Welcome to the New Education Matters

Paul Diego Holzer
Executive Director of Achieve Hartford

Our Education Matters! newsletter has been keeping you informed on the progress and challenges in the Hartford Public School District for the past seven years.  Providing a window into so many of Hartford’s reform efforts, we have largely been in the position of reacting to board of education and district decisions and commenting on the impact to student achievement.  But, upon reflecting on the impact of this reporting, it’s time to do things differently. As we move in a new organizational direction, to be announced publicly at our annual meeting on October 31^st, Education Matters! is moving in a new direction as well.

The new format will deliver stories at multiple times and in multiple mediums aimed at proactively bringing you deeper into systemic change work, through stories of leadership and best practice, words of truth, narratives of hope, and invitations to participate. You’ll still get an email from us every two weeks, but now it will contain summary links to articles, videos, podcasts and posts, all meant to accelerate our efforts to directly impact student outcomes, with you right beside us.

We invite you to “like” our new Education Matters! Facebook page and to comment and discuss education issues with our “tribe” of education champions in Hartford.

Together, as real partners, we will reshape the future of education in Hartford. Let us know what you think of the new format below, and all of our new communications as you experience them! Send a note to Nyesha, our storyteller and communication lead, anytime at [email protected].

Thanks for all you do for Hartford children and families, and for our great city.

Are You All IN?

Today, it’s imperative that we think about Hartford’s present and its future. The economic competitiveness of the city and the region requires that our attention become focused on and coordinated in developing the knowledge and skills of our future workforce – today’s 21,000 students spread across 46 Hartford Public Schools.

As the demographics of the State shift drastically over the next 10 years with more and more baby boomers retiring and more and more young people concentrated in our cities, the fierce competition for talent will only intensify.  Our state’s success in keeping businesses here while keeping costs down is directly correlated to our ability to cultivate a strong – and homegrown – talent pipeline.

The All IN! coalition was formed to support and energize existing groups of inspired stakeholders in the city who took the first steps in planning interventions to support Hartford youth advance through the education-to-workforce pipeline.

Together, bold post-secondary enrollment and completion goals will be hit by 2025 through better coordination and aligning of resources. Organizations that serve students must do so with seamless handoffs, shared data, and dialogue between partners that can serve as a flashlight to guide all efforts toward the vision of Hartford as a talent hub.

Join us on October 17, where we’ll come together to see how we are progressing towards our 2025 goals, announce new efforts, and illuminate specific ways you can be “ALL IN!” for Hartford students.

Event Info and RSVP

Designing a SuperSchool? – There’s a class for that!

In September 2015, Laurene Powell Jobs and the nonprofit Emerson Collective challenged the country to redesign the American high school with the launch of the XQ: Super School Project.

As part of the Weaver High School visioning sessions, we participated in the Super School Project when it initially launched last year and, although our proposal wasn’t selected, we are all still moving forward as a team rethinking Weaver High with ambition and optimism.

As participants in the project we have received a special invitation to join a unique online school redesign course.

The XQ SuperSchool Project in collaboration with MIT’s Teaching Systems Lab have announced an invitation-only, special edition online course titled, Launching Innovation in Schools: XQ Edition. It begins on October 12 and runs for seven weeks.

This course will support the current Weaver 2019 coalition work to design a learning experience for Weaver High school students that is unmatched in Hartford, and we invite you to be a part of our learning circle.

Our learning circle is a facilitated, in-person study group for school builders (like you!) who sign up for the course. We’ll work both online independently and then together to discuss what we’re learning in class sessions.

This course is offered free of charge but is limited as we want to keep this course to a reasonable size so we can build a productive and vibrant learning community.

If you are interested, please email Nyesha McCauley at [email protected] by Wednesday, October 11 for the enrollment link and class times.

Looking forward to learning with you!

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For Achieve Hartford’s newest staff member Daiana Lambrecht, the long road to Connecticut’s capital started in her native Argentina and continued with educational and professional experiences across five U.S. states and a year in China. Whether it was teaching 5^th graders as a Teach For America Corps Member in San Antonio, Texas, coaching teachers to provide quality instruction and relationship building in rural Southwestern China, organizing parents and community members to fight for educational equity in San Jose, California, or deepening her understanding of organizing and education policy at Harvard, Daiana realized through all these experiences that school improvement occurs when community partners are engaged and dedicated to improving educational outcomes for children.

Serving as Achieve Hartford’s Lead Coalition Organizer, Daiana hopes her talents will bring the organization to a new level of stakeholder engagement.

