Thomas Breen Photo
DuBois-Walton with Harris Tucker School students at a Newhallville ward committee meeting.
“Equity” and “excellence” are about to get an update.
Those two words summarized the mission of a five-year plan to guide Connecticut’s schools. The State Board of Education drafted and began undertaking the plan five years ago.
Now the board is crafting a new five-year plan. It has a new chair to guide that process: New Haven’s Karen DuBois-Walton.
“I really want to lean in on those two pillars again” as the board crafts a new five-year plan — with an eye to meeting new or unaddressed challenges. DuBois-Walton said during a conversation Wednesday on WNHH FM’s “LoveBabz LoveTalk” program.
For instance, while state schools overall post high performance results, too often groups like English language learners and special-ed students are left behind from the success, she said.
DuBois-Walton, who for 15 years has run New Haven’s housing authority, said she also looks to examine how segregated housing contributes to school segregation. DuBois-Walton has played a leading role in a coalition challenging exclusive suburban zoning laws. Connecticut recently settled the 33-year-old Sheff v O’Neill desegregation lawsuit with promises to boost magnet schools through the Project Choice program for urban students to attend suburban schools.
The need for mental-health help for students has been dramatically revealed during the Covid-19 pandemic, another goal the state board can help pursue, DuBois-Walton stated.
In the interview, DuBois-Walton was asked her reaction to a controversy at New Haven’s Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School. A white English teacher was placed on leave after allegedly uttering the “n‑word” as part of telling a student, in response to a question, that it was an example of a term she would not feel comfortable uttering in class. The next day 50 students walked out of class and filled the hallway outside the teacher’s room, shouting that she should be fired. (Click here to read more about that incident.)
DuBois-Walton said she sees larger issues intertwined in that incident, issues the state ed board will wrestle with under her watch.
“In that incident is an intersection of so much of what we’ve been holding and the heightened awareness over the past couple of years,” DuBois-Walton said.
She cited “the short fuse so many are experiencing as a result of all we have gone through” with pandemic shutdowns and mandates, “the longstanding history of what it’s like to be in our education spaces,” “issues of racial equity,” and “how to have courageous conversations about difficult things” — including “how we talk about and teach real true accurate history of our country in all its glory history and beauty” as well as “its ugliness and unfairness and inequity.”
Reading about the Coop incident “brought me back” to being the only Black student in her classroom growing up in a western New York town, where all the teachers were white, DuBois-Walton said.
She recalled “how dehumanizing it felt” to have “the n‑word used very freely in the discussion of Huckleberry Finn,” how “I lacked the language, the words, support from a teacher or anyone who knew how to navigate that and discuss and unpack it.”
“We’re going to read this book. It’s going to have words in it you may find offensive,” her teacher told her, then referenced DuBois-Walton’s older sister: “Your sister dealt with it. You’ll be fine too.”
DuBois-Walton grew up learning civil rights history at home, not at schools. One day her teacher told the class: “We’re beginning a unit on European history. This is where all of our ancestors came from.” DuBois-Walton wasn’t the only student who felt left out of that history; the class also had children from a nearby Native American reservation.
The Coop incident reflected the need for the state to do a better job recruiting teachers of color, DuBois-Walton said. She spoke of creating both alternative pathways and financial support for promising people to qualify as teachers, especially paraprofessionals: “They’re already in our building. They have good classroom management. They have good rapport with students. They’re already a leader in their classroom.”
In addition, the state can do more to expose students beginning in middle school to education careers, then support them up the ladder.
DuBois-Walton made clear that she doesn’t criticize a white teacher for introducing a subject tackling difficult racial issues, like the James Baldwin documentary under discussion in the Coop English class. “If that was that teacher’s idea to bring this curriculum in, that should be supported. We need to support the ability to have the kind of conversation,” she said. That includes making the classroom a “restorative place” if the conversation sparks discomfort: “When you have courageous conversations, feelings are going to get hurt, triggered emotions. We have to become the kind of place that can hold that and be restorative in those moments so that can happen.”
Click on the video to watch the full conversation with new State Board of Education Karen DuBois-Walton on WNHH FM’s “LoveBabz LoveTalk.”
How the state should tackle the challenges revealed in the Sheff settlement was also the topic of discussion during a panel discussion on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program. Click on the video to watch the discussion, with diversity consultants, “eduvists,” and parents Althea Marshall Brooks, Chemay Morales-James, and Vanessa Liles.
And click above to watch a “Word on the Street” conversation from the same program with a man struggling with opioid addiction as he prepared to attend a group meeting at the APT Foundation clinic on Congress Avenue.