Melissa Bailey Photo
Wilson addresses Board of Ed Tuesday night.
For the third year in a row, Jenine Wilson found her son wait-listed at the top-notch school one block from her home.
Wilson, who lives near the Davis Street School, aired her frustration with the admissions process at a public hearing Tuesday at the Board of Education at 54 Meadow St. She was one of a half-dozen members of the public who spoke up at a public hearing before a Redistricting Committee that is considering redrawing the boundaries that determine who gets to go to the city’s 21 neighborhood schools.
Parents gave several suggestions on how to rezone the city to make admissions more fair.
Wilson, a graduate of New Haven Public Schools, made her point with a personal tale about one of the system’s top-performing institutions.
“Davis is literally around the corner from me,” she said. When she bought her home on Earl Street, she thought: “Buy the home, get into the school.”
It turned out she couldn’t get her eldest child into the school until she was 8 years old, in 2nd grade.
Now she has tried for three years in a row to get her second child into Davis. He struck out for pre‑K two years in a row. Now he’s 5 years old, and he’s number 25 on a wait-list to get into Davis Street next year. Wilson said she doesn’t want to split her kids up in to two different schools.
“It’s a logistical nightmare,” she said. “The lottery system doesn’t work.”
Jeana Santora (pictured) came forward with a similar story. Her twin boys, both 5 years old, applied to kindergarten for the fall. One got into Ross/Woodward, but the other was wait-listed. She was told to bus her son across town to Strong School, a kindergarten overflow in the Hill.
“I’m supposed to send my kid on the highway?” she objected. “It’s just crazy.”
It turns out that the moms were applying to two of the city’s most competitive schools. Neighborhood schools give first preference to all students in their “attendance zone.” Students apply through a lottery.
Citywide, the district is seeing a crunch in the number of neighborhood seats available in grades K to 3, according to Ed Linehan, former magnet school director whom the Board of Ed hired back to tackle this topic.
Ross/Woodward ranks first in the city in the gap between the number of kids who live in the attendance zone and the number of available seats. The zone has 1,021 students but only 421 seats — a gap of 600 seats. Davis ranks third with a shortage of 425 seats: 706 students live in the neighborhood boundary, with only 281 seats available, according to Linehan’s figures.
The crunch means that not every kid who lives in the zone will get into the school.
One solution suggested Tuesday night would be to shrink the attendance zone so that families who live right near the school, as Wilson does, would have an easier time getting in.
Eliza Halsey (pictured), head of an informal group of parents who have been studying the pre‑K admissions process, gave three other suggestions to the problem parents face.
She suggested the district look at the 11 schools that have no attendance zone — for example, Roberto Clemente — and assign a zone to them. That would ease the pressure off of the other neighborhood schools, and give kids a better chance at getting into a school that’s close to them.
Citywide, only 28 percent of New Haven Public School students in grades K to 8 attend their neighborhood school, according to Linehan. The other 72 percent hop on buses to magnets or other schools.
Halsey also recommended that as the panel tries to project enrollment, it look not just at past enrollment, but at U.S. Census data, to see how many potential students the district could be serving. She called on the panel to study how placement in a pre‑K program helps kids get coveted spots in kindergarten classrooms.
Linehan said his panel is already beginning to look at census data. In its first three meetings, the panel took a broad look at the capacity and attendance zones of schools across the city. Tuesday was the first public hearing. The panel plans to draft recommendations by the end of June, take feedback from the public, then write up recommended changes over the summer, to be voted on by the school board in the fall.
Halsey called the timeline too hasty. She urged the district to slow down and engage more parents by taking the discussion on the road, to the neighborhoods.
While the panel has been transparent in its meetings about redistricting, “most people don’t know it’s happening,” she said.
Linehan (pictured) opened the meeting by pointing out a new website, which has copies of all the materials presented, as well as maps, agendas and future meeting dates.
He replied that in order to make any changes in the fall of 2013, the recommendations would need to be in place at least nine months earlier. He said the panel will probably come up with some short-term and some long-term changes.
He ended the meeting with a note of caution: If the district moves a line even one street over, it will make some people happy — and leave others dismayed. He said the district needs to take a global look at the system.
And he sought to refute a charge issued Tuesday, that suburban kids are robbing New Haveners of coveted pre‑K seats. It’s true that half of all pre‑K magnet seats go to kids from out of town, he conceded. But he said the only reason the seats exist at all is because those suburban kids are there — suburban enrollment is the basis of the magnet grants that enabled schools to open pre-Ks.
“The urban kids only have those seats because the suburban kids came in,” he said.
He said he would post information on the panel’s website showing that suburban kids don’t leave after pre‑K: the number of suburban students enrolled in New Haven schools stays relatively steady through the 8th grade, averaging 146 students per year.
Schools Superintendent Reggie Mayo, who attended the meeting, vowed to consider parents’ concerns.
“Are we going to solve all of it? No,” he said. “But we’re going to try.”
With the city’s school reform drive, he argued, “schools are getting better — more will become better,” alleviating the crunch at the more popular schools.