Aliyya Swaby Photo
New “coordinating” Principal Zakiyyah Baker.
Hillhouse High School is getting an extra $675,000 along with and more structured oversight by administrators this semester, after a fall plagued by controversy and lack of unity.
In the wake of students and staff clamoring for a more unified school, district officials and administrators are working on changes to make Hillhouse feel consolidated while keeping its existing split academy structure. Hillhouse is currently divided into four different academies, each with its own administrators, including the Social Media and Art (SMART) academy that opened this fall for freshmen. (The College and Career Academy is being phased out after seniors graduate this year.)
Superintendent Garth Harries sent a letter to the Hillhouse community Jan. 18 asking people to “stay the course” through the difficulties of this year’s transition and reassuring them that their concerns have been heard. He included a seven-point plan to address those concerns, which included designating Hillhouse a Title I school receiving extra state funding this year and specifying the roles of the three principals in the building.
Click here to read the full letter.
The Board of Education announced this year’s changes to the academy system a few days before school began in the fall, causing students and teachers to criticize the lack of communication and inefficiency of coordination.
Harries acknowledged the validity of that criticism in the Jan. 18 letter: “[I]t is also clear to me that there are real problems of communication and coordination — problems which are interfering with the transformation, and which are and will be addressed.”
He explained why the district had converted Hillhouse from a comprehensive high school to a school of academies in 2009. Though the graduation rate was going up in 2009, the school was losing “almost 6 of 10 students along the way to senior year.” Administrators created a freshman academy and small-group learning opportunities for older students, and each of the new decisions “brought their own controversies,” Harries wrote.
But the graduation rate continued to increase, reaching 69.4 percent in 2014 from 41.8 percent in 2009.
“These accomplishments have not been celebrated often and loudly enough within the school system and across the district,” he wrote.
The decision to add two more academies in 2014 and the SMART academy this year stemmed from the fact that Hillhouse was still a “last ‘choice’” for students and parents. “As strong as the progress had been, we needed significant growth and innovation to meet our goals,” Harries wrote.
Civics teacher Jack Paulishen said he was pleased that Harries acknowledged the fact that Hillhouse graduation and college persistence rates had gone up since 2009, before the school was split into academies. And he said the superintendent has been in the building surveying teachers and administrators about necessary changes.
“I appreciate the acknowledgement in this letter of the things we did well,” Paulishen said. “The negative feelings I had about how things were handled were assuaged by this letter. As a teacher, I have a responsibility to these kids to try to make this work.”
He said he plans to “let go of those things that bothered me” and move toward “making something work for our kids.”
Smith and Daniels.
But some students do not feel like anything has changed. Alanna Daniels, who spoke out about the lack of support for seniors in the College and Career academy in the fall, said that “most of the issues we had before haven’t gone away or vanished. Sometimes they’ve gotten worse.”
She finished applying to college a week ago and said she had trouble getting in touch with her guidance counselor. She said she feels administrators are not easily accessible. And she hasn’t had a chance to mentor or bond with underclassmen. She said she still wants a support system at the school.
Defining Roles
The leadership system at Hillhouse has also changed over the last several months, centralizing certain roles in specific administrators. Principal Zakiyyah Baker is now the “coordinating principal in the building, with responsibility for cross-building coordination and communication in addition to leadership of her academy,” according to the seven-point plan in the letter.
The other two principals, David Diah and Fallon Daniels, will lead their own academies. Baker said their roles in the building had developed naturally throughout the year.
“For me to take lead on coordinating across buildings and issues is a responsibility that we had discussed and that I was informally participating in anyway,” she said.
Melissa Bailey Photo
District officials also brought retired top administrator Charles Williams to serve as a leadership coach to the principals in October. Baker said Williams has been a “great mentor” to the principals, helping them figure out how to make a large divided school feel cohesive. He helped them create parent-teacher organizations within each academy that also joined together for schoolwide discussions.
Teachers trust Williams and have built strong relationships with him, Baker said. “People needed to feel comfortable and confident.”
Funding Ups and Downs
Harries also authorized $675,000 in extra funding to Hillhouse through a federal Title I grant, for schools with a certain percentage of low-income students.
The district got about $10.3 million from the state through Title I, about $8.1 million of which is allocated to schools on a per pupil basis, said Victor De La Paz, district chief financial officer. New Haven has discretion on where to set the threshold of poverty, determining which schools will get extra funds. In the past, New Haven has set the threshold for that percentage at a high level, historically excluding large comprehensive high schools Hillhouse and Wilbur Cross.
“Hillhouse and [Wilbur] Cross [High School] are so big that including those two schools would take so much more than everybody else,” De La Paz said, speculating on why the district has not included them in Title I previously. “I do think that was a factor.” Hillhouse is around 60 percent low-income students, in “the middle of the pack,” he said.
Baker said administrators have a “vision that goes well beyond Title I funding” and will have to prioritize how to use the extra $600K. They want to bring more technology into the building and create staff positions to help students who need extra support, she said.
Seniors in the fall said they did not have enough access to working computers to be able to finish their college applications.
Harries said he plans to continue checking in with leadership there monthly, as he has done since December, to make sure the transition is progressing well. He told the Independent that when he checked in with six student leaders from Hillhouse at last month’s Citywide Student Council meeting, five out of six told him “things had gotten better,” and one was “pretty concerned and negative. Those signs are good.”
Harries said in the letter that most of the Hillhouse community and staff do not want to “return to the status quo” but instead want to keep building on the academy model with a smoother process. “Hillhouse has been extraordinarily important to generations of students and it will be extraordinarily important to generations of students,” he said.