Riverside Spared

During her freshman year at High School in the Community, Sonimar Colon, a student with a learning disability, earned D’s and F’s in her classes. She started skipping school, because she thought no one would give her the help she needed. Administrators later kicked her out for fighting.

Now, as a junior at Riverside Education Academy, the district’s last remaining alternative school, Colon has a special-education plan and intensive therapeutic supports. She’s now earning top marks. But the latest round of proposed budget cuts had put her school at risk.

The Board of Education listened to Colon at a meeting Monday night, and it vowed to her that Riverside will remain open next year.

Board members ripped into Superintendent of Schools Carol Birks (who was out at a conference) for moving to close the school, especially without their sign-off.

While they held off on taking an official vote on next year’s plans, the board members made clear that they want Riverside to remain intact, though it will need to find a new location.

They said Riverside’s current rented space at 560 Ella T. Grasso Blvd., which costs roughly $462,600 annually with taxes, is too expensive to keep paying, but they suggested the school could find a home in New Horizon’s former location at 103 Hallock Ave.

“Riverside has given me more opportunities than any other school I’ve gone to,” Colon told the Board of Education on Monday night. ​“I go to school every day. I try my hardest. I have all the help I need. I have A’s and B’s, and I’m proud of that, because for a Latina woman like me, the stereotype is really hard to overcome.

“You need to think about the students, when we all get shuffled to different schools all over again. it’s hard for us. I don’t want Riverside to close because I don’t want to have been in four high schools in four years.”

Colon delivered that message at the Board of Ed’s regular Monday night meeting at Celentano School, as it considered a proposal to break up Riverside as one cost-cutting measure for next year’s $30.7 million budget shortfall.

Last week, at a finance committee meeting, Superintendent Carol Birks suggested that 100 current students could be sent off to three programs: some back to the comprehensive high schools with additional supports, some to a vocational-focused program at Gateway Community College, and some to high-priced outside special-education providers.

Alongside Colon, 15 others spoke up during the meeting’s public comment portion on Monday night. For nearly an hour, they described how the alternative school often feels like the last place in the city watching out for its disregarded kids. By the end, many in the audience wiped tears from their eyes.

Riverside is the destination for students with severe behavioral issues, traumatic memories or overwhelming family circumstances. While a small number of freshmen choose the school for its small class sizes, most students arrive at Riverside after being kicked out of other high schools.

JoAnne Wilcox, a parent volunteer whose son graduated from an alternative school, told the board members about who some of those students are. Wearing a white tee, on which she’d written, ​“I will not leave these kids unguarded,” and ​“Nope,” in black marker, Wilcox flipped through colored cards with their stories.

“The students served through Riverside are met right where they are,” Wilcox said. ​“I’d like to introduce you to a few of them.

“At Riverside, a student I care about has trouble trusting anyone enough to leave her baby with them, so she comes in once a week to turn in her work.

“At Riverside, a student I care about wants to be a plumber, and he is blown away that the school is helping to pay for his training.

“At Riverside, a student I care about goes to a facility after school because he has no home.

“At Riverside, a student I care about is slowly learning to walk off his anger instead of fighting.

“At Riverside, a student I care about wasn’t at school today, and we noticed their absence.

“At Riverside, a student I care about stops in my room every now and then for a bar of soap, deodorant, shampoo, condoms.

“At Riverside, a student I care about was in juvenile detention for two years of his teenage life, and when he came back, the first words he heard from us were ​‘welcome home.’”

Two other students also took a turn at the podium.

Denzel Caldwell, a senior who’s planning to become an electrician, thanked Riverside’s teachers for staying late so he could research on the school’s computers, for connecting him to a part-time job through Youth Stat, and for signing him up for parenting classes.

And Rekiyyah, another student with mental-health issues, said that Riverside was the one place where she doesn’t feel ​“judged.”

“Everybody there is their own person; they’re unique,” she said. Rekiyyah had to pause, putting her hand over her face. ​“Don’t close my school down,” she begged, before she had to run out of the room sobbing.

After hearing that testimony, the school board members said they’d heard enough to know they wouldn’t be following through on the superintendent’s plans. They said it was wrong for Birks to have moved ahead on closing Riverside, when they’d only given her permission to get out of a lease.

“The result is this kind of a meeting where people are concerned about the closure, because they’re not hearing anything else,” said Darnell Goldson, the board’s president. ​“For people out there, I don’t like doing this because we’ll be accused of micromanaging … “

“It’s not micromanaging,” said Ed Joyner, who’d previously leveled the charge against him.

“… but we are not going to close Riverside. It is not going to happen,” Goldson said. ​“There’s a frustration that we don’t have knowledge of what’s going on, for weeks we’re wondering what might be closed, and we have students here crying when they should be working on studying and graduating. The fact is these students should not have been treated like this, and the principal is not going to be here anymore, by his own choice, because of this kind of activity. It was the fault of the administration.”

Joyner added that the district needed to recommit to its alternative schools, rather than scrapping them.

“New Haven has led the country in its alternative programming. We don’t have to go around looking in all the wrong places to find something for our children,” he said. ​“We never planned to close the school, never; in fact, what we said is to provide more services.”

Goldson said that the district couldn’t afford to keep putting hundreds of thousands in rent into ​“a landlord’s pocket” for the Ella T. Grasso Boulevard site.

But he said that the school might be able to move back to New Horizon’s former Hallock Street location, which the district has been using as a hub for security guards and facilities managers and as storage for a car fleet and science kits.

“That is all the reimagining I want to see: how we get there,” Goldson said. ​“We don’t want to see all this other stuff about out-placements, mainstreaming and all this other stuff. What we want to see is a plan to keep it intact somewhere else.”

Goldson asked for the superintendent’s team to present a plan to the full board for review within two weeks.