Melissa Bailey Photo
When a four-foot-tall tough guy turned in his homework, teacher Zanneice Smith called for a round of applause.
The student — let’s call him Mike — is a sixth-grader at Urban Youth Center, a small middle school at 580 Dixwell Ave. for kids who’ve gotten in trouble.
He turned in his assignment after a long weekend, during which he visited his brother in jail and got caught in a fight in a public park.
The homework and the warm congratulations in class marked a small accomplishment for a student who has been known to scare his peers, and who’s absent from school 40 percent of the time.
Mike’s story reflects the challenges at Urban Youth — challenges that will be faced by Domus, a Stamford-based charter group that’s taking over the school in the fall.
Urban Youth serves 30 kids in grades six to eight. The school, which was founded in the mid-1980s, serves two populations: special education kids who are considered “emotionally disturbed,” and kids with behavioral problems.
The school was one of two in the city that got a failing mark when the district graded its schools this year as part of its fledgling reform effort. Citing low test scores and attendance, the district announced it would close Urban Youth at the end of this academic year and reopen it under new management in the fall. The school board hired Domus to run the school, which will take the name Domus Middle.
Domus plans to transform the environment with new teachers, uniforms, social service supports, and a longer school day. Click here and here for related stories.
The current principal and teachers will relocate to other schools, and this year’s eighth-graders will move on to high school. Only the students in the sixth and seventh grades will stay through to experience the changes.
A peek into Zanneice Smith’s classroom showed the range of obstacles, many sprung from poverty, that students and teachers at Urban Youth confront.
The student body is 65 percent “emotionally disturbed” students and 35 percent with behavioral problems. They typically go to Urban Youth after they get into trouble at other schools.
Mike is one of nine students — all boys — in Smith’s homeroom, the only class of sixth-graders at Urban Youth. Seven students showed up on the Tuesday after Memorial Day weekend and sat down at their desks, spread out under a gray, cement ceiling with large fluorescent lights. They shared what they had done over the weekend.
One student reported that he went to a cookout in New York City where people were throwing fireworks at cars. They stayed up until 2 a.m., he said.
Another boy went to Granby and saw a Lamborghini.
“I went to see my brother in prison,” reported Mike. He hadn’t seen his brother in 10 years. His brother cried, he said. Mike said he didn’t know where the prison was — somewhere out of state.
Smith took the chance to give him some advice.
“You’ve got to get your act together, because that’s where you’re going to end up if you don’t act right,” she said.
At age 13, Mike has already been arrested. He’s currently on probation. Smith chided him for skipping school two days out of every week.
Some students at Urban Youth have wound up in jail for truancy, because staying in school is a condition of probation, said Principal Sabrina Breland (pictured). She said of the 30 students in her school, at least eight have served stints in juvenile detention. Sentences don’t last more than a couple weeks, she said. They miss class while they’re locked up, then come back to school.
School attendance sits at 82 percent, compared to 92 percent for the district. Tardiness has been a bigger problem than absenteeism, Breland said.
Breland took over as principal last fall. She said kids’ behavior has improved, but the school has fallen short of meeting its academic goals.
“The building has calmed a lot since September,” she said. “The problem I’m finding is academically, some students don’t see themselves going any further than eighth grade.” She outlined some challenges the staff and students have faced.
The principal hinted at one problem in an announcement over the intercom Tuesday morning.
“As the year ends, please do not bring in any weapons … any fake weapons, any drugs or paraphernalia,” Breland warned. “All rules remain in effect.”
Breland has been issuing that reminder every morning for the last week, ever since a student was caught bringing a weapon to school. The student faces an expulsion hearing, she said.
Thomas MacMillan File Photo
Kids are searched with a metal-detecting wand when they enter the school, but the wand can’t screen for all forbidden items, such as drugs stuffed into pants pockets. Several students have been caught over the course of the year for bringing in “contraband,” Breland said.
