Amistad Principal: ​“We Will Be Better”

Beleaguered Amistad High now has a black woman at the helm — and she is promising to tackle the charter school’s racial challenges with an honest communal reckoning.

Emery Sykes made that promise in an interview with the Independent in the wake of controversies over the previous principal’s shoving a student and an African-American former staffer’s viral video about discipline policies at the Achievement First-run Dixwell Avenue school.

Sykes, a counselor who joined the Dixwell Avenue school at its founding and now serves as the dean of college services, has taken over as interim principal (or school ​“leader”) since Morgan Barth announced his resignation after the Independent published a video of the white principal shoving a black student.

“I believe we will be better,” Sykes said. ​“We are bruised right now, but we will be better. We will be stronger because of this.”

Achievement First initially planned to bring in a principal from another network school, but the co-CEOs changed their mind after hearing from staff in the building. Teachers said that they wanted someone who already knows their kids, said Fatimah Barker, the Achievement First network’s chief external officer. They landed on Sykes, who has broad support from the staff, because of her ​“love of kids and high moral standards,” she added.

Sykes said she’s not interested in keeping the job permanently. The search for a principal who can take over next year is on hold, said Barker, who plans to work from Amistad during the transition.

Last week, at a meeting where Amistad High School’s committee of directors heard from dozens of outraged speakers, more than 65 staffers signed a letter calling for a reexamination of the network’s entire model with ​“an antiracist focus.”

“This one incident is representative of the systematic racial inequalities that are observable throughout the network,” the school employees wrote. They said they’ve been thinking about how to create ​“a new and healthier framework for our school culture.”

The high school’s leaders said that they think the conversation needs to start at figuring out what advances students’ learning.

“Because that’s really what we’re here to do,” Sykes said.

“What’s good for kids? There’s some point where race doesn’t matter. At the very beginning, it’s: What do all kids need to learn? They need to feel cared for and they need to love learning,” Sykes said. ​“We have to create those kind of conditions, then we have to think about whether we’re creating them only because our kids are black and brown.”

From there, as they drill down into specific policies, the leaders said they need to ask whether they’d apply the same rules to a white student.

“We need to be asking ourselves, ​‘Would we have this same rule, policy or procedure in place for a scholar who is white?’” Barker said. ​“There can’t be a different bar.”

Hasn’t Achievement First’s model always been that its impoverished racial minorities — who form most of the student body — do need to be treated differently? Starting behind, how else can their kids compete? If they’re not pushed harder now, how can they eventually hope to keep up with well-off whites and their prep-school pedigrees? Hasn’t the network always insisted it must do something different to overcome the existing disadvantages?

“That’s the question we’re asking,” Barker said. ​“I don’t have the answer.”

Avoiding ​“Extreme Pendulum Swing”

Internally, Achievement First’s leadership team had been ​“grappling” with that question, Barker said. It has brought consultants in for anti-racism training and started to reevaluate some of its policies, she said. This conversation about how race ought to be handled is the first public one within the network, Barker added.

Barker, for her part, said she’s worried about an ​“extreme pendulum swing” away from the school’s exacting standards.

As a first-generation college grad who taught in the same East New York neighborhood where she grew up, Barker said, she got into education ​“to show what’s possible” for kids in neglected communities like her own.

Barker said that Achievement First can’t forget that overarching mission, even as it figures out the best way to carry it out.

“Low expectations are racist too,” Barker said. ​“I think we do need to talk about the policies and procedures, but if we are walking around saying, ​‘That’s all our kids can do. They’re not capable. Don’t ask them to do that,’ that’s just as bad. If the expectations for black and brown children are in the basement after this process, my core values will feel like they were undone.”

But Barker added that it won’t be up to her. As Amistad rethinks what type of school it wants to be, the opinions of students, families and staff will guide the process, she said.

As they try to patch over Barth’s departure, Sykes and Barker promised ​“transparency.” They said they’ll engage more people and then share their reasoning as decisions are made.

For instance, as Sykes thought about how to explain Barth’s departure to Amistad students, she asked teachers in small groups what they’d say. In the past, Skyes said, that messaging would’ve been worked out at the leadership team.

“It was cathartic for folks to be able to have space together. I don’t even think we were planning for people to have that much space and time to do that. But when everything was happening and we realized people needed it, we just let them do it. I feel like the team has bonded in a way that should have happened back in August, but I’m glad to see it now.”

Teachers’ Plea For Change

Amistad’s leaders decided to cancel school last Wednesday to give teachers a chance to talk through the previous week, leading up to the planned public meeting that night with the committee of school directors.

