Wintergreen Parents Seek To Save School

Though she lives in New Haven, Sandra Fitzpatrick sends her two children to the Wintergreen Inter-district Magnet School (WIMS) in Hamden. ​“We felt like we won the lottery when we got in,” she said, because of the school’s diversity, academics, and dedicated teachers.

Fitzpatrick (at center in photo) and other Wintergreen parents now feel they may have lost a lottery: They jammed a tense school board meeting Wednesday night in an effort to save Wintergreen from having to close or relocate.

The Hamden School board held the meeting in the district’s 60 Putnam Ave. administrative building. It was intended as a workshop for the board to discuss plans for a widespread restructuring of its public elementary schools, which it is scheduled to vote on at another meeting on Thursday night.

The restructuring plan — click here to read a detailed ​“explainer” article about it — seeks to cut costs, address declining enrollment and achieve greater racial balance by closing Shepherd Glen and Church Street elementary schools and adding a wing to Hamden Middle School to create a new citywide sixth grade.

The plan also includes having Hamden reclaim the town-owned 670 Wintergreen Ave. building housing WIMS, a regional magnet run not by the town Board of Ed but by Area Cooperative Educational Services (ACES). About a quarter of its 550 students live in New Haven. The Board of Ed now wants to incorporate the building into their school district as another Hamden public elementary school to accommodate students leaving the shut-down schools. According to the Boston-based consulting firm District Management Group, this scenario could save the town an annual $3.8 million.

According to Evelyn Rossetti-Ryan, chief of marketing and outreach at ACES, ACES learned of the plan from the school board a day after a May 23 vote to reclaim the building.

The town is counting on most of the Hamden students enrolled in WIMS to shift to attending regular Hamden public schools.

Since the town owns the property, the mayor and the Legislative Council have the right to end their agreement with ACES and force them to remove WIMS from the building.

ACES has said that it is committed to maintaining the Wintergreen program, even if it is forced to leave the building at 670 Wintergreen Ave. According to Rossetti-Ryan, it’s reviewing options at this point.

The prospect of the town reclaiming the building, however, has been met with stiff opposition from Wintergreen parents.

Many of those in attendance at Wednesday night’s meeting wore green shirts that said ​“ACES WIMS Works!” in white lettering across the front.

Among them was Thomas Figlar, a parent of three WIMS students who has served as a leader of the parents who are advocating for ACES to remain in the building.

“If you take WIMS back, that hurts not only WIMS, that hurts other schools,” he told the large group of parents, teachers, and town officials assembled in the room. He, like many WIMS parents, had come partly to express his solidarity with the parents from other schools in the district, especially the Church Street and Shepherd Glen schools, which will likely be shut down.

“Workshop” Turns Testy

The meeting was intended as a workshop for the school board to review the plans that it will vote on Thursday night, and was supposed to be closed to public comment.

However, as soon as the meeting began, the board voted to hold an executive session in a closed room before the workshop started.

After the board left the room, WIMS parent Teran Loeppke suggested that those assembled have a discussion. Loeppke is a committed Wintergreen parent. His son ​“absolutely loves” the school, he said. ​“He comes home happy at the end of the day.” Loeppke said he especially likes the diversity, the focus on the arts, and what feels ​“like a more student-centered approach.”

“Does anyone feel like their voice hasn’t been heard?” he asked the crowd. About half the parents in the room nodded and raised their hands in agreement.

Many parents also raised concerns about the transparency of the board. According to Figlar, the town’s decision to take back the Wintergreen building came as a surprise. ​“No one was aware that the board was voting on it,” he told the crowd. Figlar criticized the town for not being transparent enough and, he claimed, mistreating WIMS parents.

Not to be crude, he told the Independent, but ​“we’re almost the red-headed step child.”

He said that certain board members keep telling WIMS parents that ACES is lying to them. In his experience, however, ACES has been transparent and ​“business-like,” and they always alert parents as soon as they get updates.

