Christopher Peak Photo
Darnell Goldson filing papers in the clerk’s office.
Darnell Goldson, the Board of Education’s current president, is seeking for another four-year term to mount a fight for more school funding from the state, even if it means filing suit.
He dropped papers off with the city clerk on Monday afternoon to run for a new term, just before a heated board meeting where parents and teachers called for a new superintendent.
After a revision to the charter in 2013, the Board of Education became a “hybrid” body with two elected members, in addition to the mayor and four appointees. The two elected members each represent half the city; Goldson’s district covers the northern half of the city, from Amity to Downtown to Quinnipiac Meadows.
Goldson said that he’s running on his record of cleaning up the district’s finances.
Since he arrived, Goldson has demanded more information from administrators about who’s doing business with the school system. “When I first got on there, the board wasn’t even approving contracts,” he said. “They were getting contracts that were nine months in already.”
He’s made sure that all contracts are now reviewed by the finance committee before checks can be written, though he has sometimes opposed the way some vendors like Integrated Wellness Group have been treated during that vetting.
Last year, as board president, Goldson also shrank a budget deficit from $19.4 million down to a $5.6 million by taking tough votes to close three schools and lay off two dozen school counselors, library media specialists and teachers.
Overall, Goldson gave himself a “B++” on his handling of financial issues, saying that the board still needs to implement a procurement policy that will put stricter controls on how contractors are picked and evaluated.
Goldson also said that he worked to make the board more transparent, after the Freedom of Information Commission found it had repeatedly violated the law. He now regularly reminds the administration to post its documents online and has created advisory committees that include members of the public.
In perhaps his most consequential vote, Goldson voted to pick Carol Birks as superintendent over Gary Highsmith and Pamela Brown. He said that, given the information he had at the time, he thought he’d made the right decision.
“We made the decision at the time that we thought was the right decision. History will tell very soon whether it was or not,” he said. “I think that the superintendent has had some missteps and some stumbles, but she was fairly new to the process. I don’t have a crystal ball, so I can’t look back in time and say that any of [two other finalists] could have done any better.
“But I think that we are going through a process now with the superintendent, moving forward, revealing what the steps are moving forward, whether she’s going to stay or go. It’s based on the evaluation that we’re going to put together. I’ve been a little frustrated, but again, looking backwards is a lot easier than looking forward.”
Targeting The State
With another term, Goldson said he’d put the pressure on the state to come through with more funding for New Haven.
Currently, Connecticut underfunds its Educational Cost Sharing (ECS) formula, the primary mechanism for redistributing wealth to school districts, and it doesn’t plan on paying out the full amount that it owes until 2028. This year, that means New Haven is being shortchanged close to $19.5 million.
Even then, experts say that the ECS formula drastically underestimates how much it costs to educate students, especially if they are living in poverty, learning English as a second language or growing up with disabilities.
But after the State Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit seeking more equitable funding among Connecticut’s towns, poor cities lost much of their leverage to say they weren’t getting enough funding to provide even a “minimally adequate” education.
Goldson said his focus will be “forcing the state to provide more resources to this Board of Education,” especially around inter-district magnet schools that have been penalized for not being racially diverse enough.
“We’re going to ask first, but asking has been done for a lot of years, and it hasn’t resulted in a positive outcome,” he added. “I think it’s time for us to actually lay all the cards on the table and force the state to meet its constitutional obligations and fund education adequately for this city.”
A Hillhouse High School class president who previously served as a Democratic alder for West Hills, Goldson now works as a lobbyist for TicketNetwork, a South Windsor-based company that resells tickets to music concerts and athletic games.
Through another company, RCN Capital, his boss, Don Vaccaro, once gave a form of payday loans to a school contractor and is now suing the city to recover nearly $200,000 in missing payments. Goldson said he hadn’t been involved and that attorneys advised him not to comment further on the case.
In 2015, when he was first elected to the board, Goldson ran unopposed, after William Wynn, a Republican, dropped out of the race.