This little girl could hardly wait for her turn in the Moonwalk, as she and 200 parents and kids turned out for a summer celebration at Edgewood Park sponsored by the grassroots parents’ activist group, Teach Our Children. Amid the play was talk about why city public school children can’t bring textbooks home from school or have recess — and what parents can do about it.
p(clear). click here There was food, music and dancing, badminton and kickball, the Moonwalk and talks by parents on topics the group has been working on, including allowing textbooks to go home with kids, and bringing back recess to grades K‑5 in schools where it’s disappeared. The event took place Saturday.
p(clear).
Click on the play arrow to watch a sampling of the event.
p(clear). 
Nilda Aponte (pictured) has a daughter who just graduated from high school and four kids aged 8 – 10 in Celentano School.
p(clear). “We’re here,” she said, “not against the Board of Ed, not against the teachers or the principals or the schools. We’re here to support them, so that’s why we’re listening to parents about what the issues are, and we’re bringing it up. We go to the Board of Ed meetings, we meet with the Wellness Committee for the recess piece, and we’ve been doing a lot of those things.”
p(clear). “Support” sometimes comes in the form of a hard push. A year ago, some parents held signs outside Katherine Brennan School criticizing the principal, who had been pulled over on a DUI, saying she wasn’t a good role model for their kids. They demanded a meeting with Superintendent Reggie Mayo.
p(clear). 
Organizers leafleted for the event in different parts of town, including Fair Haven and the Hill, but most heavily in the neighborhood right around the park. Big signs at the edge of the park also advertised the event, and the publicity drew Bernice Weinstein (pictured), mother of six, who lives across the street. This was her first encounter with Teach Our Kids. She said she could relate to the issues the group has raised.
p(clear). “I like the part about the textbooks,” she said. “That’s one of the biggest problems my kids have. They come home with the homework but no textbook to go with it.”
p(clear). TOC asked these questions in their recent newsletter: Are your children permitted to take home textbooks and the materials that they need, or just dittos? Have you asked to take a textbook home and been told you can’t, or that there aren’t enough to go around? Why is it that children at Edgewood regularly take textbooks home, but children at Hill Central can’t?
p(clear). TOC members wrote letters to several school officials, but got no response. So they attended Mayor’s Night Out, where both Mayor John DeStefano and Superintendent Mayo said they would work with the group to resolve the issue. Then the parents heard nothing. So they contacted the media. At that point, the superintendent announced that there is a textbook policy, which states: “The Board of Education requires and accepts its responsibility to provide students in the New Haven Public Schools with necessary and appropriate textbooks and library books.”
p(clear). So now TOC is hopeful that textbooks will start going home with students come fall. They plan to stay on top of the issue to make sure.
p(clear). Parent activists had a more positive experience when they raised the issue of recess. They discovered that many of the lower-performing schools no longer have recess, while many of the higher performing schools still do. Parents met with the co-chair of the Wellness Committee, attended a Take-10! physical activity break at one of the schools, and visited Davis Street School to see how recess works there. Nilda Aponte thinks restoring recess could help reduce a lot of the tension and even violence among young people in the city. Click here to listen.
p(clear). 
The group has raised almost $50,000 in grant money in the past year, and has hired a full-time organizer, Gwendolyn Forrest (pictured in red shirt). She was pleased with how the event turned out: hundreds of parents and children together enjoyed a beautiful day, and 80 parents signed membership forms to join TOC. Of the different tactics the group has employed, she said, “Our intent is never confrontation for contfrontation’s sake but to get done what needs to be done.”
p(clear). Responding to the two issues, New Haven schools spokeswoman Catherine Sullivan- DeCarlo said, “It’s up to the schools if they can fit recess into the academic day. Some have it and some don’t. We’ve never looked at the link [that more low-performing schools don’t have recess], but it could be true.” She added that TOC is very active with the wellness committee, “and it’s been a very good partnership.”
p(clear). Regarding textbooks, she said, “A lot of their data was incorrect, where they claimed kids couldn’t take textbooks home. They had a very long list of schools, and when Reggie called those principals in, most of them said they do allow the books to go home.” She added that it’s more of an issue starting in middle school, because in the lower grades teachers often just give the kids hand-outs.