Vo-Tech Plans Retooled

The school district failed to find money to open a new vo-tech school — so it’s moving ahead with a humbler plan inside an abandoned wood shop at Hillhouse High.

Steve Pynn, who’s overseeing school district’s efforts to beef up its vocational-technical offerings, shared that news Tuesday in an interview at his new office.

Until the summer, Pynn had been stationed at Gateway’s vacant Long Wharf campus, where he had planned to open a new vo-tech high school called the Gateway Technical Institute this fall. The school never opened for two reasons, Pynn said: The school district struck out on getting state and federal grants to fund the project. And leaky roofs forced the school system to abandon that building.

Now Pynn, and the city’s fledgling vo-tech program, are starting over at Hillhouse High. Instead of providing vo-tech programs for kids across the city, as originally planned, Pynn is starting by making some changes to vo-tech programming for Hillhouse kids.

He outlined some small-scale plans for next semester at Hillhouse — as well as big dreams for how to redefine conventional high school education so that kids graduate with more skills they can use in the real world.

The next steps begin in the southern wing of Hillhouse High, which hosts a series of lab spaces and classrooms.

Some rooms are currently being used for career-focused classes. The broadcast journalism program, which has been at Hillhouse for at least six years, is housed in that wing, as is the city’s Public Safety Academy, which works with 40 Hillhouse students who aspire to be firefighters, cops, or other law enforcement officers.

Three other rooms now lie vacant: A wood shop, an adjacent classroom, and an engineering lab.

The wood shop (pictured) has been vacant since last summer, when the school’s longtime shop teacher retired, according to Hillhouse l Principal Kermit Carolina. A second lab space used to house robotics and physics experiments. It has been vacant for over two years, since the school’s engineering teacher retired, Carolina said. The district never filled the position, and the room ​“degenerated into a storage space,” piled high with furniture, boxes and books, Pynn said. (Pynn insisted that the Independent not photograph that room.)

The state of those two labs reflects a wider trend, Pynn said: ​“How is it,” when industry is clamoring for employees with more technical skills, ​“that we evolved to the place” where technical labs lie vacant?

“We evolved away from the teaching of these skills,” he said.

Pynn said technical programs fell by the wayside and public schools adopted a ​“one-size-fits-all mentality,” ​“to our peril.”

Pynn said the school district plans to begin to revive those spaces next semester as part of a larger effort to change that mentality.

Math Class Gets Real

First, he said, the school plans to hire a new shop teacher who will reinvent the idea of traditional shop class. The new teacher will team up with a Hillhouse math teacher on a new, double-period class called Geometry For Construction, Pynn said. Kids will learn all the concepts of a standard geometry class — and also put those ideas into action, Pynn said.

The idea of combining math class with a hands-on lab component isn’t new, Pynn said. In the past, such math classes have been watered down for kids who weren’t strong in academics. Pynn envisions the opposite, higher rigor for math. When this approach is done well, he said, it produces ​“far better test scores” because kids see meaning in math.

Principal Carolina welcomed the change. He said the new style of math class will ​“create more relevance” for kids.

Pynn said the new way of doing math aims to address a problem: ​“We are not producing graduates that have the skill sets” they need to succeed in life. Pynn, who led the Sound School Regional Vocational Aquaculture Center before taking on his new post, said he has talked to many industry leaders about what they’re looking for in entry-level hires.

“We don’t need kids who are masters of the short answer, and standardized tests,” the business leaders tell him, Pynn said. ​“We need kids who can apply the learning,” who can work in teams, and solve new problems.

“I am not interested even in getting your AP [Advanced Placement] kids,” businesspeople have told him. Those kids may get good grades, he said, but when they get hired, they don’t have the skills to think independently. ​“Tell me how to do a good job,” the students say.

Pynn said the new math-construction class aims to ​“break down” the conventional model of vo-tech education, where vo-tech classes are offered either in separate schools, or in elective courses that aren’t connected to the core academic subjects. Hillhouse currently offers business and marketing classes, Pynn said, but they are conventional, ​“siloed” classes, he said. ​“As valuable as accounting skills are, they are boring in isolation.”

