Teachers, Paras: Don’t Make Staff Cuts

As New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) Superintendent Madeline Negrón grapples with the prospect of staff layoffs for next school year, long-term substitute teacher Maria Threese Serana called for more recognition of subs like herself who have been filling classroom vacancies daily since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Threese Serana was one of many to speak up at Monday’s latest Board of Education meeting about the prospect of 61 school district layoffs to come as NHPS looks to close an expected $12 million budget deficit. 

Teachers, paraprofessionals, and other school staffers urged the district to avoid layoffs of classroom staff in response to the superintendent’s 2024 – 25 developing budget mitigation plans shared last week during a Finance and Operations committee meeting. 

During last week’s board committee meeting, Negrón said the district is considering 61 staff position cuts to help save $6 million next school year. At Monday’s hybrid meeting held in-person at Ross Woodward School and online via Zoom, Negrón’s recently updated plan now showed an expected $1.8 million in savings resulting from reduction of staff — with roughly $4.1 million in needed savings still to be found. 

Negrón said she is working to figure out the staff reduction plan before the district’s last day of school on June 17. ​“We are doing the hardest to not have to say, ​‘We got to let you go,’ but I know time is ticking,” she said. ​“We have the rest of this week and Monday. I want to at least give people the courtesy to say whether ​‘Yes, you have a job,’ or ​‘You don’t have a job.’ That is the very least that I can do.”

School staffers filled seven rows of seats at Monday’s meeting to urge the superintendent to not lay off school building staff. They each wore yellow stickers reading ​“NHFT [New Haven Federation of Teachers] Says: Staff Our Schools!” 

Maria Threese Serana is both the mother of student representative John Carlos Serana Musser and an educator. She has worked as both a para educator and a substitute in recent years, most recently working as a long-term science substitute teacher at Wilbur Cross as she is in the process of getting her elementary education certification and masters in teaching. She subbed for a teacher on maternity leave for about 56 days. 

She spoke up Monday on behalf of subs. She emphasized the need for recognizing the vital role subs have played in classrooms as the district has experienced teacher shortages. Threese Serana said that subs are paid $105 a day with no benefits, giving them no incentive to do anything beyond ​“babysitting” in the classroom. 

After 45 days of subbing, their contract states that a sub can become a union member. Long-term subs must reach 75 days of subbing in the same position to get a pay increase of $135 a day. Threese Serana said that as a result of working long-term for only 56 days, she was not entitled to be paid $135 a day despite her teaching of human physiology and pharmacology in her classroom using the teacher’s supplied slides and assignments. She was also spending her prep periods helping other classes with substitutes. 

“There are so many classes in New Haven Public Schools that have been run by substitute teachers for years since the pandemic,” she said. ​“It is so disrespectful that I have to fight to even get paid.” 

Rebecca Mickelson, an art teacher at Dr. Reginald Mayo Early Childhood School, emphasized during Monday’s testimony that ​“Connecticut is a state of staggering wealth disparity, and the resources for a healthy society have always existed, but disparities in power have led to its consolidation in the hands of a few.”

She called for all districts in the state to have fully funded schools rather than just a select handful. ​“Trickle-down economics does not in fact trickle down,” she said. ​“There’s no doubt in my mind that in our current system, our needs come with a paywall.”

Districts like New Haven need the financial resources to make public education work and end their cycle of having underserved students, she added. 

Paraprofessional Union President Hyclis Williams also testified to express concerns about the district’s spending plans, suggesting that they include student, community, and staff input going forward. ​“We have to change the way we do business in New Haven Public Schools,” Williams said. 

Williams called for budget mitigation plans to not make cuts to school staff. ​“There is no staff to cut. We don’t have enough staff as it is,” she said. ​“We want our students to get the best quality education they can receive. That means we need the best quality staff that we can find.” 

Williams concluded that change needs to happen so the new superintendent is not set up for failure. 

Teachers union President Leslie Blatteau agreed, declaring that New Haven Public Schools next year will not be fully funded. ​“Our students will not have full access to a range of educational opportunities and support that they deserve,” she said. 

