part of a reform effort that stresses managing schools differently according to how they perform.
Clemente, which has been on the federal “watch list” for failing schools for nine years, is one of two city schools to become a “turnaround” next year.
All 28 teachers had to reapply for their jobs if they wanted to keep working there. Half were asked back; only seven ended up staying, according to Renaissance CEO Richard O’Neill.
In a conversation Tuesday, O’Neill outlined his company’s two-month hustle to get up to speed on the school and determine who should stay. One answer had already been determined: Leroy Williams, Clemente’s principal for over 16 years, would leave the school. To determine which teachers would stay, the company hit the classrooms.
Melissa Bailey File Photo
O’Neill.
“We had a team of three people who were in and out of the classrooms over a matter of two days” in June, O’Neill said. Renaissance and some members of the building leadership then used a formal evaluation instrument that Renaissance came up with to rate how its teachers are performing.
All teachers were asked if they want to stay or go.
About 25 percent of the teachers decided on their own that they wanted to leave, O’Neill said. Renaissance determined another 50 percent were not a good fit for the school. That left them with 25 percent of teachers whom they wanted to keep — and who were willing to stay with the school through the changes.
“There were all sorts of good people who we wanted to stay but who decided to” work at other schools, O’Neill said.
Teachers who are leaving Clemente have been with the district for as many as eight, 14, 23, even 28 years.
“Some of us have been there for a very long time and were just looking for a change,” said one departing teacher, who declined to give her name.
The 21 teachers who are leaving the school are guaranteed jobs in the district. A personnel report released this week showed them scattering across the district to Bishop Woods, Worthington Hooker, Strong, Ross/Woodward, Nathan Hale, Hillhouse High and Troup schools.
Meanwhile, O’Neill and his staff are working to replace them. For the past four weeks, Renaissance has been making offers to teachers like Spreng to join the revamped school.
Road Trip
Spreng, just graduated from Miami University in Ohio in May. An aspiring geriatric doctor, she decided to take a break from the pre-med track to spend some time teaching in urban schools. So she applied to Teach For America, a national not-for-profit that aims to lure talented young people into urban and rural classrooms while offering an alternate route to teaching certification. (Click here to read about the district’s growing partnership with TFA.)
TFA accepted Spreng and placed her in Connecticut. Over the summer she went through a TFA training in New York City along with 700 other TFA “corps members.”
One July day, Spreng and 21 fellow TFA-ers piled into cars and headed east. They turned off the highway into New Haven’s Hill neighborhood and pulled up at school, which was built just one year ago. At the school, they went through an interview process that’s a bit different from other schools. Instead of first meeting with the school principal — Clemente doesn’t have a head of school yet, anyway — they spoke with some teachers.
O’Neill said he asked the teachers who are staying at Clemente if they’d like to volunteer their time over the summer to help rebuild the school staff. All seven obliged. Those teachers served to screen applicants through phone and in-person interviews; they then made recommendations to Renaissance about whom to hire.
So far, Renaissance has hired about 10 new teachers, who will remain in the unionized workforce. Some are in-district transfers from schools such as Co-op and Troup. Three are first-time TFA teachers; one is a second-year TFA member who taught last year in Rhode Island.
In lieu of a standard certification, TFA-ers attend a five-week summer training course to prepare for the classroom — then take classes during the school year to earn their Connecticut certification. They commit to teaching for two years, and have access to one-one-one coaching and teaching support during that time. The program aims to balance teachers’ inexperience with their energy, talent as well as the extra support.
During her summer training, Spreng got a taste of the urban classroom by teaching 8th grade science a summer school in the Bronx. At Clemente, she’ll be teaching 7th or 8th grade science, she said.
Spreng said she chose Clemente because “it really sounds like a positive environment,” and it’s a good time to join with the changes that are underway.
No More “Roaming The Halls”
Melissa Bailey File Photo
One big challenge for Spreng as a new teacher: the school’s new effort at controlling student behavior in the classrooms and halls.
That’s the area where Clemente was struggling the most, said O’Neill.
“Discipline and behavior were clearly, uniformly seen by parents and faculty as very significant problems within the school,” O’Neill said.
He said when Renaissance first observed the school in the spring, kids were “roaming the hallways” without a hallway pass. There were verbal and sometimes physical assaults.
O’Neill said adults in the school community told him that “kids have been allowed to do whatever they want for years and that there were no consequences.” The behavior was interrupting kids’ ability to learn in class, O’Neill said. “Aberrant behavior” created “a lack of consistent and uniform good instruction,” he observed.
O’Neill said in the last month of school Renaissance “made inroads” in improving behavior by making discipline a top priority. He said Renaissance didn’t change the rules: “We simply had uniform and consistent enforcement of the existing discipline code within the building.”
Garth Harries, the city’s school reform czar, credited a new school leader with helping in that effort. Frank Costanzo, an assistant principal at Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School, stepped in as interim principal toward the end of the school year after the departing Williams went out on medical leave, Harries said.
O’Neill has said Renaissance plans to bring in a Positive Behavior Support system, in which kids are rewarded for doing good deeds—and have a clear set of consequences for bad behavior.
All the staff who’ve been hired so far will be sent next week to a Responsive Classroom training, which O’Neill described as “a way of addressing behaviors and creating a culture of respect.”
O’Neill said when discipline problems emerge, he expects there to be “a lot more interaction between head of school and students as well as with their parents and guardians” than there was last year.
Zero To 60
Harries applauded the company for involving teachers in hiring new teachers, and involving parents in screening applicants for the head-of-school job.
“Those are good and positive signs about the kind of team-building that is one of the greatest challenges with an outside organization going zero to 60 over the course of June to August,” Harries said.
“There is clearly a lot of work left to do,” Harries added. “The actual school leadership will be the most important.”
Renaissance plans to hire three administrators for the school: a principal, “achievement specialist,” and “operations specialist.” The three will be Renaissance employees, not part of the city’s union, with salaries totaling about $350,000. Beginning Aug. 1, Renaissance will pay their salaries and get reimbursed monthly by the school district for 125 percent of the cost.
O’Neill said Renaissance has made an offer to a woman to be the head of school and is waiting to sort out a “technical item” about the contract.
The achievement specialist, a position that doesn’t exist at other city schools, will bring “an increased focus on good instruction” and will use a lot of data, O’Neill said.
The new team aims to reverse a long-running trend of low performance: For the last nine years, Clemente has failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress, a federal benchmark on standardized tests. That means Clemente has sat on the federal failing schools list for the longest time of any of the district’s 43 schools.
O’Neill said Renaissance aims for the school to make AYP by the end of the first year by achieving what’s called “safe harbor.”
Just as at Domus Academy, the city’s first turnaround school to be run by an outside entity, Renaissance will be counting on some brand new, energetic teachers to make that happen.
Spreng said in her short time in the Bronx classroom, she’s developed one new tactic designed to change kids’ frame of mind: On homework assignments, her students write their names next to the prefix “Scientist.”
“I make my students feel like they’re scientists in my classroom,” she said, “getting them thinking about being inquisitive and asking questions. I think that’s really important — making them feel that they are capable of being scientists.”
Past Independent stories on Clemente:
• School Board OKs Clemente Takeover
• Fine Print Released On Clemente Deal
• Illegal Meeting Aborted; Co. Starts Work, Anyway
• City Secretly Plans School’s For-Profit Takeover
• For-Profit Charter May Take Over Clemente
• Two Schools Become “Turnarounds”