Thomas Breen photo
Goldson: Sheff integration efforts have failed.
The Board of Education’s president doubled down on his support for researching a magnet school tuition plan for suburban students who attend New Haven schools, and described the inter-district magnet system to date as a financial burden and a diversity failure.
Board of Education President Darnell Goldson issued that call Monday night at the board’s regular monthly meeting in the Celentano School cafetorium at 400 Canner St.
Goldson, citing a recent New Haven Independent article that revealed that the state sent nearby towns $13.8 million last year for students who attend New Haven-operated inter-district magnet schools, pressed New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) administrators to conduct an in-depth study of whether or not to charge suburbs that send students to city-run magnet schools.
“We were hoping this experiment would work,” Goldson said about the magnet school system’s promotion of voluntary school desegregation across town lines following the 1996 Connecticut Supreme Court’s landmark Sheff v. O’Neill decision. “Well, it has not.”
Monday night’s Board of Ed meeting.
The city currently operates 16 inter-district magnet schools, which serve around 8,000 students. Those schools receive extra money from the state if they meet two diversity requirements: If at least a quarter of the students come from a surrounding suburb, and if at least a quarter of the students are white, Asian-American, Native, or a mix of those races.
Yet last year, despite all the effort and money the school system has spent advertising its magnets and paying for suburban busing, only one of those schools, Engineering and Science University Magnet School (ESUMS), met those diversity requirements, and multiple schools have had state funding withheld for becoming even more racially isolated.
“In terms of charging tuition to magnet school students, is that being considered as a budget mitigation item?” Goldson asked after Assistant Superintendent Keisha Redd-Hannans reported that the school system has reduced its project deficit for the current fiscal year to around $13 million. That $17 million reduction from the initial estimated deficit of around $30 million, she said, came through a variety of measures, including cutting bus routes, leveraging Education Cost Sharing (ECS) Alliance grants and Medicaid reimbursements, and ending the lease of the former Riverside Academy school building.
Assistant Superintendent Keisha Redd-Hannans (center) and Superintendent Carol Birks (left).
“That is definitely something we would love to look into,” Redd-Hannans replied. She recalled that the board had investigated the magnet school tuition option back in 2016, but that the school system had done little research into the topic since then.
“If that’s something that the board wants to visit,” she said, “we definitely are interested in exploring that as an option.”
Goldson argued that Redd-Hannans, Superintendent Carol Birks, and the rest of the NHPS administrative team should, per state law, be making explicit recommendations to the Board of Education, which is then charged with reviewing, adjusting, and approving or rejecting said recommendations. The board shouldn’t have to come to the school system with a budget mitigation idea first, he said, in order for the school system to start their research.
“We’re actually researching that topic now,” Redd-Hannans said about magnet tuition. That topic will be brought up at the board’s next Finance and Operations Committee meeting on Monday, July 16, she said.
Without going so far as to say that the city should end its participation in the inter-district magnet school system altogether, Goldson said that the board should not feel beholden to decisions made two decades ago when faced with present realities of persistent segregation and financial penalties from the state.
“What this board decided to do 15 to 20 years ago doesn’t necessarily hold through now,” he said. “We are being punished for these [suburban] kids not coming here.”
The portfolio school model is not a bad model in and of itself, he said, but the city certainly doesn’t want half-empty school buildings and buildings in need of serious capital repair.
Goldson and Mayor Toni Harp both acknowledged that the Connecticut General Assembly passed a bill in 2016 that requires school districts to give a one-year heads up to municipalities they plan to charge for students sent across town lines to inter-district magnet schools.
The existence of that prohibitive legislation, Goldson said, should be all the more incentive for Superintendent Birks and her team to expedite its research into magnet school tuition.
“i haven’t talked to one person,” he said, “who thinks that this [magnet school] experiment has not failed.”
Some argue that New Haven has already reaped the benefits of state funding to build magnet schools, and the inclusion of suburban students was part of the deal. State support a counted for the lion’s share of $1.7 billion in school construction. The city still gets money another inter-district magnet funding stream, which pays $7,085 per suburban student and $3,000 per city student. The legislature initially paid ECS money to sending districts to get buy-in on those programs.
In an interview Tuesday on WNHH FM, Amber Moye, who is challenging Goldson for the Democratic Party nomination for the elected Board of Ed seat, said “I absolutely agree with Darnell” about charging the suburbs tuition.