Hillhouse Principals Warm Students To Transition

As students poured out of Hillhouse High School’s classrooms for dismissal, Zakiyyah Baker enthusiastically greeted some students, directed hallway lingerers to after-school activities, and answered questions when she could. Including questions about whose principal she is this year.

One student — enrolled in the Law, Public Safety and Health (LPSH) Academy, one of four separate schools-within-a-school at Hillhouse — started to ask Baker for ​“a favor.”

“Ask Principal [David] Diah,” Baker informed her with a pat on the shoulder, then continued on her rounds.

Last school year, Baker was the student’s principal. She ran LPSH. This year she’s running two of the other academies: College Career Readiness, which is being phased out this year; and a brand new Social Media and Art (SMART) Academy, which is being phased in. It’s the latest step in an experiment launched last year in breaking up city’s large comprehensive high schools into mini-schools with special themes and more individual focus. (Click here, here and here to read stories about public debate over that approach.)

“There are definitely kids that miss Ms. Baker,” observed Bill Garraty, a coordinator of the LPSH program, which gets students started early on police, fire and EMT careers. ​“She is a mom to all these kids.” (Baker has also taken a leading role in bringing ​“YouthStat,” an effort to support students at risk for dropping out, to the school.)

The student isn’t the only one who’s been confused in these first weeks of school. The Board of Ed announced the changes in academies, along with a shuffle of principals for each, several days before school opened, leaving people scrambling to get used to a new order.

And it has left Baker, Diah and Fallon Daniels, principal of the Innovation, Design, Entrepreneurship and Action (IDEA) Academy, in charge of a challenging transition. Baker and Daniels came to Hillhouse in 2014 to launch the schools-within-a-school experiment. (Click here to read a story about their initial efforts.) Now the three principals have a difficult job ahead of them this year as they seek to stabilize the academies while making the school feel like one Hillhouse. During a visit to the school last week, they described efforts to improve communication throughout the building and incorporate students’ suggestions on decisions ranging from curriculum … to the color scheme.

Each academy paints its walls a different color: green for IDEA and light blue for LPSH. The new SMART doesn’t yet have an official color. Students and staff will vote on one. Baker said she secretly hopes they choose purple.

Making Changes

Students have repeatedly made public comments asking for better communication about the changes at their school. At last Monday’s Board of Education meeting, junior Teaira Edwards said she doesn’t feel like ​“the school is together.” She said administrators are ​“playing the cards they got,” instead of being open with the student body.

“I don’t want to be separated from people I used to be friends with,” she said. ​“What is going to happen the rest of this year and what is going to happen next year?”

Superintendent Garth Harries said the district could have managed this year’s transition better. ​“There are certainly things we could have and should have been better at in the process here, in terms of communicating,” he said. But he said ​“there has been significant communication” with those who would be most affected by the changes.

Principal Baker has watched changes come to city schools at close range throughout her career.

She grew up in New Haven, graduated from Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School. Then she returned there to teach — and became the city’s 2011 teacher of the year. She was placed in an experimental New Haven program that trained teachers to become principals.

Baker said she understands that Hillhouse students — largely upperclassmen, who knew the school before the changes — feel confused. Teachers and students helped to design the transition to the academy system two years ago. But this year, the change was more sudden. ​“There’s a lot of concern in the external community and on our own campus because there are a lot of changes,” Baker said.

The confusion affects not just students, but staff as well. To remedy that confusion, teachers within each academy gather every Monday at 12:45 p.m. for a professional development session ​“to make sure they’re on the same page for the vision” of the school, Baker said. At SMART Academy, that conversation is a bit less concrete — more about a future ​“vision” than immediate plans. ​“What does it look like for a student to graduate from a Social Media and Art Academy?” Baker said.

Teachers meet as a whole school once a month.

Principal Daniels (pictured) noted that the school is divided between ninth and tenth graders who are ​“new to the structure” and juniors and seniors getting used to a second major change in two years. ​“We have to build the communication tools” for each group, she said.

They’re still working on creating ways for students to have input. Baker meets regularly with seniors who want to discuss school structure. One LPSH student wrote a letter asking how to integrate more internship opportunities and college visits into the school year. So administrators organized for all the juniors to take a trip to the University of New Haven at the start of the year.

Still, Baker said, ​“we have lots of different people from different avenues being like, ​‘What’s the vision for the school again?’ We need to provide that clarity.” Part of that process includes ​“acknowledging when [students] are right.”

House News

When seniors argued for bringing back ​“House News,” Hillhouse’s TV news broadcast, which slipped in the transition, administrators built a class into the schedule. Dennis Bellamy, a Hillhouse alum, returned to his alma mater to teach the Intro to Film class and spearhead the project.

As the CCR Academy is in the process of being phased out, those seniors ​“didn’t feel like they had much of a voice,” Bellamy said. In a few weeks, they will have very prominent voices in the school community — every morning for five to 10 minutes on television.

“I want them to think outside the box,” Bellamy said. They will conduct interviews once a week with administrators of different academies about their career paths and put together short entertaining films.

Hillhouse senior Matias Guzman said they decided to provide entertainment and music as well as school news ​“to incorporate a broader audience.” During Thursday morning’s class, he performed an improvisational scene as a police officer who pulled over classmate Malik Daniels for driving 30 miles per hour over the speed limit.

Daniels said the class helped him work on skills like making eye contact and speaking extemporaneously.

None had acted before that class. Some were more nervous about it than others. Senior Janae Jones needed several takes for her improv scene Thursday, nerves getting the better of her each time. Eventually, she was able to overcome her shyness and tell her father exactly why she should be able to party instead of doing homework.

