They Came Back

Danielle Palmieri was warned: Don’t try to get your students to read Richard Wright’s Native Son. It’s too long and difficult a work of literature for high-schoolers to tackle.

Palmieri — one of three teachers interviewed this week who returned to the classroom in the city that raised them — ignored the warning. She remembered taking English in high school with Sandy Friday, who inspired to tackle Franz Kafka and classic South African works. (“I remember sitting in her class thinking, ​‘Is this what it’s like being a literary student?’ I took off from there.”) Now, as a first-year English teacher herself, at Hillhouse High School, Palmieri believed her kids could tackle Richard Wright, could catch the same literary bug.

She broke the books into chunks. And it got read. This week, it also sparked an extensive discussion about criminal guilt and personal responsibility: Did Wright’s Bigger Thomas deserve to die? ​“Students are interested in social injustice” movements taking place in the country now, she noted, and that interest carried to Richard Wright’s handling of similar issues in the 1930s.

At one point Palmieri noticed the students were leading the discussion. ​“They didn’t need me,” she said.

That’s the ultimate compliment for a teacher — for Palmieri, and for the teachers she had when she attended New Haven Academy as a member of the class of 2011. English teacher Friday imbued Palmieri with a love of literature. And started her onto the path to become a teacher herself — back in the city that raised her.

You don’t often hear stories about talented young people who live New Haven and come back. From New Haven’s ​“Promise” initiative to statewide programs, policymakers are trying to stop a perceived youth-talent drain out of Connecticut.

Inspired by memorable teachers like Friday, Palmieri returned after her 2015 graduation from Connecticut College to the public school system that educated her.

So did Julia Miller, a 2001 Wilbur Cross graduate who’s teaching 11th grade social studies at Metropolitan Business Academy, where her constitutional law class was debating capital punishment the same day Palmieri’s students were weighing the morality of the death penalty for Bigger Thomas. Cross teachers like Leslie Abbatiello convinced Miller that teaching can make a difference.

Diana Hernandez DeGroat came back too, not just to New Haven’s schools, but to the high school she attended as a student: High School in the Community. She loved going there.

The trio visited the WNHH radio studio after work one day this week to discuss their full-circle school journeys on the ​“Dateline New Haven” program.

A Needed Win

As much as Palmieri loved the cozy student experience at New Haven Academy, where she had the same teachers for four years and got to know them, she originally planned to settle elsewhere after college. ​“I’m going to get out of here. I’m going to a big city. I’m never coming back,” she remembered thinking.

That thinking changed at Connecticut College, where she spent much of her time working with New London public high school students. She also stayed in touch with her New Haven Academy teachers, continued visiting them.

It turned out New Haven Academy’s focus on civic responsibility and citizenship had convinced not just to serve community, but to do it in the community where she was raised. ​“I couldn’t see myself leaving the place that built me up … [and] made me who I was. I have a responsibility as a citizen to build it up,” she decided. ​“My heart was always with New Haven.” She came back and started in New Haven right after graduation. She’s living in Fair Haven.

“It doesn’t mean you’re a prisoner to where you came from. It instills respect and a desire to see it flourish,” she said.

She entered a school, Hillhouse, in the midst of upheaval, marked by internal and public criticism over its transition to four mini-“academies” within one school. Palmieri joined other teachers at a hearing last week at City Hall about the difficult changes.

“There is no perfect model of what it means to be a school in New Haven. We all have our challenges. We all do things well in certain areas. There are very dedicated teachers who are working to make things better,” Palmieri said. ​“We have a strong sense of community” at Hillhouse.

Palmieri felt that sense of community last Sunday, when she joined busloads of her students and fellow teachers to Mohegan Sun, where the Hillhouse boys basketball team won the state championship.

“We really needed that win,” she said.

Return Trips

Two of the three teachers interviewed found themselves in other cities before they returned home.

Miller headed to the millennial mecca of Brooklyn. She threw herself into teaching social studies at Park Slope Collegiate high school. She had a strong female principal who inspired her, she said. She also saw the school wrestle with convincing middle-class Brooklyn families to send their kids to school along with the lower-income, mostly black and Latino students coming there from other neighborhoods.

With a young child, she and her husband decided it’d be easier to live in a smaller city. New Haven called Miller home. She landed at Metropolitan, where another ​“incredibly strong, tough” woman with her ​“heart in the right place,” Judy Puglisi, is her principal, who inspires her, she said. ​“I want to be in a school I believe in. I feel I have that now,” Miller said.

Sometimes in ​“spite” of negative trends in American education, like ​“privatization,” some ​“amazing work is going on at the ground level,” Miller said.

At Metro, Miller’s classes include constitutional law, where this week her students — like Palmieri’s at Hillhouse — debated the death penalty. Miller has also recently had her students study the 1963 Supreme Court Gideon v. Wainwright case, which established indigent defendants’ right to a public defender. She brought in a March 19 New York Times story about the virtual disappearance of that right in New Orleans. Like Palmieri’s students, Miller’s are interested in social justice movements taking place today in the U.S.; their teachers are helping them connect those movements to debates from earlier generations. 

Last Friday Millere found herself chaperoning students to an LGBT ​“True Colors” conference. It felt like the continuation of a commitment she had as a Cross student, when she attended a similar conference (then called ​“Children of the Shadows”) as an active member of the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance back in the days before legal gay marriage when LGBT activism had far less public support; during Miller’s student days at Cross local ministers protested the school’s allowing LGBT students’ stories to appear in the school newspaper.

“That was one of those cool full-circle moments,” she said of the chaperoning.

Guiding Transitions

Hernandez DeGroat remembers different trips from her days as a student in the HSC class of 1997— to college campuses in Washington and Massachusetts. This week she’s planning a similar trip she will now take HSC juniors on as their guidance counselor. With a smaller budget than in her student days, the trips will have to remain in Connecticut. But they will still expose students to settings a world away from New Haven, she noted.

“It’s always great to have them see what’s out there. Even to go to a school like Western [Connecticut State University] or UConn. It’s so far from what New Haven is like,” she said.

Hernandez DeGroat hoped to teach Spanish at HSC right after finishing college. She loved the freedom and responsibility afforded to the students there. She started out as an aide; the Spanish teaching slot was taken. An opening emerged in Milford, so she went there. But she returned to HSC years later as soon as the Spanish slot was available. She has stayed ever since.

Hernandez DeGroat noticed that the students often came to her for advice. Eventually she became the school’s guidance counselor. That has meant much more than college advice. The formerly teacher-run school also underwent a few tough years of transition; Hernandez helped guide the students through it. Hernandez said she’s in the profession for the long haul, and that she intends to stay in New Haven.

After the WNHH show, Palmieri discovered that her younger sister is currently a student in Miller’s class. Miller discovered that her sister attended Educational Center for the Arts with Hernandez DeGroat back in the day. Palmieri is sitting with some of her old teachers at district English meetings.

They already knew that New Haven is a small city where you discover those connections all the time. And where they will continue to make them.

Click on or download the above sound file to hear the full interview with Hernandez DeGroat, Miller and Palmieri.