Still Up in the Air

The District’s annual celebratory School Governance Council (SGC) forum Tuesday evening was coupled with a suddenly-called Board of Education Finance Committee meeting immediately afterward.  At both sessions, un-finalized school and District budgets were still up in the air at this late date … just like those of the City and State.  It’s a very unusual (not to say nerve-wracking) year.

For nearly a decade, the District’s annual SGC forum has presented an opportunity for parent, school, and community leaders, school by school, to relay their best practices, detail their deepest experiences, and convey their most careful caveats about the cuts that annually come to their budgets.  But in this fraught year, dollars remain a mystery and SGC discussion this week was minimalized.

At Tuesday’s SGC forum at the old and new Barbour School site – the Journalism and Media Academy on Tower Avenue – the program had to be shortened due to time constraints, as the Board’s Finance Committee needed a piggy-back meeting to catch up to the fact that the Fiscal 2018 budget at all levels is still in limbo at this late date.  The committee meeting shortened the annual SGC showcase (at which many more District officials were on hand and on the mic than were SGC members).

Budget Emergency Kidnaps Forum

The Courant’s editorial yesterday, exploring – and advocating – State fiscal oversight in return for the extraordinary fiscal support Hartford requires – made it plain that past, weak pension and benefits investments statewide and in the city have caught up with us.  This is not only a local problem; it reverberates across our cities, our state and our nation, perhaps most prominently evident in the debate over health care.  Credit Mayor Luke Bronin: Unlike many public officials, he refused to ignore this cost crisis as a voice in the suburban wilderness.

The Courant today further illuminates the uncertainty of both the State budget outcome and possible Hartford bankruptcy.

Hartford’s school budget is up in the air.  Possible variations vary by millions of dollars right now.

Asterisks *** will have to be used, Board members concluded after a long meeting Tuesday night, as they could not resolve the various gap mitigation strategies, multi-million dollar additional reductions, continuously ambiguous Sheff-related seat availabilities, and ongoing budget amendments, yet to be finally adjusted.  Some 150 more Hartford-host magnet seats may be made available, but no one can say for sure.

HPS has brought costs down by $23 million through cuts in salaries/staff changes, contracts, maintenance, transportation, benefits, and computer and printing, but these cuts may not cut the mustard.  Nor may the State pass its budget this week.

The District is looking to further save $1 million just by eliminating its offices of academics and school improvement; streamlining the office of academics, and setting up offices of elementary and middle grades and secondary education, respectively.  That’s 10 positions.

District Superintendent Leslie Torres-Rodriguez emphasized in an interview that a realignment of the offices was in the works long before the fiscal crunch this year.  “As a systemic thinker and practitioner,” she reflected, “one of the first things I noticed when I came here as an assistant superintendent was that the central office structure did not lend well to implementation of inter-related strategies.  That’s what we’re now designing, to ensure operational effectiveness, alignment, and coherence.  The new Office of Academics, for example, will be purposeful and efficient in our support to schools.”

Uncertainty is the watch word at all levels, but at least some version of next year’s HPS budget will be adopted tomorrow at a special meeting of the Board of Education at 12:30 pm at 960 Main Street.

Here, You Drive

On a Saturday no less, the third annual Hartford ROOTS Youth Leadership Conference last month brought nearly 300 students from 28 Hartford high and middle schools to get beyond common, cute cliché photo ops and identify real neighborhood needs and solutions.  If helping develop leadership skills is the transmission, youth organizing is the engine.  Where is the fuel?

The fuel comes from students like Frances Reyes and Marvin Medina, junior students at the Hartford Public High School Law and Government Academy.  They helped organize the Teach for America-sponsored event May 13^th at Pathways to Technology and Design High School.  More than a dozen workshops featured 20 facilitators, slam poetry, youth organizing specialists, and guidance from leaders like Hartford community icon Trudy LeBron.

“Our goal is to amplify student voice and bring students together across neighborhoods and schools to recognize their school leadership skills,” Teach for America Managing Director of Hartford Programs Michelle Szynkowicz said, calling for getting beyond cute student photo ops to address real needs.

Supported by Law and Government Academy Principal José Colon and English Teacher Kaitlin Curran, here’s what the Hartford High students added in an interview Tuesday about their two years of participating in the planning of ROOTS youth conferences, including the most recent one at Pathways:

• Frances Reyes arrived in Hartford from Puerto Rico at the age of one – and then became a chronicler of educational opportunity.  She attended Parkville, McDonough, Moylan, McDonough again, Clark and a New Britain school, before arriving at Hartford Public High School’s Law and Government Academy, where she is a junior today.

She learned over the years that “you definitely have to connect with your teachers,” she said in an interview Tuesday – and that mobility toughens your character.  As a worker bee for ROOTS conferences over the past two years, she has become interested in conference planning as a career option.  Her lessons learned from planning meetings and running presentations, including one to Bridgeport youth, have led her to conclude that the most challenged students simply need more participation in activities that promote their growth.  “They’re good people, but just come from bad neighborhoods,” she said, recalling her own limited exposure to new experiences as a child.  “Because of lack of money, we didn’t get out and do fun things,” she said.  Now she does.

