Ed Board: Birks Is Done

At month’s end, Carol Birks will no longer be the superintendent of New Haven Public Schools, according to Board of Education President Darnell Goldson.

After a year and a half on the job, Birks has agreed to a settlement deal from the Board of Education to walk away for between $150,000 and $200,000, Goldson said.

Goldson said that the deal has already been negotiated, but Birks still needs to sign off on it within the week. He said he could not disclose all the details until it became official.

With one opposing member saying Birks should’ve been fired instead of bought out, the school board voted 5 – 1 to agree to negotiate the termination of her contract, which wasn’t set to expire until March 2021, at a Wednesday night special meeting at the district’s Meadow Street headquarters. The settlement was reached right before the Board of Ed was set to give Birks her first formal evaluation.

At the meeting, the board members immediately voted to go into executive session. After a half-hour behind closed doors, they took two votes in less than two minutes, with no discussion.

Birks wasn’t present and did not answer a phone call from the Independent.

“I’m disappointed, absolutely,” Goldson said after the meeting. ​“It’s all of our failure, including me.”

Ed Joyner, the one board member who voted against the severance package, said he thought Birks should have been terminated.

“I thought that we had cause,” he said. ​“It’s that simple.”

The deal with Birks should closely match what her predecessor, Garth Harries, received when the school board negotiated his exit in 2016.

Birks won’t officially quit being superintendent until Nov. 1, though she’s been asked to take vacation days until then, not making any official decisions, according to the deal.

A search for a permanent replacement likely won’t begin until after the November mayoral election, so that whoever’s in City Hall can participate in the search.

“We do not want to rush the process,” Goldson said.

Next time around, Goldson said he’ll be looking for a candidate with ​“a little more experience, someone who knows how to deal with the community and the board.”

Iline Tracey, currently the assistant superintendent, will step up in the interim ​“to lead and manage all matters involving the operation of the school district,” after a unanimous vote by the board on Wednesday.

Tracey, a 35-year educator in New Haven, will be the fourth person to helm the school system in just three years. Harries left under fire in October 2016, followed by former Superintendent Reginald Mayo, who returned for an interim stint until Birks came on board.

Birks’s tenure has been controversial since before she ever set foot into Central Office and it only escalated with public protests by students, teachers, and parents over budget issues, teacher transfers, and transportation routes.

Before she even took the job, the school board sparred over the yearlong search process to replace Harries. They scrapped an outside search firm’s picks, boycotted meetings, and nearly came to blows in a threatened duel. Critics argued Birks’s views seemed to match up with corporate-minded education reforms, particularly around charter schools and student-based budgeting.

When she was named as a frontrunner, parents and teachers from the watchdog group NHPS Advocates held a protest on the steps of City Hall and collected thousands of signatures. #NotMySuperintendent, they claimed.

Two board members who picked Birks — in a narrow 4 – 3 vote — later said they regretted their decision. Frank Redente, claiming he was pressured into his vote, said ​“I should have held myself strong.” Jamell Cotto, too, said he’d made a ​“monstrosity of a mistake.”

Nijija-Ife Waters, the president of the City-Wide Parent Team, said that politics on the school board, especially from Joyner and Goldson, two elected members, had doomed Birks from the start.

“I believe there were too much politics involved with the selection of our superintendent. What probably was supposed to be a good plan went bad,” Waters said. ​“The stakeholders’ lesson from this action is to know that nothing good is going to come from a board that lacks organization, order, respect and leadership. This is not a do-as-I-say system. The very people that we have selected or allowed to serve as our leaders have failed us.”

“Until we have a functioning Board of Ed with good leadership, we are constantly going to see a dysfunction in our educational system,” she added.

Just a few months in, Birks’s one-time supporters publicly undercut her, holding a press conference about the decision to send termination letters to 1,100 part-timers. Birks wasn’t invited.

Joyner, who’d voted against her, said the board was ​“micromanaging” and needed to give Birks a chance.

But he, like many parents and educators, soon concluded she wasn’t able to do the job.

They pointed to her reliance on consultants, saying she tried to hand out big bucks to data analysts and strategic planners, hid some of those payments through purchase orders and downplayed the expertise of those who’d spent their entire careers in New Haven.

At one point, Birks tried to cover up an additional payment to a company doing a curriculum audit for the district. ​“I don’t want anyone else to know about. I don’t want it to become public,” Goldson said Birks told him. ​“We can do a P.O., and if you don’t say anything, no one will know about it.”

They said Birks had been unable to balance the budget, saying she rejected the expertise of a chief financial officer, obscured the size of a looming shortfall and foisted too much of the painful cuts onto teachers.

They said Birks fomented distrust and failed to accept responsibility for her mistakes. Her chief operating officer accused her of creating a hostile workplace environment, and another director filed a federal lawsuit against her for retaliation. Top administrators (including the deputy superintendent she’d hired) and hundreds of teachers all quit.

Frequently joking that she should have paid more attention as a political science major in college, Birks struggled to work with the board. She privately told Mayor Toni Harp that she felt so uncomfortable around Goldson that she wouldn’t meet with him one-on-one. After an investigation, she publicly apologized.

After her first full school year, test scores in elementary schools continued to tick upward while SAT scores in high schools slumped. Birks also started a Gateway to College program after consolidating the district’s alternative schools and launched ​“network improvement communities” for principals to learn from each other as part of the district’s portfolio model.

This summer, Birks’s decision to start trimming next year’s budget deficit by eliminating 53 teaching positions — maximizing class sizes and endangering advanced courses in a process that looked retaliatory for more than a handful of teachers — led to calls for her resignation.

A massive rerouting of the district’s school buses, announced to parents just days before the school year started, was the final screw-up. The district received hundreds of complaints. One mom she’d lost her job because she’d been late after driving kids to school.

“The underlying problems here seem to be inexperience in the absence of humility and the lack of a vision and ethical frame to guide decision-making,” Sarah Miller, a lead organizer for the NHPS Advocates whose kids go to Columbus Family Academy, said. ​“Going forward, we should work to bring the on-the-ground concerns of our teachers and learners to the center of decision-making. We also need to invest in genuine collaboration across our differences so that we can demand together the resources that our kids and educators need and deserve.”