The conversation was ​“powerful,” said Attallah Shepard, who teaches juniors a college-prep class called ​“Foundations of Leadership.” It focused largely on the disciplinary system of ​“demerits” for minor rule-breaking, but it also opened up more areas to reexamine.

“As we talked about this work through an anti-racist lens, we stepped back and examined ways in which the merit system had rolled out. While it might not have been the intent, there’s an impact that I think we all were able to wrestle with,” Shepard said. ​“I think we all know that it’s not just the merit system. There’s some greater, systematic things that we have to look at as a school and a network.

“Change needs to happen. Folks in this building, families in the community, students in these classrooms mean it when we say it.”

At the end of the day, a few staffers penned the letter that was read that night to the high school’s directors. Lauren Cohen, the summer programming director, said that she wanted to ​“put down in writing” what the staff had been discussing and also show families that the teachers are with them in asking for change.

“This one incident is representative of the systematic racial inequalities that are observable throughout the network,” the staffers wrote in the letter, seeking ​“a new and healthier framework for our school culture.”

“Our days have been long, thoughtful and productive,” the statement read, ​“and they are worth it because we care deeply about our scholars and the future of our school.” The letter expressed ​“disgust and disappointment at the lack of transparency” around the October shoving, which most of them hadn’t known about. They said they’d been left out of discussions about Barth’s departure and the search for a new principal. They also said the network needs to use this moment ​“to examine the entirety of our model with an antiracist focus.”

“A Different School”

As she looked around the school during a conversation this past Friday, Principal Sykes said Amistad is already starting to feel like ​“a different school,” where staff engaged each other in a new way: ​“in partnership, really,” she said.

Last week, students also took a survey to gauge how they’re feeling, and this week, parents will get a chance to talk back with the new leaders.

Sykes said that she wants that engagement to continue and deepen. Her biggest worry is that the school doesn’t hear the feedback it needs.

“I really want candor, and I want truth,” she said. ​“I want a deeper level of engagement than I think we’ve had so far.”

Barker said that she hopes the process is a true reconciliation, one that works so well that Amistad will be defined by what it becomes, not by what it is now. She said she’s worried, though, that parents won’t give them a chance to do that.

“My hope is that this becomes a place where its past, you can’t even see it, feel it or smell it,” she said. ​“That’s not overnight, but at some point, I hope to walk through this place and not have the past hanging over our head, that people truly move forward and we’re better for it.”

Harp Offers Help

Meanwhile, Mayor Toni Harp Monday said she has offered to have New Haven Public Schools share tips on ​“social-emotional” development with Achievement First in wake of the latest controversies.

Harp has historically supported the development of the charter network, especially as a state senator, though she has also criticized it for attacking conventional public schools. (Read about that here.)

In response to a question from a listener on her latest appearance on WNHH FM’s ​“Mayor Monday” program, Harp said she still overall supports the work of Achievement First schools. Especially when it comes to academics. She spoke of the network’s insistence that all children can learn, and its emphasis on high academic achievement.

“We admire them for that,” Harp said. ​“I believe in what they do in terms of kids getting into really good colleges.”

“The social-emotional side needs works,” Harp said. ​”There’s another iteration that has to happen” in the network’s development.

“We can help them.”

The New Haven Public Schools have had more success working with teachers’ and students’ emotional and social challenges, Harp argued. As evidence, she pointed to the fact that New Haven Public School students who attend University of Connecticut remain enrolled in higher numbers than do graduates of Achievement First schools (the so-called ​“persistence rate”).

The mayor said she first contacted Achievement First about helping with social-emotional tips after a high-profile incident in which police slammed a handcuffed teen to the ground during the 2015 St. Patrick’s Day Parade. The incident stemmed from an ongoing feud involving teen girls, some of whom were Achievement First students.

Harp was asked whether AF was interested in the city’s advice or help, then or now.

“They listened,” she responded. Until now help has not ​“really been ongoing,” she said. But ​“AF leadership is recognizing they need to do more on social/emotional” development.

The state does not report college persistence statistics broken down for Amistad High graduates.

Achievement First’s internal statistics project a 50 percent college completion rate, according to spokesperson Amanda Pinto. She called the figure ​“many times the national average for students from low-income backgrounds” but ​“still not good enough.” She said Achievement First aims to have students from low-income backgrounds match the percentage of college completion from students from high-income backgrounds.

“That’s why we’re implementing programs like the Greenfield model,” Pinto said. ​“The goal is college graduation, so that our students can pursue the careers that they want.”

Click on the video for the full episode of ​“Mayor Monday.”

Paul Bass contributed to this story.

WNHH’s ​“Mayor Monday” is made possible with the support of Gateway Community College and Berchem Moses P.C.