As the discussion wore on, it grew more and more heated.

“I don’t like the divide in this room right now,” parent WIMS parent Jodie Melton remarked at one point. ​“I don’t like how they’ve set schools against one another.

“We need to join forces… We need to stop the madness, and fighting amongst one another is not going to solve the problem.”

After the meeting, Loeppke echoed some of Melton’s feelings. ​“It feels like this has been a very top-down freight train,” he said. ​“What that did was place parents from different schools in different silos.”

Parents were also concerned that taxes are rising but services have not improved. When one parent questioned why the school board wanted to spend so much money on the proposed changes when the underlying problem is state underfunding, Legislative Council member Justin Farmer stood up to speak.

“Investment has to happen,” he told the crowd. ​“Yes we’re going to spend a lot of money, but we can’t just not do anything and expect the situation to get better… From the get-go we’ve had too many schools, because as a town we’ve been racially segregated for generations.”

“Something Has To Go”

With too many schools to operate and not enough funding, ​“something has to go,” school board Chair Christopher Daur told the Independent.

That was why town officials contracted District Management Group and Milone & MacBroom to help them figure out how they could streamline their public-school system.

After board members were finished with Wednesday night’s executive session, they reentered the meeting room and heard a presentation from Sam Ribnick, senior director of District Management Group. Ribnick explained ​“scenario 9” in the redistricting plan, which is the plan that the board is most likely to choose Thursday night. It would involve closing the Church Street and Shepherd Glen schools and incorporating the Wintergreen building into the district.

According to Ribnick, if nothing changes, the school board will have an $8.7 million deficit by the 2022 – 2023 school year. If board members follow scenario 9, the district can reduce that deficit by $3.8 million, meaning that the deficit would instead be $4.9 million by 2022 – 2023.

These estimates are based on a few assumptions. Ribnick explained that ​“the key thing is how many students you’re still obliged to pay tuition for.”

Therein lies the most contentious and the most critical assumption: namely, that Hamden can shake off all of the costs that WIMS poses to it.

Under the current arrangement, ACES leases the property essentially for free. It pays the town $1 per year. ACES covers all of the costs of maintenance and renovation, to which Rossetti-Ryan attributed the school’s excellent condition.

The town pays ACES tuition for every student it sends there, and gets reimbursed by the state. As long as the proportion of Hamden students at the school is less than 55 percent, the state reimburses the town $7,900 per student per year. However, if the percentage of Hamden students at the school exceeds 55 percent, the school is no longer considered an inter-district magnet school, school board member Lynn Campo told the Independent, and the state reimburses the town only $3,000 per student per year.

In recent years, the percentage of students from other towns, especially Meriden and Wallingford, has decreased. That has meant that Hamden has been in danger of exceeding that 55 percent limit and has had to make efforts to limit its enrollment at the school to avoid going over that level.

While Hamden is in a tricky position with regards to WIMS, the situation is no easier for ACES. When WIMS was founded 21 years ago, state funding for magnet schools was much more abundant than it is now; at the time the state was investing heavily in regional magnets in response to a court order in the Sheff v. O’Neill school desegregation lawsuit.

Yet over the past few years, state funding for magnet schools has dried up at an even faster rate than funding for public schools. Rossetti-Ryan said that this has forced ACES to increase the tuition it charges the town, though only ​“nominally.” According to Christopher Daur, that figure is somewhere in the range of 3 – 5 percent each year.

Decreases in funding have forced ACES to cut some of its programming at WIMS. According to school board member Lynn Campo, who serves as the board’s representative to ACES, the school used to offer Spanish for all grade levels; funding shortages forced it to cut the program back to only 7th and 8th graders.

Contrasting Numbers

All of these factors have led the school board to decide it needs to shake off these costs. This is where scenario 9 comes in.

