Melissa Bailey Photo
Maria Serrano wants better security for her grandson at school.
When a private firm takes over Clemente Leadership Academy, one of the first tasks will be to create order in the halls.
At its regular meeting Monday, the Board of Education unanimously approved a contract with a New Jersey-based for-profit company, Renaissance School Services, LLC, to manage the pre-K‑8 school, which serves 538 students in the Hill.
Click here and here to read the contract.
The pact marks new territory for the public school district, which has been experimenting with different ways to overhaul failing schools as part of a reform drive. Superintendent Reggie Mayo called the contract part of a “different strokes for different folks” approach in which each school will be run differently according to its needs. Clemente rated among the lowest-performing schools in the city’s latest rankings, leaving it in line to be drastically restructured as a “turnaround” school.
Renaissance will be the second outside firm, and the first for-profit company, to take over a failing New Haven public school as part of Mayor John DeStefano’s ambitious effort to close the city’s longstanding achievement gap.
The company, which has already been working in the school without pay, plans to start an intensive planning phase Tuesday, according to Renaissance President Richard O’Neill.
The district will pay Renaissance $800 per kid, up to $456,000 annually, for the expertise and specialized tools to fix up failing schools. The company will be paid $58,000 for the period from May 17 to June 30 of this year, plus a $65,000 retainer that will be paid back to the district. School officials intend to pay for the contract with a $2.5 million federal School Improvement Grant, which has not yet been awarded.
O’Neill said his company is in the beginning stages of figuring out what’s working and what isn’t at the school at 360 Columbus Ave.
He said so far, one conclusion is clear: “Some work needs to be done on discipline and code of conduct.”
That’s at the top of Maria Serrano’s list, too.
Serrano (pictured at the top of this story) was picking up her 6‑year-old grandson, Emanuel Garcia, from Clemente one recent afternoon.
Serrano said she has other grandkids at Clinton Avenue and John C. Daniels schools. Compared to those schools, she said, Clemente doesn’t do a good job managing kids’ “hyper” behavior.
“There is no control,” she said, when kids line up to get on the bus after school. She said the school needs better security guards to keep the building safe and orderly.
O’Neill said he plans to bring in a Positive Behavior Support system, in which kids are rewarded for doing good deeds — and have a clear set of consequences for bad behavior. Parents will get phone calls in both cases, said O’Neill. The principal will spend “multiple hours per day” talking to parents.
Beyond those suggestions, O’Neill shied away from announcing specific plans for the school. He said he and his business partner, who have together managed 25 “turnaround” schools in their careers, have developed a “toolkit” of instruments. Before deciding which tools to use, he said, the company will need to observe the school and talk at length to the staff who work there.
O’Neill (at right in photo) made those remarks in a presentation to the school board Monday night. New Haven school reform czar Garth Harries (at left), who performed his own share of turnarounds when he worked for former school Chancellor Joel Klein in New York City, introduced O’Neill as the leader of “one of the most experienced turnaround teams in the country.”
Clemente “is a school that we feel can really benefit from the serious and focused attention of a provider like Renaissance,” Harries said.
O’Neill told the board he plans to hire three administrators for the school: a principal, “achievement specialist,” and “operations specialist.” The three will be Renaissance employees, not part of the city’s union, with salaries totaling about $350,000. Beginning Aug. 1, Renaissance will pay their salaries and get reimbursed monthly by the school district for 125 percent of the cost.
The three new administrators will replace the school’s principal and assistant principal. O’Neill said he plans to post the jobs this week. He said he prefers to hire from within the district but will conduct a national as well as a local search.
O’Neill announced the new team aims to achieve Adequate Yearly Progress, a federal benchmark on standardized tests, within two years of taking charge. Clemente has failed to make AYP for nine years, the longest time of any of the district’s 43 schools. The company also has agreed to performance standards laid out in the contract.
Board member Alex Johnston (pictured) asked O’Neill if he feels “nervous” making a claim of projected success without having school leadership in place. That leadership is “fundamental” to a school’s success, he noted.
O’Neill replied “no.” He said he has a track record of making good hiring judgments.
Renaissance, which was formed in 2006, has directly managed two schools. It took over the Lowell Community Charter Public School in March of 2010 when it was on the brink of closure. In the first four months Renaissance fired 50 percent of the teachers and three-quarters of the administrators, he said. He said the Massachusetts education department has declared the school “transformed” even though test scores have not come out yet to verify that claim.
