Aliyya Swaby Photo
Nitza Diaz “hurts” to see English language learners (ELL) struggle to grasp the material, because she was there, too, as a teenager from Puerto Rico. She said she’s running for the Board of Education elected position in part to make the district’s ELL policies more consistent across all schools.
An education consultant at the quasi-public Connecticut State Education Resource Center (SERC), Diaz works each day with districts across the state on creating school-level initiatives to engage families of various cultures. She said that she’s not a politician, but that she knows how to create and implement policies that actually work in schools.
“If I were part of the Board of Education, that perspective around best practices around different areas — that perspective is valuable,” she said.
After a 2013 charter revision referendum, New Haven will for the first time hold elections for two Board of Education seats. The city has been divided into two voting districts for the upcoming Sep. 16 Democratic primary. Diaz filed papers this week to run for the District 2 seat as a Democrat and will be facing former West Hills Alder Darnell Goldson and former Alder Angela Russell, assuming they make the ballot. Edward Joyner runs uncontested for the District 1 seat, since his opponent Anais Nunez dropped out earlier this month.
Diaz, who lives in Beaver Hills decided to join the race just last week, more than a month after the first wave of candidates filed papers to run. She said until recently was the president of the board of directors for the Fair Haven Community Health Center board; now that she isn’t, she has time to campaign for the education board position.
She decided to run because she said no other candidate in District 2 has a background in “policy-making and education.”
When Diaz came with her family to New Haven’s Fair Haven neighborhood from Puerto Rico in 1987 as a 15-year-old, she could understand English but spoke very little. She said she would have fallen through the cracks if it hadn’t been for a counselor, who said, “You are smart. You’re going to go to AP classes.”
So Diaz enrolled in an Advanced Placement Chemistry class at Wilbur Cross High School, with a dictionary and a student tutor, and tried to make sense of the complex science in an unfamiliar language.
“After being here a year,” she said. “I would say, ‘One moment, please.’ When I see kids struggle, I know what that’s like. It hurts me because I know what they’re going through.”
The district sometimes expects English language learners with just two or three years of academic English to “know enough to compete with native speakers,” Diaz said.
She said she would push for “holistic policies” as a member of the Board of Education, policies that are consistent across all schools. For example, all teachers, including paraprofessionals, at all schools should receive professional development twice a year on strategies to help English language learners, she said. “Everyone has to be on the same page.”
Part of her job as a bilingual family engagement consultant is helping schools make sure family members of all backgrounds feel “invited” and included in their children’s education, she said. “If I feel not invited as a family member, I’m not going to come here,” she said.
Diaz grew up in a family of educators in which “everyone was a teacher or a principal.” She has been an SERC consultant for seven years; before that, she did research on substance abuse at the University of Connecticut Health Center and worked for the district coordinating Family Resource Center initiatives at Hill Central School.
Her two children do not go to New Haven Public Schools. Diaz declined to publicly comment on the reason, but said they also do not attend charter schools.
She said she would have voted against a proposed financial partnership between New Haven Public Schools and charter network Achievement First on a new charter school, Elm City Imagine. Charter schools, she said, “have their great aspects and not-so-great aspects.”
The not-so-great parts include the high numbers of suspensions and expulsions reported at Achievement First schools, she said, as well as the lack of transparency. The state passed a law in July requiring more accountability and transparency from its charter schools.
“Until we really know what’s going on … why do we need another?” Diaz said.“If charter schools were created to talk about how to include all kids, how come it doesn’t seem like all kids are included?”
She teaches fifth and sixth graders at her church — Vertical Church in West Haven — and said she focuses on building their critical reading and thinking skills “from the perspective of God.” In one world studies unit, she led an interactive lesson about global inequity between countries, by giving students different numbers of “points,” to represent a country’s resources.
She told each student, “‘These are your 100 points and you need to survive. What is it that you will choose?’ Some countries have 500, some have 100.”
Diaz said it’s important to “look at places and people from a student-based perspective. There has to be one thing you think is amazing about each student.”