Pynn envisions overhauling other core classes to connect them to skills, so kids can design projects and create them in revamped lab spaces.

To do this, Pynn plans to make use of a partnership with a company called Education Connection, which has already been working with city schools to beef up science and technology offerings. The company just won a new grant from the National Science Foundation, and will use it to train teachers at Hillhouse and bring kids to statewide competitions testing 21st century skills, Pynn said.

Pynn has also set up a computer lab that he hopes will serve as a new ​“project and discovery lab” that Hillhouse teachers can use for hands-on projects.

And Pynn said he is recruiting a cadre of Hillhouse teachers who are excited about turning a large storage space back into a working lab.

Big Dreams

In part, the vo-tech effort is responding to a common complaint about New Haven’s school reform drive: That while New Haven Promise offers new opportunities for college-going kids, the reform drive isn’t offering much for kids who don’t have their sights set on college.

To answer that complaint, Mayor John DeStefano and then-schools Superintendent Reggie Mayo hopped on the highway two years ago. They visited a successful vo-tech high school in Billerica, Mass., and came home determined to create a similar school in New Haven.

Pynn said he lobbied the school system to create ​“something deeper and more systemic than another standalone high school that would serve 300 students.” New Haven school officials settled on creating a new vo-tech high school program called the Gateway Technical Institute, that would take kids from all of the city’s high schools. The program would work like Educational Center for the Arts: Kids would report to traditional high schools during the morning, then go to Gateway Technical Institute for half-day or after-school programs focused on technical skills.

Initially, the school system got a commitment from the state to help make this happen by paying $20 million toward renovating Gateway’s old Long Wharf campus, according to Pynn. The plan hit a roadblock when the state officials who had supported the project were ​“let go,” Pynn said.

“We were back to ground zero,” Pynn recalled.

Then roof problems at Long Wharf made the rehab prohibitively expensive. ​“We had to walk away from it,” Pynn said.

The change of plans was ​“in many ways fortuitous,” Pynn reflected. He got the chance to work inside one of the city’s two main comprehensive high schools — rather than create a separate program a few miles away.

Pynn said he could have closed a door and declared the vo-tech wing separate from Hillhouse. But he saw a chance to begin to revamp core courses to connect them to careers that kids are interested in.

Future plans call for creating a robust extended-day program at Hillhouse, open to kids from across town. The program would be voluntary, he said. It would offer courses like Geometry for Construction that combine academic and technical skills. It would be a way for kids to recover lost credits, accelerate credits, or earn dual credits that count towards high school and college, he said.

He said that’s possible in part because of a change in state law. State law used to define a high school credit only in terms of time: ​“a 40-minute class period for each school day of a school year.” Pynn and Erik Good of High School in the Community lobbied the state Capitol earlier this year to allow high schools to give students credit not just for seat time, but through ​“a demonstration of mastery based on competency and performance standards.” The bill was signed by the governor in June.

“This is huge,” Pynn said.

It allows school districts like New Haven to award credits for ​“mastery-based” classes like those at HSC, where students move up as soon as they demonstrate ​“mastery” of a concept, regardless of how much time it takes. HSC is one of six high schools experimenting with that model of learning; Pynn said new vo-tech programs could follow suit.

New Haven could be at the forefront of reinventing high school to prepare kids for careers, Pynn said.

“What is holding it back?” he asked. ​“Money.”

He said he has applied for millions of dollars in grants so far, without any luck.

“If we had more money, we could significantly take off,” he said. For the meantime, the district is proceeding with a slower plan that’s growing in smaller increments.

“Gateway Technical Institute continues to be something that we want to see happen,” said schools Superintendent Garth Harries. ​“There’s no question that,” with a lack of money and a change in location, ​“we haven’t been able to build it in the ways that we originally conceived. But we think the core idea is important,” and will continue to find ​“ways to support and expand it.”