Maya McFadden photo
Williams and Blatteau: Human-centered schools a priority.
The New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) district began the school year scrambling to hire educators to address a teacher shortage.
It’s ending the school year with the announcement of staff cuts to come.
To the leaders of the city’s two classroom-facing unions, that mixed messaging is a problem — and reflects the broader challenges of understaffing, budget crunches, and inconsistent communication across the district. It also underscores the imperative of putting students’ needs first.
Local teachers union president Leslie Blatteau and paraprofessionals union president Hyclis Williams pointed out that apparent contradiction during an end-of-year sit down interview with the Independent Monday at the teachers union headquarters at 267 Chapel St.
For years, the duo have worked together to build a community/union coalition to support the school district through its challenges like educator flight and underfunding from the state. The duo said that collaborative work will continue with more vigor in the future as NHPS looks to close an expected $12 million budget deficit for the 2024 – 25 school year budget — which the superintendent has said could lead to up to 61 NHPS staff cuts.
Blatteau has led the teachers union for the past two and a half years. Williams has been president of the paraprofessionals union for almost five years.
“We still started in August with significant shortages and now we’re wrapping up wondering what’s getting cut,” Blatteau said. She said she and fellow educators feel whiplash over this latest announcement, because local schools still feel understaffed.
“Students are telling us that they need continued support. Families are communicating that they need support. And in a time when we need more support, it’s hard to process the threat of cuts,” Blatteau said.
At the same time, both union leaders said, classroom-facing staff like teachers and paras are celebrating the growth made this year in spite of being underfunded and a national narrative that says public schools aren’t doing enough.
Communication Could Be Better
How is communication between district leadership and teachers in the classrooms?
Blatteau said there’s always room for more “listening [to] authentic lived experiences.” That said, teachers union leadership does have monthly meetings with the superintendent, per a term of the union’s contract.
And while educators are able to contribute to the superintendent’s next strategic plan through structured input sessions, she said district leaders should pull up a chair more often and listen to educators’ ideas and experiences in more “organic” ways, too.
“We need to peal back the layers of bureaucracy and have real conversations about what’s impacting us. Where are the more purposeful interactions?” Blatteau said. “It cost them nothing.”
Williams said the paraprofessionals union does not have monthly meetings with the superintendent written into its contract. She instead schedules appointments with district leaders when concerns come up. She’d like to see more consistent meeting with central office leadership. “It goes a long way to just designate time to us,” Williams said.
Williams did say this year’s strategic planning process was memorable for her because it was her first time seeing such a diverse group of stakeholders come together to discuss the district’s future.
Still No Paras Contract
Williams pointed out that a top concern to her and her union members is that the paraprofessionals union will be going into another school year without a contract. The contested union deal is now in arbitration. The current paras contract expired on June 30, 2023.
Williams proposed that instead of staff cuts, the district could have saved on spending by not taking the para contract to arbitration as well as spending less money on attorneys. Blatteau agreed that costs could be cut not by laying off staff but by more carefully spending money on lawsuits and attorney fees.
“They pay attorneys to pay us down,” Williams said.
She continued, “A lot of paras have bachelors degrees, masters degrees.” Some even have PhDs and law degrees. “We have professionals who otherwise would take another job but most of the paras are parents, they want to work with the public schools to make a difference in children’s lives.”
Williams added that the paras want the new superintendent to succeed and for the district to grow and do better but “people need to eat and to feel that they can go home and meet their basic needs. Even though members don’t have, they see the needs of students. They put the needs of the students first even if it means they go to the soup kitchen to collect something and make sure that a student has a meal or what they need.”
”We’ve been filling in the blanks for so long and making do with what we have, there’s nobody left to cut. We don’t have enough staff,” Williams said.
When asked if expected school closures should have come before staff layoffs, Blatteau repeated the words of Board of Education Vice President Matt Wilcox: “Just closing a school does not generate millions of dollars in savings.” She continued: “What’s most expensive about a school system are the human beings.”
