Nora Grace-Flood photo
ECA students gathered on Audubon Street Monday.
Roughly 100 students at an Audubon Street arts magnet school walked out of their classes and into the city’s public arts district to protest staffing cutbacks and to stand in solidarity with affected teachers.
That mass student action took place on Monday afternoon on Audubon Street near Orange Street, right outside of the main building of Area Cooperative Educational Services (ACES) Educational Center for the Arts (ECA).
The protest followed news that ECA, a regional half-day high school arts program on Audubon Street, is overhauling the school’s department heads positions — currently filled by five teachers who double as broader liaisons and leaders for the program’s five divisions of study, including dance, visual arts, music, creative writing and theater — in order to reel in budget woes next school year.
This restructuring is “deeply personal because we’re such a small school,” 16-year-old ECA student Naomi Borenstein said at the protest.
“A lot of the department heads have families,” she said, worrying that some of the school’s top teachers would be forced to find work elsewhere due to salary cuts. “If they abolish the department heads, that will ruin ECA.”
Enrollment Drop, $500K Deficit
ACES Executive Director Tom Danehy said the school’s board voted on April 5 in favor of a budget that would demote the department heads from full-time equivalent employees to part-time teachers (all of ECA’s other teachers, like the school’s students themselves, are part-time, since ECA serves as a supplemental arts program for kids who are dually enrolled in other schools) and hire a new assistant principal to take on their outstanding administrative responsibilities.
He pointed to declining enrollment, a $500,000 operating budget deficit, and losses in funding as drivers of the staffing changes.
For example, he said that the student body has decreased from 319 students in 2018 to 266 today. That change, he said, may be due in large part to state rescission of funding back in 2018 which restricted New Haven youth already enrolled in magnet schools from attending ECA. In other words, the only New Haven students allowed to participate in ECA are those enrolled at Hillhouse and Wilbur Cross. Read more about that here.
In all, the five department heads’ associated salaries and benefits came to a total of $548,098 this past year, according to Danehy. By concentrating administrative work between two people – the school’s principal, the newly hired Kevin Buno, and an upcoming associate principal – rather than five, Danehy said ECA will cut those salaries to $219,508 the following year and save a total of $142,750 (the yet-to-be-hired associate principal’s salaries and benefits will come to $165,831).
In a Friday letter to parents, Danehy further announced that, “Recently, ACES engaged Odyssey Associates to study the program at ECA. The full report should be available soon, and we will share it with all of you once it is available. So far, we know the study will document an array of positive and negative data points: students’ and parents’ overall high satisfaction with the programming at ECA; blended elements of staff satisfaction and dissatisfaction; a large, unsustainable financial deficit to ACES due to declining enrollment from prior years; and supporting students as they navigate the increasing challenges of attending two schools.”
Danehy said that in addition to shaving some money from ECA’s budget, the restructuring would “prioritize teacher/student interactions” by granting department heads more time to work with students rather than on administrative responsibilities.
Department heads are currently tasked with a combination of direct teaching and administrative duties. With next school year’s approved budget, those department heads will have the opportunity to stay on as teachers working on a half-time basis, while the additional .3 full-time equivalent roles they previously served as administrators will all be re-assigned to the principal and his associate. Danehy suggested that department heads were previously spending the majority of their time on administrative responsibilities rather than teaching; with the change, they will spend all of their hours in the classroom.
Danehy noted that those five teachers should be able to maintain full-time employment if desired by picking up additional teaching gigs with ACES’ other schools. He also said that none of the teachers should lose their benefits, but that if the teachers did not take on additional work moving forward, they will have to pay higher shares on their insurance premiums than they currently do.
None of the five affected teachers responded to requests for comment from the Independent for this article.
This restructuring comes less than a year after ACES purchased an adjacent law office building on Orange Street for $975,000 with plans to convert that site into ECA school “programmatic” spaces.
"Really Sad That This Is All Happening"
Students took turns climbing onto a nearby windowsill to speak out against the restructure.
However, students — who have already been vocal alongside parents online in calling for greater transparency from school leadership and creating a petition to reverse the budget vote — spoke up in person and en masse about how the restructuring could impact what they described as a singular educational opportunity and student “safe space.”
Over the course of an hour on Monday, students took turns sharing stories of how their department heads have changed their lives, expressed their concerns that cutting back teacher salaries could lead to the departure of beloved staff, and mourned the stymieing of artistic development by monetary savings.
“My mom has been here for 20 years,” one ECA student named Joaquin, whose mother leads the visual arts department, told his peers. “She went here as a student. She’s an alumni and now she’s teaching here. Before that, my grandmother taught here.”
“You’re next!” another student cheered from the audience.
That continuation of artistic education now feels uncertain, Joaquin responded, as he observes his mom and other artists struggle to provide for their students in the face of limited funding.
“All the other department chairs are feeling really bad,” he said. “It’s just really sad that this is all happening.”
He said he has watched his mom labor after hours to organize group field trips and art shows to help the school’s painters, photographers and other visual artists find ways to grow and share their artistic talent outside of the classroom.
“Why do we need to cut them in order to save just a little bit of change?” he inquired.
Others, such a senior arts department student named Gabe, reiterated Joaquin’s point.
He pointed to “portfolio day,” an event arranged by his department chair which brings college representatives to school grounds to observe students’ portfolio of artwork.
“That couldn’t occur without the organizational capacity of a department head,” Gabe said, but the event often helps students identify which colleges they’re interested in attending and helps them secure competitive scholarships that can make exorbitant tuition possible to pay.
“I don’t get why we don’t pay our artists,” another student named Maya questioned aloud to the crowd. “Because we kind of run the world!”
On and off Monday’s makeshift Audubon Street stage (a nearby windowsill on which students stood in search of a platform), students described the department head system as a key way to help students who often feel isolated by traditional educational pathways to find a means forward in the field of their choice.
Students Phoenix Geyser, Emmy Rosario, and Oren Mendieta.
Phoenix Geyser, a 17-year-old senior pianist at ECA, credited her department head with helping her navigate persistent health issues and the complexities of applying to college as a homeschooled student of a single mom.
“When I first came to ECA, I had post concussive syndrome. It’s ironic, because I’m a musician, but I couldn’t handle a lot of loud noise and had a lot of trouble navigating spaces with a lot of people.”
Fortunately, one of her trusted teachers was also the head of her department. The department head helped her swap courses to accommodate her head injury, switching out percussion ensemble, for instance, for a choir class.
Later in her high school career, Geyser struggled with considering college applications as a homeschooled kid without a standard school advisor.
Her department head worked overtime to guide her through the process, Geyser said. Next year, Geyser will start studying piano at the Boston Conservatory. “It’s basically all because of her,” she said of her teacher.
Students repeatedly told stories of how the department heads faced with the administrative realities of persistently shrinking budgets brought their passion for both their students and their craft to create solutions, like meeting with teens one-on-one to personally connect kids who couldn’t afford supplies not provided by the school with materials from their own home.
Naomi Borenstein: Staff restructuring "deeply personal."
On Monday midday before the walkout, Danehy sent an email to parents thanking them for all of the feedback and critiques.
“We are looking forward to assessing the information we have today, the predictions we’ve made, details that unfold in the near term, and the new solutions to vexing issues that ECA faces,” he wrote. “We will be in touch with more information as it becomes available, and we ask that you be patient as those details unfold and are available. Budgets for next year are based on details, assumptions, needs, wants, and choices. All of those details change over time. To that end, know that we hear you as we move forward.”