Bellamy knows what it’s like to feel powerless as a student. When he was at Hillhouse, an administrator told him he would never amount to anything, that he wasn’t smart enough. ​“He looked at me and judged me,” Bellamy said. His mother died when he was five years old and his father was ​“inactive in my life. I didn’t have much support. When I came to school, I was looking for that encouragement.”

Bellamy encouraged his film students to be that source for others in the school through House News.

In the past, House News ​“always kept us updated on stuff we missed,” said senior Darius Wise (pictured above), including sports and the weather. He wants to do that and more for his community this year.

Three Schools In One

Other students are asking for more out of their Hillhouse experience. Patricia Jimenez said Hillhouse is preparing her well for a career as a pediatrician or lawyer. But she wishes the school were more cohesive again, and that she had access to opportunities in the other academies.

Jimenez and LPSH classmate Precious DuBose both said the switch from Baker to Diah as LPSH principal was done in an organized way. Still, DuBose said, some students don’t understand the exact details of the changes or know exactly what opportunities interest them.

DuBose plans to be a firefighter and has already taken a course in emergency medical response. The academy system ​“felt like a better learning environment,” she said.

“It helps prepare you to think about what you want to do,” Jimenez added. But she said she misses the opportunity to take classes with her friends in other academies.

“I wish we could do the academies and be able to all be together as a group,” Jimenez said.

Right now, LPSH is ​“a whole other school to me,” DuBose said. She said she knew about academic and career opportunities only in her own academy, not in the other two.

Jimenez said she wants to take advantage of the SMART Academy’s focus on technology. ​“We need that, too. This generation is based on technology,” she said.

Superintendent Harries said he has heard from many juniors and seniors who feel similarly to DuBose and Jimenez. ​“Most of what I’m hearing is the issue of, ​‘We want to connect with other students. How are we going to figure out who Mr. and Mrs. Hillhouse are?’ The leadership group is focusing on how those things can happen.”

He said student connections between academies is important, but so is ensuring underclassmen get ​“personalized attention from teachers. If the choice is letting students fall between the cracks and creating some degree of unsettlement, I’m going to go with” the former.

Every student should ​“feel close to every administrator and teacher” in his or her academy, Daniels said.

Recently, a student with a hefty disciplinary record ​“went off on” Principal Diah (pictured), yelling at him without cause, Baker said. Instead of suspending her, Baker asked her to be ​“accountable” for acting out and to write Diah a letter apologizing.

Baker said she has taken from her experience teaching and learning in New Haven a feeling of confidence in her students’ potential. ​“Being an educator is knowing and believing because I sat next to the person who ended up in prison and knew that they had just as much potential as I did. So what set me apart? That people invested in me, believed in me,” she said.

Though critics have called the school’s structure bloated and expensive, district and school leaders argue it is necessary to effectively teach a diverse group of students, many who need additional academic and social support.

“You can’t do that,” Baker said, ​“unless you have an individual, personalized approach.”

Mastering Learning

Despite the current chaos of the transition, Hillhouse’s principals say the school is moving toward a better version of itself. They are responding to the many critiques with specific plans for improvement.

“Has it been different? Yeah. With everything, there are challenges,” Diah said. ​“Even through those challenges, the school is still moving.”

The main office is now a ​“welcome center,” which will soon transform into a useful information hub for students and parents. Baker said parents last year said they ​“felt like they had to go to too many places in the building for support. Now they can go right to the welcome center.”

Administrators physically moved the office spaces of the special education, counseling and English language learning support teams to the first floor, adjacent to the main office. Baker said they have gotten positive feedback as well as some pushback from staff adjusting to the reorganization.

Hillhouse administrators are also slowly incorporating progressive models such as restorative practices and mastery-based learning, which the district eventually wants all schools to adopt.

The switch last year to mastery-based learning, in which students are graded on how well they master certain skills in each subject, was rocky. DuBose said she almost failed a math class. ​“I went from all As and one B to an F,” she said. ​“The first time in my life.”

Baker said it forced students, even those who always did the work, to really question whether they had mastered the material, which ​“felt uncomfortable for some students.” She called last year an ​“exploratory year” in LPSH and IDEA, in which teachers had leeway on developing a grading system for those skills.

Joseph Daley, an English teacher in the IDEA Academy, said last year, he graded students on a scale from 1 to 4, then averaged the final score and translated it into a number or letter grade. This year, he said, teachers have flexibility to weight certain assessments and skills more than others.

“I like this hybrid scenario better,” he said.

A couple of standards for the model: Instead of giving students Ds or Fs mid year, teachers give them an ​“NR,” which stands for ​“not ready” and offer them more academic support. And students can petition to be reassessed if they do poorly on an assessment and don’t master a specific skill the first time around.

Hillhouse is moving toward having ​“one unified grading practice on campus,” which will be easier after this year’s CCR seniors graduate, Baker said. She is encouraging teachers at the new SMART Academy to incorporate mastery-based learning to whatever extent they feel comfortable doing so this year. ​“Some have a gradual plan for leading up to that,” she said.

Baker said SMART needs community partners who will work with students to develop art projects and incorporate technology into their studies. She hopes to have ​“a couple of those partners” in place by the start of 2016.

And the principals are working on a way to allow students time to support one another, within and between academies.

After third period, ninth, tenth and eleventh graders have an ​“academic support” period to work on areas where they need additional help. Many seniors have no academic commitments at the end of the day, leaving them time to help younger students.

That might look like a senior with good calculus grades partnering with a teacher to help a junior struggling to pass that class. Or a student returning from incarceration being mentored by a student who successfully reintegrated after a similar experience. ​“We’re in the beginning stages of mapping that out,” Baker said.