Superintendent Reggie Mayo was disappointed to learn Friday that the district lost out on $35 million in federal education money.
The federal education department Friday announced the “highest-ranked applicants” for $650 million in federal Investing In Innovation Fund (i3).
The city school district applied for $35 million from the fund — $5 million for its BOOST program of “wrap-around” social services for kids, and $30 million for a partnership with Achievement First to train teachers and administrators.
New Haven Public Schools was not among the 49 highest-ranked applicants—click here to see the list.
“Were we disappointed? Yes,” said Mayo, who’s leading the district through the first year of a five-year plan to close the city’s achievement gap.
New Haven is ahead of the game by several measures when it comes to making the kind of reforms that Education Secretary Arne Duncan is looking for. It has gained praise from top Obama officials for the collaborative way it settled a new teacher contract. Duncan even invited school officials to D.C. to talk about how the city’s new teacher evaluations, which are tied to student performance.
Those evaluations were a “monumental” achievement, Mayo said. The collaboration on the teachers contract was “unprecedented,” he added.
Mayo said his greatest disappointment was that more school districts didn’t make the cut. Of the 49 highest ranked applicants, about 15 are school districts. The rest are research institutions, foundations and not-for-profits like Teach For America.
New Haven school officials considered themselves hamstrung in a separate competition for federal money called Race to the Top, because the money went straight to the states. Connecticut, which has pursued reforms less aggressively than other states, missed out on the first two rounds of money.
Mayo said while that money went directly to states, he understood that i3 grants were supposed to go directly to the schools.
“We would like the Obama administration to know that we think more school districts should have been involved. We have the greatest impact” on children’s educations, he said.
Mayo said the district aims to hire a fundraiser to support its reforms. The mayor has said he will need “north of $100 million” in outside money to pay for the plans to cut the dropout rate in half, close the achievement gap and give scholarships for city kids to go to college.
“The district certainly can’t afford all of it,” Mayo said.