At Clemente all 45 teachers must reapply for their jobs if they want to remain there. If they aren’t rehired or choose not to remain, they’ll be guaranteed a job elsewhere in the district.
Monday’s deal came with the blessing from the city teacher union President Dave Cicarella.
“Despite everybody’s best efforts,” he said, “we haven’t had good results” at Clemente. He said it’s time to try a new solution to improve the school.
Teachers at the school were briefed on the changes at meeting at the school two weeks ago. So were parents.
Ann Boyd, a grandparent at the school, agreed the school needs a fix. But she frowned on the takeover.
Boyd, a longtime Hill activist, has four grandkids at Clemente; her nine children went there, too. She said as a neighborhood school., Clemente has long been a “dumping ground” for kids from other schools. It has “dwindled” in quality over the years, with poor instruction from teachers, poor cleaning from janitors and poor management from administrators, she opined.
Boyd suggested the school should be revamped by an “in-house revitalization committee” — not handed over to a for-profit company.
“I don’t think we should be roaming around the country looking for someone else to do a job” that the district already pays someone to do, she argued. “Do we really need an outside company?”
Boyd attended the closed-door May 12 meeting where parents heard from O’Neill about his company’s plans to take over the school. “The few parents that was there was concerned about how are you going to make it better for my child,” she said.
O’Neill provided few answers, she said: “He don’t have a plan. He came in with the assumption that he was already hired, but he couldn’t answer any question that was asked.”
Boyd missed Monday’s board meeting; no parents or members of the public spoke up about the plan.
For his part, O’Neill has said he isn’t coming to town with a “cookie-cutter” solution. He said he needs to learn more about the school before rolling out specific plans.
On Monday, Superintendent Mayo defended the choice to hire an outside contractor to run the school. He said the district already has its hands full running Brennan/Rogers, which was revamped as an in-house turnaround, and Wexler-Grant, which is due to follow suit this fall.
“If we overburden ourselves, we’ll be doing an injustice to our turnaround schools,” he said. Using an outside management company is a way of “accelerating and intensifying the work.”
Mayo said he likes that Renaissance is managing only two other schools at the moment. He praised the company’s experience and its flexibility. Although Renaissance has its own teacher evaluation system, the company was willing to come in and work with the city’s evaluation system, as well as all of its union rules.
DeStefano asked O’Neill how he plans to promote and measure parental engagement. He said he aims to keep parents in the loop on major school decisions. He’ll track their attendance at report card nights and roll out surveys soliciting their input.
Board member Selase Williams asked O’Neill how students will experience the changes at their school.
O’Neill said they should expect higher expectations for behavior and academics, more adult attention, and more communication between the school and their parents.
Seventh-grader Wesley Hough (pictured), who was waiting for a ride home on a recent school day, said he learned about the turnaround from his teachers: Four or five informed him they won’t be sticking around.
Wesley said he won’t be sticking around to see the school change, either: He’s off to Bishop Woods school as his mother searches for a better education for him and his sister. Wesley said he came to Clemente last fall from Ross/Woodward School, which he said had more challenging academics and more resources.
In eight months at Clemente, “we’ve never been on a field trip,” he said.
Ross-Woodward school has allocated $10,000 for field trips this school year, according to the school budget. Clemente has $500 for field trips.
That disparity is reflected in the budgets for the two schools, which serve similarly sized populations. Ross/Woodward, an interdistrict magnet school focusing on classical studies, has an operating budget of $4,427,606 for 514 students this year. Clemente, a neighborhood school, is spending $3,456,190 for 538 kids.
The $2.5 million federal School Improvement Grant for which the city has applied would fund the Clemente management contract for the next three years. The contract with Renaissance includes an opt-out phase if New Haven doesn’t get selected for the grant.
School board members approved the contract in a 6 – 0 vote, with Carlos Torre and Michael Nast absent. Mayor DeStefano stressed the importance of having the teachers union’s cooperation in and approval of the deal.
“This is not typical in America,” he said.
Past Independent stories on the Clemente school:
• Fine Print Released On Clemente Deal
• Illegal Meeting Aborted; Co. Starts Work, Anyway
• City Secretly Plans School’s For-Profit Takeover
• For-Profit Charter May Take Over Clemente
• Two Schools Become “Turnarounds”