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Tamiko Jackson-McArthur at WNHH FM.
Tamiko Jackson-McArthur has advice for the people replacing her on New Haven’s Board of Education: Take a deep breath, and remember the children.
Serving on New Haven’s school board can be “every emotionally draining and can tap into emotions that you don’t use every day,” she put it in an interview Thursday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program. “You see people doing things that are not in the kids’ best interest.”
“Try and leave the outside influences and political influences off the table and out of the room.”
McArthur-Jackson, a New Haven pediatrician raising kids who attend the public schools, is completing the last month of a four-year term. Mayor Justin Elicker replaced McArthur-Jackson and another board member who sometimes raised questions about administration policy, Larry Conaway, with two new appointees for the term beginning Jan. 1. (Read more about that here.)
The past four years have been stormy on the school board, with extended, sometimes accusation-filled, conflicts over who should serve as superintendent, how to deal with racial prejudice, and how to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic.
McArthur-Jackson, who played a vocal role in those debates, said she has “no regrets.” She is proud of having led efforts to enact a new district equity policy, a “restorative justice” approach that has dramatically decreased the number of suspensions, a gender affirming policy, a revisiting of school resource officer policy, and the renaming of the former Columbus Columbus Family Academy to Family Academy of Multilingual Exploration (FAME).
Most recently she oversaw a new policy to support families whose children “opt out” of high-stakes standardized tests, ensuring they remain in school and receive their education.
That issue — the reliance on standardized tests —has concerned McArthur-Jackson for years. Her own children opt out. She often writes letters to parents of her pediatrician practice patients to support opting out. She argued that schools devote too much time teaching to standardized tests, with health impacts on the kids from the pressure, taking time away from more productive instruction.
The opt-out policy is just a start in addressing that problem, she said. She would like to see school districts like New Haven’s resist state mandates that tie millions of dollars in classroom aid to ensuring that 95 percent of students take the tests, for instance.
McArthur-Jackson said she plans to continue advocating publicly on that, and other, education issues — such as the need to improve remote learning beyond the pandemic so that, say, students confined to home while they recover from surgery can obtain more than two hours a day of instruction.
“I’m not going anywhere. My kids are still in the school system,” McArthur-Jackson said.
She also is launching a nonprofit called Virginia’s Heart to address short and long-term housing needs of mothers in crisis.
Click on the video to watch the full discussion of education with Tamiko McArthur-Jackson on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.”