Christopher Peak Photos
Valerie Horsley, Jim Owens at Monday night’s school board meeting.
Board discusses Birks’s performance in 2-hour executive session.
Superintendent Carol Birks during public criticism.
Superintendent Carol Birks’s job appeared to hang in the balance, as school board members heard parents and educators call for her firing, then retreated behind closed doors to discuss her future.
For nearly two hours, in a private discussion in Celentano School’s library, Board of Education members talked about her performance and asked their lawyer to begin to negotiate the terms of Birks’s exit from the district, several of them said afterwards.
That development took place as part of a stunning reversal during Monday night’s regular board meeting. Before a packed crowd, where parents held up signs that read, “#NewSuperintendent” and “Transfer Dr. Birks,” the school board voted to permanently undo the involuntary transfer of 53 teachers and then began discussions that could put Birks’s position in peril.
BOE’s Matt Wilcox and Yesenia Rivera.
Board members voted, 6 to 1, to permanently reverse the elimination of these 53 teaching positions.
Matt Wilcox, the only board member who voted against the motion, cited a provision in the superintendent’s contract giving her authority over the “assigning and transferring of all personnel.” He recommended proceeding with the reassignments, which may still have to happen to close next fiscal year’s looming budget deficit.
Co-Op’s Mindi Englart: Not feeling good about going back.
When the roll call was taken, the audience burst into applause.
Students from Hill Regional Career High School who had organized a walkout against the cuts hugged their social-studies teacher, Bob Osborne, who said he was so glad to stay.
But several other teachers said that they worry about what it would feel like to go back into a “hostile” building where they’d been targeted.
“I have been told very clearly you are not wanted here,” said Angie Catalano, an English teacher at Hillhouse High School. “This is not an environment where you keep quality teachers.”
After that, the Board of Ed listened to dozens of parents and educators speak for two hours, many of them voicing their concerns about the district’s direction under Birks’s leadership.
Sometimes pausing with exasperation, shaking with emotion and, in one case, taking a pot shot about “high heels” and “glittery outfits” that was shouted down, many of the speakers said that it’s time for the superintendent to go.
Birks sat on her hands and bit her lip as she listened to the criticisms lobbed her way.
In three-minute speeches, several of the speakers said that, despite massive opposition to Birks’s selection as superintendent in November 2017, they had tried to give her a chance, either silently holding back criticisms or actively trying to help her succeed.
But they said her decision to start trimming next year’s deficit with the elimination of 53 teaching positions — maximizing class sizes and endangering advanced courses in a process that looked retaliatory for more than a handful of teachers — was the final proof that Birks doesn’t know what she is doing.
Sebastian Bianchine, who will be a sixth-grader at Worthington Hooker School next year, repeated a lesson that he said his teachers had taught his younger brother about the difference between “wants” and “needs.”
“We want a $10,000 calendar. We want extra test prep. We want unnecessary assistant superintendent positions. But what we need is teachers,” he said. “This makes us want a new superintendent.”
Parents and teachers at Monday night’s board meeting
Other speakers, including board members themselves, pointed to Birks’s inability to balance next year’s 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 she has fomented distrust, has failed to accept accountability for her mistakes, drove top administrators from their jobs, and sent classroom teachers into panic, as 29 teachers announced their resignations just in the last two weeks.
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.
Sonya-Marie Atkinson: We’re spending money to cover up incompetence.
“In reality, we are not spending money to do better,” said Sonya-Marie Atkinson, a parent. “We are spending money to keep friends and potential future employers in positions that protect them from having to show inability in their positions.
“Our children have been used like an amateur playing chess, just trying to get as many bodies from one position to another as opposed to looking at the end game. Our end game is our children receiving the best — not adequate — quality education to go out into this world to be compassionate, productive members of society,” she continued. “Every single one of these children is a king and a queen; they need to be protected as such. They are not pawns; they are not rooks. It is your job to protect our children, not positions on Meadow Street.”
Parents from the watchdog group NHPS Advocates also said that Birks has failed to unify the city around a coherent vision for its schools, outsourcing that goal-setting to consultants.
“There is so much that we could be talking about and working on: how we make sure every kid learns to read, how we join forces to force the state to fully fund public education, how we bring the powerful interests in our city to the table,” said Sarah Miller, a parent at Columbus Family Academy. “But there’s only so far we can push these things from the bottom up. We need leadership at the top working hand in hand with the community to make them happen.
“Instead, we have incoherence, irresponsible spending and a culture of divide-and-conquer. It’s reasonable to ask our highest paid city official to operate in a way that establishes and strengthens trust over time, so that we need not continuously be on the lookout for spending that steals from our children’s classrooms for frivolous things.”
Jamell Cotto: I made a “monstrosity of a mistake.”
The criticism came as well from a former backer who’d played a role in putting Birks in to her current job: Jamell Cotto, a former board member who joined the 4 – 3 vote for Birks over Pamela Brown and Gary Highsmith, said that decision had been a “monstrosity of a mistake.”
“I wholeheartedly apologize for casting that vote,” he said. “If you’re not familiar with results-based accountability, it means how much did she do, how well did she do it, and who’s better off? We’ve seen a mass exodus of talent leaving this district. Tonight, 30 teachers are resigning. That said, I am calling for the resignation of Carol Birks immediately.”
Last year, Frank Redente, another former board member who joined Cotto, Mayor Toni Harp and Board President Darnell Goldson in voting for Birks, also told the Independent he regretted picking her.
Rev. Boise Kimber addressing the board.
Only two people came to Birks’s defense. Both of them exceeded the three-minute limit by using time yielded from other signed-up speakers (including one’s daughter).
Boise Kimber, the pastor of the First Calvary Baptist churches in New Haven and Hartford, compared Birks’s opponents to “raving wolves.” Robin Miller Godwin, a former president of New Haven’s chapter of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority and executive office manager at the Housing Authority, said that board members were seeking “self-aggrandizement.”
Nijija-Ife Waters: I see who you listen to.
Another speaker also faulted the board for taking complaints seriously only now, when a different crowd — including two Yale professors — showed up to protest.
Nijija-Ife Waters, who as Citywide Parent Team president has routinely asked the board to revise its policies, said that she felt the board paid attention only when “a group of people that don’t look like me come together, rally up in numbers and then point in your face what’s wrong.”
“It’s not fair to the black parents like myself that comes here and say, for four years, ‘Your policy is outdated,’” Waters said. “I came on numerous occasions to advocate what’s wrong, asking for accountability. You want to get rid of the superintendent? Why? The board is the one that puts her here. You guys want to get upset? Get upset with them. You want to check somebody? Check them.”
Board discusses Birks’s performance in 2-hour executive session.
After that, the school board sped through the rest of their agenda, quickly voting for two new principals, overnight field-trip permissions and a bundle of contracts.
At 8:15 p.m, members went behind closed doors to evaluate the superintendent’s performance.
At 10 p.m., they filed back into the cafetorium, said they hadn’t taken any votes and adjourned.
After the meeting, in the darkened parking lot outside Celentano, Birks said that she felt she has tried to connect with New Haveners during her year and a half on the job.
“I’m willing to continue to work collaboratively with all stakeholders,” she said. “We’ve had several touch-points for engagement all throughout my tenure here: with teachers, students, families. I’ve committed my life to supporting students being successful and I want to continue.”
Asked what she thought about the calls for her resignation, Birks said, “I’m not sure.”