Christopher Peak Photo
Choice Director Marquelle Middleton presents options to families.
This year’s school choice lottery will have 284 additional desks set aside in the city’s magnet schools for New Haven residents.
School administrators presented the latest figures on local seating — the first adjustment to the share of suburban students in New Haven’s inter-district magnet schools after a back-and-forth with the state — at the Board of Education’s Finance & Operations Committee meeting this past week.
Then the full board unanimously approved the shift in enrollment rates at Monday night’s regular meeting at King-Robinson School.
About 5,300 New Haven kids currently attend an inter-district magnet, the much-desired schools with themed instruction, bigger budgets and diverse classes. Parents routinely complain that even more kids would go if so many seats weren’t set aside for suburban children.
After school board members voted to change that, the state agreed to pay for 700 more New Haven kids to attend an inter-district magnet. But school administrators last week said those schools can fit only 284 more New Haven kids.
That still-big increase in the number of seats for New Haven residents will be followed by a gradual decrease in the number of seats for suburban residents, as the district phases in a new recruiting goal over the next three years.
From now on, each new class of pre-kindergarteners and ninth-graders starting at an inter-district magnet will enroll 69 percent from New Haven and 31 percent from surrounding towns.
For New Haven residents applying to magnet schools this year, the district predicts it will add 46 seats at Career, 31 at High School in the Community, 28 each at Co-Op and West Rock, 25 at New Haven Academy, 22 at Mauro-Sheridan, 21 at ESUMS, 17 at Davis, 14 at Jepson, 10 at Beecher, Daniels and Ross, and a handful each at the rest.
(Click here to download the district’s full data set of projected enrollment.)
By October 2022, administrators are projecting that will mean the inter-district magnet schools will enroll 5,342 city residents, a 247-desk increase, and 2,471 suburban residents, a 95-desk decrease.
That 69:31 ratio is a compromise to maximize how much the state will pay in inter-district magnet funds. It’s a four-point adjustment from the previous 65:35 recruiting goal but still a six-point difference from the board’s requested 75:25 recruiting goal.
Because the state pays about $4,300 more for each suburban kid, reserving more desks for New Haven kids would’ve cost $325,000 for each additional percentage point by the 2022 – 23 school year, said Phillip Penn, the district’s chief operating officer.
The board unanimously accepted the proposed adjustment, though some members said they want administrators to continue negotiating with the state to seek more funding, especially as the district faces a projected $10.8 million deficit next school year.
“Think outside the box,” board member Darnell Goldson told district administrators. “Think like we’re thinking, in a way that supports the students instead of worrying about how many dollars we might lose. [The state] already backed down once, and hopefully they will again because our argument is righteous.”
Tamiko Jackson-McArthur, with other school board members at Monday night’s meeting.
The changes to this year’s lottery came out of a nine-month negotiation with the state, after board member Tamiko Jackson-McArthur first asked last spring why the district couldn’t lower suburban enrollment in inter-district magnets to the state’s statutory minimum.
In an effort to desegregate across town lines, state law requires inter-district magnet schools to accept no more than 75 percent of their students from one town and no less than 20 percent of their students identifying as white, Asian-American, Native or some mix of those races.
School administrators said they always recruited more students from the suburbs — allocating only 53.8 percent of new placements to New Haven kids last school year — to maintain a buffer, even though nearly all of the schools still missed their targets anyway.
“We were getting blamed and getting fined and leaving seats vacant in those schools,” Goldson said. “If we’re going to be a choice program, then we should be a choice program. But if you’re black and you’re brown and you don’t get a choice, that’s not truly a choice program. That is the argument we have been making.”
After the school board voted to charge suburban districts tuition and maximize local enrollment, the state came back with a compromise. It said it would allow New Haven to max out whatever money was available for its inter-district magnet school grant to enroll more resident students, up to $2.15 million for 703 additional desks, almost 50 more seats in every building.
Iline Tracey: This decision may have consequences.
Once administrators looked at the actual classroom space they had available, though, they realized they’d only be able to add about one-third of what the state had offered.
(There’s another category of intra-district magnet schools, like Edgewood, Martinez, Bishop Woods and Conte-West Hills, which are open to any city resident, that will not be affected by the proposed changes.)
In a memo listing the “pros” and “cons” in bullet points, Interim Superintendent Iline Tracey said that the change will result in an increase in funding at 11 of the 16 inter-district magnet schools next school year, though that number will decrease to only three schools by 2022 – 23.
Tracey added that an accompanying decrease in enrollment in the city’s neighborhood schools could result in a reallocation of Title I funds, a reduction in Head Start and School Readiness slots, and some larger class sizes.
She said that the change will also make it harder for schools to meet their racial-isolation goals, for which it has a waiver in state law only through the 2020 – 21 school year.
“I would not mind going back to neighborhood schools, if possible,” Tracey said. “What we have now is the unintended consequences that we all have to live with.”
Matt Wilcox, the board’s vice-president, said he also worries that the expansion of magnet-school seats might send the wrong message to parents, “that our other schools aren’t worth going to.”
“We really want to back our parents having the choice to go to the schools they want to go to, and this is a way to increase those numbers in the system,” said Wilcox, who voted against changing the recruitment goals last summer. “But at the same time, other schools are communities that we want to support in every way.”
Board members, after weighing the arguments, said they thought the change was still worth it.
“I’m always going to fight for New Haven,” Jackson-McArthur said.