“Stakeholder engagement and organizing is the glue that holds everything together. People are complex and have their own interests,” she said.  “To move people towards action for better results for children, we must work with decision-makers and community members in a way that puts them in the drivers seat to bring new initiatives and practices into education. Without people moving in a unified direction, it is hard to accomplish education reform for children.”

What made this Harvard-educated, teacher’s daughter come to Hartford? Inspired by efforts such as the Sheff Movement, Daiana came to make a difference in a state that infamously suffers from the largest achievement gap in the country, too often leaving children of color, lower socioeconomic status, special needs, and English language deficiency affected the most – especially in Hartford.

Joining an organization that she views as taking an innovative approach to shaping educational practices through direct partnership with community organizations will bring new meaning to her belief that it takes “a village to raise a child.”

As Daiana embarks on the work of making connections across the city, she welcomes the opportunity to hear from our community of education leaders.  Reach out to her at: [email protected].

Over 70 supporters jammed into the Chrysalis Center on July 26 to attend a screening of the film Resilience: The Biology of Stress and the Science of Hope. The award-winning documentary revealed how toxic levels of stress in the form of abuse and neglect during childhood can have long-term health consequences on the brains and bodies of children and then adults, causing all sorts of health problems and leading also to barriers to learning. A panel discussion moderated by Alice Forrester, CEO of Clifford Beers Clinic in New Haven and force behind New Haven’s Trauma Coalition, followed the screening and delved into how Hartford communities and schools can become more trauma-informed.

To panelist Catherine Corto-Mergins, becoming a more trauma-informed community requires people in schools, treatment centers, youth service agencies and other entities to look at the world they work in with a “new set of lenses.” Comparing her own work as Director of The Village’s Collaborative Trauma Center to one of a brain surgeon, Corto-Mergins explained how children exhibiting behavior problems may be acting out not because they are deliberately hostile or are suffering from ADHD, but because their adverse childhood experiences have negatively altered their neurological system, thereby increasing their likelihood of aggressive conduct.

Awareness of how trauma-induced hormones wreak havoc on brains and bodies should inform policy and practice changes within schools – in areas like discipline, classroom management, and daily instruction. “A consistent, caring adult in a child’s life is one of the most important preventions for trauma,” said Corto-Mergins.

Providing effective support for children harmed by trauma is challenging on multiple levels. To Hartford community activist Kelvin Lovejoy, even if kids attend safe, supportive schools and participate in after-school activities, they still have to return to homes and communities filled with adversity.

“What happens between 3(pm) and 8(pm) affects what goes on between 8(am) and 3(pm),” Lovejoy said, noting that everyone in a community, from parents and relatives to store owners and churches, has a role to play in providing a safe environment for children to grow up in.

Fellow panelist Timothy Goodwin, founder of Community First School in the North End of Hartford, added that supportive environments need to also be built into schools.

“If you can’t reach a child, you can’t teach a child,” said Goodwin, explaining that training teachers in how to interact with students suffering from trauma is necessary to build the authentic relationships which are crucial for a successful learning environment.  Goodwin’s proposed new school is built on the notion that all adults will be trained to address trauma and working alongside community resources to get the needs of students met.

Yet the efficacy of teacher training in trauma-informed practices is limited. Collective bargaining agreements restrict the amount of time teachers receive training. Additionally, incorporating these practices is often met with hostility from a common mindset among teachers and administrators that trauma-affected children can rise above their troubled past if they just had the determination to do so.

But it is these adverse childhood experiences that often undermine how resilient a child is. Kelvin Lovejoy believes focusing on restoring a child’s emotional intelligence – their personal temperament in day-to-day life – is key to putting them on the right path.

“When you can raise the emotional quotient of a child, automatically reading, writing, and arithmetic will go up also,” said Lovejoy.

The Bottom Line

Many of those in attendance indicated in a response card before leaving an interest in forming an organized “trauma coalition” that would push for policies and resources to make Hartford and its schools more trauma-informed communities.

Getting decision makers to change policies and allocate more resources for trauma-informed training will be a challenge, but for Community First School Board Member and Founder of ScriptFlip, Trudi Lebron, it is more about changing minds than changing hearts:

“You can try to change people’s hearts, which is hard, or you can try to change people’s minds; and the way you change people’s minds is to put policies in place that require people to deal with things differently.”

With a thriving trauma coalition in Hartford sometime in the near future, Catherine Corto-Mergins hopes teachers, counselors, parents and anyone working with traumatized children will change their approach towards kids from “What’s wrong with you?” to “What’s happened to you?”