Paul Bass Photo
Harp at WNHH for “Mayor Monday.”
With Hillhouse High School in turmoil, Mayor Toni Harp decided to see for herself where the problems lie — and what can fix them.
Harp (pictured), who recently became president of the Board of Education with a vow to inject more “urgency” into improving the schools, spent five hours at Hillhouse this past Friday.
Along with Board of Ed member Michael Nast, she said, she met separately with groups of students, parents, security guards, teachers. Then schools Superintendent Garth Harries and board member Alicia Caraballo joined her to meet with the three principals of the four separate “academies” that operate within Hillhouse. (Harries said he was also present at the student discussion, and that he helped organize the visit.)
Harp said she came away from the meetings convinced of the need to preserve Hillhouse’s controversial schools-within-a-schools model, despite calls to return it to a single comprehensive school. She said the old model failed, and students and parents “love” the specialized academies, such as one that gets kids started early on public-safety careers.
Harp also came away convinced that — contrary to assertions made on WNHH radio last week by Superintendent Harries—administrators botched the transition to a new fourth academy this year in large part because of poor communications. She called for a host of changes at Hillhouse to make the new model work better and to reintegrate it as “one school.”
Hillhouse “has a history” as “one of the best schools in the nation,” Harp said Monday on her weekly “Mayor Monday” appearance on WNHH radio’s “Dateline New Haven” program. “I want to get it back to that place. … Hillhouse really has a ways to go and I want to get it there.”
Communications Breakdown
From talking to students and teachers and parents, the mayor said, she learned that changes occurred rapidly at the school with “little communication. There are still things they have to work out about how it operates. There has to be a better way for it to feel like one school.”
Last Friday Harries said that people who had complained about not knowing about important changes at Hillhouse this academic year — like the last-minute formation of a new academy — weren’t those who needed to know. He said the media misreported the matter. Everyone affected knew of the changes in plenty of time, he said.
“That’s not what I heard” at Hillhouse, Harp said Monday. “I’m sure that from the forest point of view that everyone who heard, heard. But there are little details around operations that just sort of fell through the cracks.”
That continues to be the case, she said. Students told her they didn’t find out about opportunities available to them at Hillhouse outside their academies, such as driver’s ed. Students and parents don’t get clear information about “what happens if your math class is full in the law and public safety academy but it’s not full in the IDEA academy. There was no real communication about how easily, without intense parent intervention, you can take the class in the other academy.”
One solution lies in having one of the three principals take charge of making sure information flows freely throughout all parts of the school and in generally “pulling together everything,” Harp said. (She convinced Harries to temporarily hire a retired school administrator, Charles Williams, last week to help sort out such matters at Hillhouse.)
She wasn’t suggesting hiring new administrators or naming one principal to serve as principal of the whole school; she said the three principals told her how their smaller more-focused academies enable them to go into all classrooms and make observations. One of the three principals, Zakkiyah Baker, a former citywide teacher of the year, has been moving toward such a first-among-equals coordinating roles; she served as the principals’ spokesperson at Friday’s meeting with Harp. Harp said she won’t “dictate” to Harries which of the three principals to select.
Seniors told Harp they feel separated, in their own academy, from the rest of Hillhouse. They miss the chance to “mentor” younger students, she said. She called for Hillhouse to establish “peer mentoring” opportunities to mix different grades together — even next year, when the senior-only academy gets phased out.
Teachers, meanwhile, told her they thought a previous version of the multiple-academies model at Hillhouse — with less formal tracked groupings but only one principal — worked fine. They also told her they’d like to see more standardization for how to grade students from different academies, especially since some students from one academy will sometimes take courses in another. “That makes sense,” Harp said.
Unlike critics of the small-academy system — such as the two newly elected members of the Board of Education, Edward Joyner and Darnell Goldson —Harp argued that returning to a single comprehensive high school would be a mistake. The old model failed, she said; four-year graduation rates have risen dramatically under the smaller academies, and they’re a hit with students and parents. She also argued that education research nationally shows that smaller, theme-focused schools produce better results.
Too Early To Judge Harries
Harp also said she was “surprised” at — i.e. in disagreement with — statements made by Joyner and Goldson upon their elections last week that, if they had to vote today, they would vote not to renew Harries’ contract. The board is scheduled to vote by year’s end on whether to extend the contract an extra year beyond its June 2017 expiration.
“You’ve got to look at the numbers” showing how Harries has fared against the goals set by New Haven’s school-reform drive, which he came to New Haven to implement, first as an assistant superintendent, then as superintendent. She said the board has been reviewing his performance based on those numbers in executive session.
She said it’s too early to tell how the vote will go in December on Harries’ contract. (“There are a lot of opinions on that board, I’ll tell you!”) She held off on predicting how she will vote.
“Are there areas in which any of us can improve what we do? Absolutely,” Harp said. “But when you begin to look at the numbers, the kind of change he was asked to implement, you’ve got to say he has created that change. Nobody likes [change]. It’s uncomfortable.”
Click on or download the above sound file to hear Harp’s entire episode of “Mayor Monday.” The discussion of Hillhouse begins at 31:33 in the file.
Click on or download the above sound file to hear Harries’ interview on WNHH last Friday.
Previous coverage of Hillhouse’s transition:
• Harries Defends Schools’ Progress
• Transition Rocky For Hillhouse Seniors
• Joyner, Goldson Call For One Hillhouse
• Principal Switch, Late News Cloud Hillhouse Start