Aliyya Swaby Photo
Quaye: latest in the Reg-to-school PR pipeline.
New security chief Reddish.
The Board of Ed has a new official voice — after almost nine months without a permanent hire in the role — as well as a new security chief in the face of increasing in-school fights.
Mercy Quaye is to start as communications director June 1. She is the fourth former New Haven Register reporter to fill the position out of the last five people to hold the job.
Quaye follows in the footsteps of Register reporters-turned-school-spokespeople Catherine Sullivan-DeCarlo, Christopher Hoffman, and Abbe Smith. Michelle Wade, who is not a New Haven Register reporter, held the position between Sullivan-DeCarlo’s and Hoffman’s tenures.
Quaye’s hiring was one of five major central office leadership changes unanimously approved Monday night at the end of a five-hour-long Board of Education at L.W. Beecher School, a meeting length that has become standard with the current board.
Quaye was a student in New Haven Public Schools from kindergarten through eighth grade. After high school, she attended Quinnipiac University, graduating in 2013, and then became a breaking news reporter at the Register including covering some Board of Education meetings.
“I’m excited to be able to give back to the community that prepared me for my career,” she said at Monday’s meeting.
Until earlier this year, Quaye was honing her communications chops at pro-charter group Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now (ConnCAN). She will make $72,544 a year in her new city job.
The board also approved Thaddeus Reddish, retired New Haven assistant police chief, as the new schools security director. His salary originally started off at $100,000, but he negotiated it up to $120,000, according to Superintendent Garth Harries. The district has not had a security director for months, even as the student board members reported the number of fights in the schools dramatically increasing over the past year.
Mayor Toni Harp said security officers who spoke with her “felt they were inadequately trained and wanted someone who had experience in doing that.” Reddish will be a good fit, she said. “He should make at least what an assistant principal makes.”
Reddish was not present at Monday’s meeting.
Three people also transitioned into new leadership positions after Monday’s vote. Lynn Brantley will move from being interim supervisor of language arts and reading to being permanently hired for the position.
Brantley (left).
Board member Ed Joyner enthusiastically approved Brantley for the role, in part because she had helped to develop an effective reading program to build foundational literacy skills. Growing up in Bridgeport, “she knows the urban landscape. She’s exactly the kind of educator we need in an urban district,” Joyner said.
Brantley has been in New Haven for 30 years, filling the roles of teacher, instructional coach and coordinator for the literacy initiative. She said one of her first steps in the new role would be to deploy a foundational phonics program, with five hour training sessions for teachers rolled out by three certified members in the department.
Montalvo (right).
Myrna Montalvo will move from principal of John Martinez School to principal of the new Reginald Mayo Early Childhood School when it opens in the fall. Superintendent Harries said he wanted an experienced leader in the role.
Board member Alicia Caraballo praised Montalvo’s skills as an educator — when Caraballo was a social worker at Truman School, Montalvo was a “fabulous kindergarten teacher,” she said.
Larry Conaway, currently assistant principal at New Light School, will become principal of two alternative schools: New Light and Riverside Academy. Riverside is located on Ella T. Grasso Boulevard and has about 80 students. New Light is in the Wooster Square neighborhood with about 50 students.
Conaway: double duty.
Superintendent Harries told the Independent that Conaway will bring the two sites together over the next year, likely to both end up on Riverside’s campus. “What we know is that our alternative schools are very small,” he said. “As a result, they’re not really aligned well to provide the full range of services.” Though they have small classes with a relatively large number of teachers, alternative schools don’t have access to the “full student service teams that best practice alternative schools really need,” he said.
Conaway is responsible for “ensuring that support,” Harries said. As head of New Light for the past year, Conaway has built a strong team of teacher leaders who will support the program over the next year as he spends most of his time at Riverside.
Board member Darnell Goldson said Conaway is more than up to the job, but that he is worried the merged schools would turn into “another Hillhouse” — a school with a complex three-principal leadership structure that has been under fire in the last year.
He urged Harries to give Conaway the needed resources to run the two schools well.
Harries said he and Conaway had discussed exactly that in the negotiation process. Conaway will be helped by the fact that he is “working with two strong staffs,” Harries said.
An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the last four consecutive schools spokespeople, rather than four of the last five, had been Register reporters.