• Marvin Medina, also a junior at the Law and Government Academy, was not quite the nomad that Frances was, but he attended Naylor and Burns schools before high school and advises students: “Don’t hesitate to search for opportunities.”  Students at the ROOTS conferences are able to articulate their views and feel more connected, he said Tuesday.  “We want everyone to know that people our age are able to do things,” he emphasized.

When he learned of the ROOTS conferences, he said, “I joined because of so many different people wanting to help themselves and their community.”  As he contemplates majoring in business at college, he said, the youth conferences have helped many a young person overcome nervousness about public speaking.

The Bottom Line

ROOTS stands for “Realizing Our Own True Strengths.”

Managing Director Szynkowicz has a plain explanation for the purpose of the effort to convene middle and high school students.  “Youth hold all the power to bring about change in Hartford,” she told us.  “Youth organizing, with deep training in organizing skills, is key because these individuals are the most severely impacted by inequity.”

We all know that affluent families are positioned to, among other things, take vacations, afford extracurricular and musical enhancements, and continually expose their children to powerful, new experiences driving their growth.  ROOTS conferences help fill the opportunity gap that characterizes less affluent students and point us toward the value of youth organizing.

Stage Set for Action at Board of Ed Retreat

The June 2^nd Hartford Board of Education “retreat” reiterated the importance of raising expectations and creating conditions for continuous school improvement in the era of the landmark (albeit complicated) Sheff region-wide integration experiment.  All five appointed, and all four elected Board members attended (the full line-up!).  Facilitator (and UConn Associate Research Professor as well as Executive Leadership Program Director) Bob Villanova set the tone for the day when he urged the leadership team to work with new Superintendent Leslie Torres-Rodriguez to create conditions for progress.  Here’s some of what they established.

At one point during the retreat, Facilitator (and statewide superintendent leadership trainer) Villanova remarked, “The egg is cracking a little here,” when Board members’ wide-ranging discussions went to data requests dying on the vine, ventured out into the weeds of what has happened with re-purposed purposed furniture and materials, and, most importantly, sought to understand the implications of staff cuts.

Donald Harris, the Bloomfield District Board chair, now a leadership coach for Hartford, was at the retreat table and candidly commented on the budget limbo now at every level of our government.  To Board member comments that “the superintendent has the opportunity to clean house a bit” but that the District has no money to buy out contracts, Mr. Harris intoned, “You don’t have to buy out contracts – you can take that person and put them in the classroom … and you know what?  They won’t stay long.”

Additional highlights from the retreat include these:

• Hopes.  Board members opened the meeting with expressed hopes for a common understanding between the Board and superintendent to yield better communication; identify next steps coming out of the meeting; decide whether there are “too many balls in the air” (what Facilitator Villanova called “initiative overload”), and produce a clear understanding of the common, long-term goals for the District;
• Perspective.  UConn Executive Leadership Program Director/Facilitator Villanova, speaking as a colleague of past longtime Hartford Superintendent Hernan LaFontaine, described new Superintendent Torres-Rodriguez as a leader who knows how to discuss issues with pride and confidence.  “You’ve got a gem here,” he advised, noting, as he put it, that she, while diminutive, has a big intellect.
• Priorities.  The superintendent and Board members identified a number of conditions crucial to continuous improvement:

• Accurate metrics to register progress
• Trust and effective communication
• Appreciation of complexity [from the Sheff court room to the classroom]
• Alignment and execution of activities in furtherance of the mission
• Appropriate communications among Board members, through the chair

• A one-page document, “Accelerating Equity through Organizational Excellence,” visually represented a 30,000-foot view concerning reimagining, redesigning, and restructuring the District for improved student outcomes.

Another Municipality Heard From

Bloomfield (one of Hartford’s next-door neighbors) Board of Education Chair Donald Harris, Jr., noted that his district in 2011 hired longtime HPS administrator Dr. James Thompson, on the basis of his emphasis on rigor, the use of data, and positive community engagement.  Coming from one of the five lowest-performing of the 169 districts in the state, Bloomfield is now number 36 in CT, he said – and its graduation rate has jumped 20 points to 91 percent, since 2011.

Unlike Hartford, where several committee meetings run 90 minutes each on many different days of any week during any month, Bloomfield folds its work into just three committees (Finance, Curriculum, and Policy) and conducts all on one night, 30 minutes each, back-to-back meetings, from 6 p.m. until 7:30 p.m., prior to its regular Board meeting later that same night.  “We’re in there and we’re out,” Bloomfield Board Chair Harris said.  Is this an efficiency Hartford might want to study (since stipends for volunteer Board member hours obviously aren’t on the table at this time)?

Mr. Harris also suggested assigning a Board member to each school; making sure the superintendent calls the Board chair immediately on any major emergent development; and prioritizing the dissemination of data through central office and school teams.

By contrast, Hartford has no data team at the District level.

The Bottom Line

The job of Board members, Mr. Harris advised, is similar to a congregation, as he put it, upholding the arms of its pastor.

In Hartford, support will be needed for a superintendent pursuing the goals of operational effectiveness, transformative teaching and learning, robust family and community engagement, and true systemic accountability.  The foundational commitments on which these goals rest are: putting students at the center of their learning; developing leaders to lead for learning; and organizing and operating in ways that align adequate resources for improved teaching and learning.

And, from our point of view, the Board’s ability to provide strong support will necessitate more and consistent leadership training related to how exactly their role impacts student achievement.