$1,500-A-Day Consultant Questioned

A $1,500-a-day consultant said she put in many more hours of work than what she charged, as the Board of Education considers whether to renew her contract for a second school year.

That came up after the Finance & Operations Committee spent part of its Monday evening meeting at 54 Meadow St. questioning if they’d gotten their money’s worth from the contract in year one.

The consultant, Sherri Killins Stewart, a one-time New Haven mayoral candidate and former Massachusetts early education commissioner, has been working on improving the district’s early childhood education programs.

In their presentation to the finance committee, school administrators said Killins had coached top staff on ​“meeting management”; established a partnership with the Kellogg Foundation, another one of her consulting clients, that led to a $67,000 grant; and had stepped in to assist with rescuing Head Start funding that the federal government was threatening to withhold.

Killins said in her application that she’d continue much of the work she started last year.

Under the proposed contract for next year, Killins would be paid $39,000 to provide services for 26 days at the same $1,500-a-day rate. The finance committee voted to recommend the agreement to the full board, which will take a final vote next Monday.

A year ago, Superintendent Carol Birks said unifying New Haven’s splintered pre-school programming was one of her top priorities.

She said she wanted to see the same standards and processes for its three pre-school programs: Head Start, which serves 800 children from poor families; School Readiness, which serves about 1,000 children; and Magnet Pre‑K, which serves about 600 children.

At the time, the district was scrambling just to keep those programs running. It had to secure its Head Start funding and rebuild its early childhood team.

That’s when Birks tapped Killins to step in as a consultant. The superintendent said she picked Killins, because she had been volunteering for the district for free since April 2018.

“Through my network and such, she just came to us, honestly, and said, ​‘How can I help?’” she said last fall. ​“She’s been volunteering her services and engaging others in the work of early learning to support our grant-writing process, coaching the team and help with the strategic thinking about how we scale up our processes.”

Under the previous agreement, signed in August 2018, the district agreed to pay Killins $1,500 per day for up to 40 days. That works out to $60,000 total.

For that money, Killins, who lives in New Haven’s Westville neighborhood, said she’d hold a ​“strategic planning retreat” for early learning leaders; study ​“the feasibility” of a city-wide marketing campaign and intake system for preschool spots; create partnerships with local providers and state agencies; recommend preschool sites; and provide ​“strategic direction” on crafting ​“individualized professional development plans for all staff.”

At the Finance & Operations Committee meeting on Monday, board members and parents asked whether Killins has delivered. And after making two recent hires, Elizabeth Gaffney as director of Head Start and Pamela Augustine-Jefferson as director of early learning programs, they wanted to know if her services were still necessary.

“What is it that she’s doing for us that you guys can’t do?”asked Ed Joyner, one of the board’s two elected members.

“It’s not to say that we can’t do it, but she has a different level of expertise,” said Mary Derwin, an administrator who assists with school readiness programs. ​“The idea is that she is not going to be here forever. She is to support us, to mentor us, to coach us to build capacity within the district.”

“What are the specific skills she’s coaching you on?” Joyner asked. ​“Can you give me an example?”

“Meeting management,” Derwin said. ​“Focus alignment, coherence.”

Joyner sighed. ​“Coaching educated professionals on meeting management?”

“Not how to run a meeting. It’s how to pace the momentum, the movement within a system, how to accelerate the growth, the movement of the body, whatever type of meeting it is,” Derwin said. ​“So, when we did strategic planning across all the systems, it’s pacing, finding commonalities, finding movement between them, guiding on possible next steps, then the district personnel here carries it out.”

“You’re saying we have to hire another person because we don’t have full-time professionals that don’t know how to do that?” Joyner pressed.

“No, I’m not saying that,” Derwin said. ​“It is an additional, outside perspective. Everyone has a coach, everyone can be mentored by someone else.”

Asked for documentation to support what Killins had done, school administrators said they didn’t have any available.

Going into next year, the city’s pre-school offerings remain scattered, with no one place for parents to sign up. Online, parents will find a year-old list of sites with openings, a brochure with 28 different numbers to call, and a near-indecipherable set of Y’s and N’s on a web-based application.

Sarah Miller, a parent at Columbus School, reminded board members that the district had been trying to roll out ​“play-based learning” in its early grades. ​“How does this contract advance the district’s commitment” to bring that model to ​“five sites this school year?” Miller asked in email.

Asked about her work, Killins told the Independent she didn’t want to recount what she’d done at every hour, but she said she’d put in much more time than she charged.

“I don’t think it is appropriate to provide a piecemeal accounting of the task I completed,” she said in an email. ​“I work an [eight to ten] hour day, never six. There are many hours that are not accounted for.”

Next year, if her contract is approved, Killins said she plans to keep providing coaching to top administrators, plus she said she’d also start holding monthly meetings to check in on the district’s overall plans, making site visits to better understand the district’s needs, and supporting leadership in boosting attendance in the early grades.