Ko Lyn Cheang photo
Carolyn Ross-Lee” New Haven ready to tackle change.
Supported by grants from the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund, the New Haven public school system will launch two new programs aimed at increasing the number of Latinx and African-American teachers as well as promoting awareness of racial biases among school administrators.
As the school system deals with budget woes, administrators have turned to alternative sources of funding, including private philanthropic funds like this one, to address the lack of teacher diversity.
The grants come at a time where 72.5 percent of New Haven’s teachers identity as white, compared to 12.9 percent of students who identity as white.
“You have a school system that is burdened with centuries of explicit and implicit racism which has yet to ever fully grasp how to educate children of color, how to represent the history and contributions of people of color in its curriculum,” said David Addams, executive director of the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund. “There needed to be some really intentional work to address both of these issues.”
The programs are the culmination of more than a year of work by the District Equity Leadership Team (DELT), formed in the 2017 – 2018 school year to help districts become more conscious about promoting equity, with funding from the State Education Resource Center and the Graustein Memorial Fund. DELT applied for the two grants from the fund more than a year ago.
“As a community, New Haven is ready for these constructive conversations about change,” said the school system’s leader for the DELT, Carolyn Ross-Lee, who co-authored the grant application. “Obviously it is hard work. It’s easy to say and sometimes hard to do. But we know right now that we are poised and ready to engage in the work.” Ross-Lee also serves as the school system’s Title IX coordinator and climate coordinator.
The first grant is for minority talent development and recruitment. It provides $100,000 for the public school system to establish a teacher certification program that will support predominantly Latinx and African-American paraprofessionals in becoming certified teachers.
Some money will also go toward supporting new teachers by covering some of their rent and providing homeownership training and financial literacy training for them.
“It goes without saying that we need more minority teachers within our schools to reflect the population of our school system,” said Assistant Superintendent Keisha Redd-Hannans.
The second source of money, $141,500, is an Equity Transformation Grant. It will fund equity and inclusion training provided by the Winters Group, a diversity and inclusion consulting firm.
Under the equity training program, school principals and administrators across the district will be required to take an “Intercultural Difference Inventory” survey, which measures how well a person accepts intercultural difference. The results of the survey will serve as the starting point for designing the equity training program, which could include book clubs and discussions about racial bias.
“Given the fact that we are dealing with the unrest in our country, it becomes even that more vital that we are engaging in work that will have our leadership reflect on their implicit biases that preserve barriers to student achievement,” said Assistant Superintendent Redd-Hannans.
The program will be the first district-wide equity training program happening across schools to address racial bias amongst education leaders, even though individual schools have organized their own equity initiatives in the past.
Turning to Philanthropic Funding
Philanthropic funding makes up less than 1 percent of Connecticut school district budgets, according to data from the School and State Finance Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit education policy organization.
“A few hundred thousand dollars in a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars is not an enormous amount of money in terms of the overall budget picture but it does give school districts the opportunity to do specialised programs that they might not otherwise have the opportunity to do,” said Katie Roy, executive director and founder of the School and State Finance Project.
This is the first time the Graustein Foundation has given a grant to support equity training and teaching diversity programs of this sort in a public school system, although the foundation has given grants to other school districts before, such as the Middletown public school district.
Addams said it is uncommon for government agencies to apply for grants from organizations like the Graustein foundation, but that public budgets tend to be quite limited and so in order to supplement those budgets, they turn to philanthropic foundations.
The New Haven Public School system was expected to suffer from a $8.3 million deficit during the next fiscal year. School system administrators recently proposed cost cuts, including shrinking the number of staff and increasing class sizes, in order to make up for the deficit.
“New Haven is one of the few districts that has been willing to step up and take some affirmative steps to move things forward,” said Addams.
“Acknowledging the problem and proactively look for structures and solutions are critical. Only a handful of districts in the state have begun to take that on in any comprehensive way.”