Most of the sixth graders have stayed out of trouble.
Smith said of her 11 years at Urban Youth, this is by far her best-behaved class.
“They’re still kid kids,” she said. Her students play with Transformers. That’s a rarity at the school, she said: “All the other kids are into sex and running the streets.”
Mike is an exception in Smith’s class. Though he’s less than four feet tall, he has street cred and a toughness that scares the other kids, Smith said. He’s older. When she bought her students Transformer action toys for Christmas, she gave Mike a watch and a chain instead.
“There were so many fights in the park” over Memorial Day, Mike reported to the class Tuesday. “I got stuck in the middle of one.”
“You’d better be careful,” Smith advised, “because you know bullets don’t have names.”
Smith said other kids were afraid of Mike at first. He arrived as a “bully” who bothered other kids and wouldn’t sit still in class. While many kids needed a lot of attention, he was the most difficult student in the bunch, she said.
“He’s real street-smart, and he hates school,” she said.
Smith said she runs as many hands-on activities as possible, to try to interest and motivate students like Mike. At one point, the kids all wrote letters to family and friends.
One kid wrote to his grandma. Mike wrote to his nephew, who’s in jail.
Tuesday, Smith made a special point to commend Mike for completing his work.
“Give [him] some applause — he brought his homework back,” she said. His classmates clapped their hands.
They sat down to consider the week’s writing prompt: A (fictional) mayor has proposed imposing a $100 fine “if you’re caught with your pants hanging below your butt.” Do you agree or disagree?
The kids set to writing.
“Get out of here before I call the police,” read one student’s sentence, as Smith corrected classwork in the middle of the room. After a discussion, she helped the student figure out that he needed an exclamation point at the end.
Smith said this class is by far the brightest, and most advanced, that she’s seen at Urban Youth. For the most part, they do work on grade level. She said she’s focusing on punctuation, such as when to put capital letters inside quotations and where to put quotation marks, that past sixth grade classes could not attempt.
She lures her students with rewards: If they all bring in their homework, she cooks them a hot breakfast, serving up sausage, eggs, pancakes, bacon, grits. At Christmas, she bought them each a dictionary and a thesaurus.
Smith acknowledged that despite all her best efforts, kids like Mike fail because of so many missed school days.
With 11 years on the job, Smith is one of a handful of veteran teachers at Urban Youth. She sent her own son through the school. As school ends in late June, Smith will be saying goodbye to her star class, and her school. She said some of the changes Domus is planning — a new curriculum, a overnight camping trip before school starts — don’t appeal to her, and she’s ready to move try high school.
One challenge Domus will face is luring parents to take on a bigger role in the school.
Parent turnout at report card night was 25 percent (eight out of 32). Breland said when she invited sixth- and seventh-grade parents to talk to Domus about the changes afoot at their school, only three out of 18 came to see the presentation. They were all in the Ms. Smith’s sixth-grade class.
When classes start next year, the district will be poised with newly minted metrics for measuring every part of the school, from teachers, to student growth, to the school “climate.” The goals of the school reform drive are to eliminate the achievement gap for every student, and cut the dropout rate within five years.
Domus has its work cut out for it.
Urban Youth scored at the bottom of the district on the Connecticut Mastery Tests last school year: 33 percent scored at least proficient in math, compared to 66 percent for the district and 85 percent for the state. (Click here for more stats in the school’s interim progress report issued in March.)
Breland said with this year’s CMTs, she aimed for 60 percent proficiency. She expects to fall far short of that bar. One problem was that many eighth-graders lacked the computer skills to take the writing tests, which were done on computers this year, she said.
Breland said as the students close out the school year, she’s been prepping them for the changes — uniforms, new rules, more hours in school.
Breland and Smith agreed the kids would be better served by having more resources — such as the “family advocates” in Domus’s model —to help with the complex socio-emotional problems they face.
“I’m anxious to have [Domus] come in,” said Breland. “We need something for them.”