New Haven’s school system took it on the chin, as did Yale and City Hall, as Dwight gathered for a “state of the Community” summit.
Some 150 activists, neighbors and politicians gathered for the two-plus-hour event Saturday afternoon in the sun-filled Dwight Community Center at Edgewood and Day.
And they didn’t mince words.
Skepticism and more emerged in an impassioned cry by State Sen. Toni Harp about how education is failing local kids. She continued and expanded on themes she first went public with at a January Chamber of Commerce event.
“We have 36 percent of our third-graders not reading at proficiency,” Harp told the Dwight crowd Saturday. “And do you know that’s how they plan prison beds for the future, by that statistic?! Something is deeply wrong in the city, when down the street at Amistad, they are doing the job.
“I say trying hard is just not enough any more. And if you speak out about it in this town to hold the school system to accountability, they threaten you, they run someone against you! It all starts with the kids, and our numbers here are embarrassing. We are failing them.”
Harp (at far left in top photo) also made pointed criticisms of New Haven’s out-of-school suspension numbers versus in-school. “Ninety-two percent of suspensions are out of school, with some 6,000 a year, while only 142 by recent count were in school. What end does that serve to have these kids on the street? Especially, especially when so many of the suspensions are for silly things like wearing a hat wrong! I know the superintendents not only here but in the state are upset, but so be it. It’s the kids that matter.”
Which prompted Gina Calder‘s call for a community center. Gina Calder, a first-time alderwoman who represents Dwight’s Ward 2, organized Saturday’s event along with her two Democratic Party ward co-chairs, Greg Smith and Mark Griffin.
“If not the Q house, then one that serves these kids, the elderly, the re-entering society population, all of them,” Calder said. “And what’s wrong with re-opening the Q house, on which I know people are working, and another one as well?”
Where would the funds come from? Calder suggested partnership with City Hall was critical. Other voices said, in effect, that we have to stop thinking of all good things coming from others, and that as parents and volunteers we can do what needs to be done without City Hall, or Hartford, or Washington, D.C.
Prisoner Re-Entry
State Rep. Patricia Dillon (in the red in the top photo) said she was taken by surprise with news she heard at the meeting that as part of the upcoming budget City Hall would be proposing an office of prison re-entry. She wasn’t sure that, given all the programs out there, it was such a good idea.
“I’m fairly certain it’s happening out of [Community Services Director] Kica Matos’s office,” Gina Calder said. “But I’m not sure we have enough data on what the people coming back from prison really need here,” she said. “I’ve been talking to [Dixwell youth program] CTRibat,” for example, “who have been following some of these people over a period of a year or 18 months, and they’re beginning to get a clearer picture. I mean if many of these people end up living with relatives, maybe scarce resources should be put into jobs instead of housing. We need more data before we act, and, I think, we need the services to be decentralized out in the communities.”
Darrell Brooks, the Ward 26 Democratic co-chair, said that none of these problems could be solved without a plan, and that a plan was no good unless it was presented to the powers that be with clout. Which brought the organizers to their point: voter sign-up and registration, which was available within a dozen feet of everyone at tables set up at the center.
“When Gina goes downtown,” he said, “she will speak with a stronger voice if you vote! I sit on the board of the New Haven Family Alliance, out of which the Street Outreach Workers operate. They’ve helped to cut shootings in half. If we want work like that expanded, vote!”
He pointed out that five of the wards in the city — those in Westville, Morris Cove, and East Rock — deliver more votes than the total from the rest of the city. “Our goal, “ said Calder, “is to have at least a 50 percent turnout of voters in the next election in November.”
In the last several, Ward 2’s turnout has been slowly rising from the mid-30 percent range, but it remains in the low 40s.
Mother Yale
Is Yale, many of whose students live and volunteer in Ward 2, doing enough? The assembly was divided. Some like Sister Nikki Brown (pictured above with Dillon and Calder), the prison outreach director of Thompson Street’s Salvation & Deliverance Church, said she didn’t think so.
“Sometimes I have trouble understanding these kids myself! How can Yale kids relate to them!”
David Kohn, a Yale sophomore and activist who coordinates the university’s some 20-plus tutors at Wilbur Cross High School, said he may not be able to contribute anything to the kids’ techniques for survival on the street. But he can teach them algebra one, and wasn’t that worth something?
Greg Smith, the ward co-chair, and many others agreed, some pointing to the very fine hall in which they were sitting, built through the collaboration of Yale and its architecture students.
Another active neighbor present, Christine Bartlett-Josie, saw the anger at Yale as misdirected. Click here to read a story about her observations and thoughts.