The model assumes that 70 percent of the 300-or-so Wintergreen students who live in Hamden would choose to go to Hamden public schools if ACES is forced out of the building. The model also assumes that the remaining 30 percent of those students would go to other schools that do not charge Hamden tuition for the students it sends there.

If these assumptions hold true, taking back the Wintergreen building would save the school district about $1.9 million. That is almost half of the total $3.8 million that the plan would save them. Part of the savings would come from revenue the town would get from the 70 percent of students who would choose to go to Hamden public schools. The other part of the savings would come from not having to pay tuition for Hamden students to attend WIMS.

Many WIMS parents questioned those assumptions.

“The 70 percent is not based on any surveys, any data they have; it comes from a hunch,” Sandra Fitzpatrick bemoaned.

The 70 percent estimate came from Milone & MacBroom, which analyzes demographic data.

Meanwhile, WIMS parents have conducted their own survey, which shows drastically different numbers from those in the Milone & MacBroom prediction. According to the results of a survey conducted by Figlar and other parents that Figlar sent to the Independent, 95 percent of WIMS parents would move with WIMS if ACES has to find the school another building.

Even if ACES has to forfeit the Wintergreen building, if it is able to keep WIMS open in a different location, Hamden would still have to pay tuition for all Hamden students that go there. That means that if Figlar’s survey is accurate, the town would save close to none of the money that District Management Group’s model has them saving by taking back the Wintergreen building. That is, rather than saving an annual $1.9 million, the town would still have to pay about that much in tuition to ACES, and the total savings from the plan would only be about $2 million, rather than the $3.8 million currently projected.

There is also a chance that ACES and the town will reach an agreement in which ACES would buy the property from the town. As a part of the package, ACES would likely allow the town to use some of its properties on Skiff Street as swing space while the West Woods, Alice Peck, and possibly the Dunbar Hill schools undergo renovations, a function that the Wintergreen building is supposed to fulfill if ACES has to vacate it.

The price that ACES has been offering to the town, however, is too low, Lauren Garrett argued. ACES has offered the appraised value of $11-$12 million. Yet if the school were to be built anew to the condition it’s currently in, it would cost around $36 million.

Elusive Deal

Mayor Curt Leng spoke to ACES executive director Thomas Danehy before the meeting to try to reach a deal. He said that every time he and Danehy talk, they make progress, but unfortunately they had not reached an agreement yet.

If no agreement is reached by Thursday night, the future of Wintergreen School will remain unclear. It’s also unclear whether or not the Board of Ed would proceed to vote on the whole restructuring plan.

“It’s difficult when something has more value in actuality than it does on paper,” he told the Independent, referring to the Wintergreen school. He explained that the school and the building have enormous value to both the parents and the town.

Even if the plan does save the money that the models predict, some parents worry that these changes are not taking the town in the right direction. Patricia Cespedes, the mother of two Wintergreen students from southeast Hamden, said that many parents are concerned that ​“all this wouldn’t even close the gap of the deficit problem.”

“Moving kids from one school to another has happened many times in the past, and it doesn’t provide a long-term solution. In two or three years we’re back to the same situation,” she argued.

The meeting appeared to do little to assuage many parents’ fears.

“I feel like I learned just how complicated and unfinished this whole thing is and just how staggering it is that they would be able to vote tomorrow,” Teran Loeppke said after the meeting.

Council member Justin Farmer also acknowledged that it will be difficult for the board to make a good decision Thursday night. It’s too soon, he said, but the problem is that if the town doesn’t make a decision now, the funding the state has already promised for certain school renovations will disappear.

Thursday night’s board meeting will take place at 7 pm at Hamden Middle School. A large crowd is anticipated, so the board is limiting public comments to two minutes each. If all goes as planned, it will vote on which schools to close.

While Hamden has a long, tumultuous road ahead, Patricia Cespedes is just hoping that her kids will be able to continue the experience they’ve been having at Wintergreen: ​“Will Wintergreen remain a school with love is the main concern.”