On behalf of the union/community coalition, Blatteau called for the board to staff schools because ​“there are no cuts left to be made to our classrooms, to our schools, and to our student-facing staff. We need more, not less, support for our students.”

The teachers union has worked in collaboration with the district as its right-sizes its schools and fills vacancies. 

Blatteau emphasized that more school counselors are needed to guide students toward their post-secondary pathways. More social workers are needed to support schools Planning and Placement Teams (PPT), and more paras are needed to offer one-on-one support to special education students. 

She concluded that all student-facing staff are needed. ​“Our students deserve fully-staffed and fully-stocked libraries so they can put their improved reading skills to work. So they can develop a love of reading because that’s fostered by having access to a library, not simply by monitoring progress on a computer program.” 

In order to build on the community coalition working toward providing students with the schools they deserve, Cross teacher Melody Gallagher encouraged all board members to attend meetings in person to work together. ​“We cannot afford to wait any longer, and it’s going to take a community to get it done,” Gallagher said. 

A music teacher at Barnard, Sloan Williams agreed that collaboration is the way to go. ​“We can do a lot more if we’re working together. If we’re fighting, our students suffer immensely, so it’s time for us to come together as a community and support them. If we need to find funding, I’m sure there’s ways we can do it together,” Williams said. 

Later in Monday’s meeting, Superintendent Negrón updated the board on her team’s ongoing process of working through budget mitigation plans for the 2024 – 25 school year. 

She said that while she’s grateful for the increases in next year’s funding from the city and state, the district still has a nearly $12 million budget gap to close before schools reopen in the fall. She also noted the exciting things to come to the district in coming years thanks to state funding like repairs to the Floyd Little Athletic Center and Adult Education getting a new building. 

Additional mitigation plans include the district’s ongoing work to look at all early notice retirements of staff. Negrón said her team is tasked with difficult conversations of ​“do we really, really need to fill” the gap? And, ​“can we afford to” not fill the gap?

While looking at vacancies, she said she has to consider that ​“maybe this is not the year that we fill it.”

Negrón said she is also optimistic that the district will be able to mitigate $1 million in cut bus routes for transportation. 

The plan notes cuts to contractual services to save $1.1 million. Those services will include overtime staff when community services and programs use district buildings. ​“Every time the buildings are used, it means that we have to have security there, we have to have custodians there. But what we’re saying is those things we’re going to look and say, ​‘No, not happening,’ unless you are putting a program and inside the program, you built it so that you are covering the cost of our custodian and our security,” Negrón said. 

That also may include services the district has invested in to enrich teaching and learning, Negrón said. 

“Well, we don’t have the luxury to have those tools anymore because we are mitigating a budget, so those things are also going to be cut,” she concluded. ​“When we make those decisions it means that discretionary dollars that often we would give to schools, that now we’re going to say, ​‘Well, now you’re going to get less because we had to access some of that to mitigate the deficit.’ ” 

In response to the discussion Monday, Board of Education member and Mayor Justin Elicker said the ​“school finance system in the state is broken in my view.” Other board members agreed.

Elicker said it’s a myth that the district has been wasteful in its spending. ​“That’s not to say that there’s not work to be done identifying cost savings and making sure the every dollar is spent efficiently. But you look at the Connecticut School Finance Project, and their analysis says we spend less in administrators than many other urban districts in the state average. If you look at what we spend per student, per pupil, it’s around $20,000.” Meanwhile, he said, places like Westport spend $25,500 and Greenwich spends around $27,000 per student. 

“Part of the problem here, as [school board Vice President Matt Wilcox] says is, Connecticut is doing great in a lot of ways, but we’re in one of the most segregated states in the nation. And if you take Westport as an example, their grand list is larger than ours. So in other words, they have more taxable property in their city than New Haven does in our city, and we have high-rises. They have a bigger farm to feed their people. And they have many fewer mouths to feed than we do in New Haven. And in the meanwhile, their taxes are more than half of what ours are,” Elicker said. 

“This is an opportunity for us to work together to have a real conversation about how we change the state’s system.”