Paul Bass Photo
U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona at Fair Haven School: "We don’t have all the answers in D.C."
Fair Haven got to work Monday on creating “community schools” — by first deciding what that means in 2024.
The kick-off took the form of a press conference/celebration held at Fair Haven School to celebrate the receipt of a $2.5 million federal grant. The five-year grant will go to the mental health-focused Clifford Beers Community Care Center to work with the public school district and 14 non-profit and government agencies to turn Fair Haven School and Family Academy of Multilingual Exploration (FAME) two blocks up Grand Avenue into community schools
That term has a history in New Haven. The city received similar grants more than 50 years ago to turn Katherine Brennan and Jackie Robinson (then others like Conte) into “community schools.” That meant keeping them open earlier in the morning and later in the evening so community members could come in to offer tutoring, athletics, health care, and other programs for families. The idea was to make the school the center of a neighborhood where people worked together not just on educating kids but in strengthening their families.
The money dwindled. The DeStefano administration tried a revival of the program in the aughts.
Officials at Monday’s event were short on specifics about how the community schools they’re looking to create now will resemble or differ from those in the past. Explanations ranged from “leveraging all our partners” and “reconceptualiz[ing] our schools as holistic systems of care” and “caring of the whole student” to young people being able to “go home” to “all kinds of help available to them and their families through means that didn’t exist before — the internet, for example.” (See video above.)
They said that the first six months of the grant will go toward a planning process, including a “needs assessment.” As a way of coming up with a definition.
“We don’t have all the answers in D.C.,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, who participated in the press conference. “We’re going to get a community assessment. What worked 30 years ago” doesn’t necessarily work today.
Fair Haven Alder Sarah Miller is a point person for the process in her day job role as Clifford Beers’ director of strategy, implementation and special projects. She said that after that first six months, money will go directly toward programming that makes better use of the two school buildings (first at Fair Haven School). Each school will have a coordinator who can find ways to bring in, say, a theater program for the Fair Haven School’s restored but largely unused century-old performance hall.
After the event the school district released a summary with more specifics. The envisioned “full-service community schools” will operate “beyond the school day as youth and family resource spaces” with “arts, sports, cultural” “enrichment activities” as well as “family support services” and “academic interventions and supports.” In addition to the full-time “community school coordinator,” each school will have a “family support care coordinator.”
The “key organizations” serving as “partners” for the planning process are ARTE, Junta for Progressive Action, Catholic Charities of Centro San Jose, the New Haven Free Public Library, Fair Haven Community Health Care, New Haven Federation of Teachers, New Haven Reads, United Way of Greater New Haven, Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services, City of New Haven Youth and Recreation Department, City of New Haven Elderly Services Department, Dwight Hall at Yale, the City Wide Youth Coalition, and the CT Violence Intervention Program.
More details to come.