She urged that the consolidation process be done with consideration to the impact on community and avoiding the creation of a vacuum to be filled by expensive privatized programs or charter schools. “Those schools that were built 20 years ago weren’t given a fighting chance to survive past 20 years. So why is it that we don’t have a capital budget from the city for proper maintenance?” she asked. “Why is it that when they were built there wasn’t a plan in place to make sure they were maintained?”
Williams agreed, adding that the district must work toward more responsible maintenance plans that prioritizes building upkeep for the future. She suggested that “if we use people that are vested in New Haven and know this is their town and they want what’s best for children and community instead of just always going with the lowest bidder, things would be different.”
Keep Cuts Away From Kids
So. If the district shouldn’t layoff staff to close the $12 million budget deficit, where should it look to save money?
Williams said the attorneys budget should be cut and better maximized by avoiding arbitration. She also suggested the district make better use of its custodial staff rather than outsourcing such work. And she said it should reconsider the need for central office staff positions that were vacant for long periods in the past, like chief of staff and communications director, and consider buying transportation vehicles and/or offer incentives to students to arrive to school by biking, walking, or taking public transit.
“A rehaul on everything else is the answer because the students need the staff and the staff need the students,” she said.
Blatteau praised the district for the way it’s gone about “right-sizing” classrooms so far. The teachers union helped the district to do this work through analysis of all schools’ enrollment and staff to learn what schools were staff heavy and which were not to equally distribute educators at all school buildings.
That process of “let’s make sure all schools have what they need” should be replicated, Blatteau said, with a close analysis of central office staff next. The district should look at what staff are doing and what impact they’re having on priority areas for NHPS.
She also suggested the district take a close look at how overtime is used. “Why do we continue to have to rely on overtime?” she asked.
She added that teachers and paras don’t get paid overtime for grading papers after school, writing college recommendations, or chaperoning overnight field trips.
During a recent Finance and Operations Committee meeting, district leaders explained that the district is doing an analysis of its software subscriptions to see what is redundant or underutilized. Blatteau applauded that work. She suggested it look at redundancy in all outside contracts like law firms and data management systems.
She said the district should find out from families directly about whether or not they prefer access to software to track math levels or after school programs and field trip for their kids.
Taking a closer look at what spending the district is doing to make adults’ jobs easier, Blatteau said, is far less important than investments in what’s developmentally necessary for the district’s students.
Always “One More Thing”
The two concluded that the district must return to an approach of human-centered schools. That means celebrating parents when they participate in any and all district matters with the goal of working toward a better district.
“We got to get the community back into the schools. The community has to be a part of the school system, you can’t put the community out and then serve the community like it’s not their school,” Williams said.
Blatteau added that it also means moving away from extrinsic motivation for students and families. “Short term fixes, computer programs, those things will not deliver results. The relationships create the conditions for someone to develop the intrinsic motivation and ultimately that is what we’re seeking,” she said.
For example, she said, there district should strive to encourage a love or reading in students, and not just focus on improving assessment scores. It should offer hands-on learning, and support mental health needs. “These are the things that will help us create a path to intrinsic motivation because a prize out of the gift box or Amazon is not what makes us tick. Our kids are more complex than that.”
“I get that all ideas need to be on the table but we can’t forget the long term,” Blatteau said.
The two said the district has moved away from effective classroom foundations by having classrooms only supported by a single teachers. Williams recalled paraprofessionals supporting classrooms decades ago up until the 5th grade. Now she said, paras are tasked with just supporting pre‑k and kindergarten classrooms. “You need another person to make a foundation,” Blatteau said.
Wealthier school districts, Blatteau said, continue to invest in the one-on-one support of paras well beyond elementary schooling.
Blatteau said in the past kindergarten used to be focused on providing elementary students with a full year of social emotional learning and first grade would be the first year of academic goal setting. However now kindergarten educators are tasked with doing both and getting the kindergarteners to read in their first year. The duo described it as the “one more thing factor” where additional work is added to an educator’s caseload each year but nothing is being moved off.
A poster at the teacher union headquarters.