An earthquake of sorts shook the Hartford Board of Education meeting this week, as the mayor’s call for more city parents on the nine-member panel was realized at the leadership level: Four parents will now run the Board as the four-officer executive team.  And longstanding Board Chair Richard Wareing has been replaced, marking this as the first time since the City Charter was changed in 2005, granting the Mayor five appointments, that an elected member is Board chair.

The chair is now Weaver High School graduate and North End resident Craig Stallings; the first vice chair is West End resident Tiffany Glanville; the second vice chair is North End resident Karen Taylor; the secretary is South End resident Julio Flores.  All are parents of Hartford students; their citywide representation and diversity also stands out.  The other elected members are Michael Brescia, Robert Cotto, Jr., and, recently appointed by the Board to fill the vacated seat of Beth Taylor, Juan Hernandez.  The next election of the four so-designated Board members is this fall; generally, fewer than 8 percent of registered voters participate.

Hartford’s strong-mayor model is designed to consolidate control at the top; the transition this week from Chair Wareing to Chair Stallings, who is not a mayoral appointee but elected, could make it harder to focus accountability for the school system’s performance – but it could also help to balance mayoral power.  This can be good or not, depending on how you view mayoral control.  And with Craig Stallings’ energy and ideas, there is a lot to be excited about.

In any case, the pressure certainly is on new Chair Stallings to guide governance stewardship at such a rocky time, to build a close relationship with the mayor, and to build a team out of nine individuals at a time when they are sorely needed.  With representation from workforce, municipal government, education, higher education, accounting, legal, political, and obviously, parent perspectives, the Hartford Board of Ed can accomplish incredible things.

The Bottom Line

Whether this week’s leadership development is a powerful earthquake (or a mere tremor) remains to be seen.  We see it, however, as a great opportunity to address a critical Board shortcoming over the years:  The whole seems to be less than the sum of its parts.  Individuals are exceptional.  The entire group?  Well-intentioned but in need of training, as are we all.

Whatever happened this week to compel the chair change is anyone’s guess, but clearly a new direction was favored by a majority of the nine members in Tuesday’s election.  All votes were unanimous and, unusually, all nine members were present.

Past Chair Wareing has served tirelessly, and if Tuesday’s meeting is any indication, he aims to continue to serve and graciously support the new chair.  From a personal standpoint, he said wryly, he may now be able to bill more hours at his law firm (this comment does suggest a fourth-rail issue.  Past Board Chair David MacDonald told us in a recent interview that Board work requires 10-20 hours of reading and planning every week.  As some school districts do, he suggested, Hartford might want to incentivize its Board membership with a stipend recognizing their time away from family and work obligations.  Maybe when the economy is stronger!)

The Board recently has stepped up the activities of its committees and looks to be gearing up to shoulder the Board’s portion of the shared leadership trifecta with the City and District.

The time is now, and we plan to be as helpful as possible.

The two finalist candidates hoping to be selected to become the District’s next top leader will be on hand next Wednesday to meet the public in candidate forums at Capital Community College.  With the initial screening interviews done, the Hartford Board of Education’s Search Committee has narrowed the field down from two dozen to two.  Next week’s “public job interviews” are the next stretch of the gauntlet.

The two candidates selected by the Search Committee as finalists to become the District’s next top leader are Acting Hartford Public Schools Superintendent Leslie Torres-Rodriguez and longtime Hartford principal, now Capital Region Education Council (CREC) Assistant Superintendent for Operations Tim Sullivan.

At Tuesday’s Board meeting, both received a series of ardent campaign speeches from their allies (video here).  Both finalists will be on hand at the Search Committee’s two Superintendent Candidate Forums this Wednesday, March 29^th, at Capital Community College:

1. A Morning Session is designed for Hartford business, nonprofit, higher education, and philanthropic leaders, from 8 a.m. to 9:30 a.m.; and

2. An Evening Session is designed for Hartford families, residents, and educators, from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

Educators are welcome to attend either forum; both will be live streamed at www.youtube.accesstv.org.

“Looking back to April 2014, Achieve Hartford! had perhaps its most successful community meetings, hosting candidates Beth Schiavino-Narvaez and Ronald Taylor in a series of sessions where they spoke directly and revealed their leadership styles to hundreds of Hartford school advocates,” Achieve Hartford! Executive Director Paul Diego Holzer said today. “We held these forums in the very accommodating 11^th-floor auditorium at Capital.  This coming Wednesday, working with a 14-member coalition of community groups and directed by the Board Search Committee, we are returning for an equally robust ‘public job interview’.”

Here is the Board’s announcement of the forums, which contains a link to the printable flier.  The Board expects to elect the new superintendent at a special meeting April 4.

In addition to Achieve Hartford!, the March 29 forums are supported by the Asylum Hill Neighborhood Association, Blue Hills Civic Association, Center for Latino Progress, Christian Activities Council, Hartford Local Organizing Council, Clay Arsenal NRZ, High School, Inc., Maple Avenue Revitalization Group, NAACP, Upper Albany Merchants Association, Northeast NRZ, Upper Albany NRZ, Urban League Greater Hartford, West End Civic Association and West Indian Social Club of Hartford.

Here is our article last month, which contains the resumes of the finalists.

Hartford’s current leadership faces almost insurmountable obstacles to get our city back on track.  Yet, facing them head on, Mayor Bronin and his administration have demonstrated some early success and much meaningful progress on several key municipal fronts. We praise Mayor Bronin’s leadership and acknowledge his achievements to date, highlighted in his address linked here and covered by the Courant here.  That being said, Hartford schools and students still need and deserve much more.

Hope is High 

“What we are doing here to rebuild our Capital City – aiming not only at solvency, but beyond that to vibrancy and growth – is an essential part of making the State of Connecticut competitive again.”  – Mayor Luke Bronin, 2017 State of the City Address

A recent report from the Hartford Courant of a resurging downtown echoed Mayor Bronin’s remarks, highlighting a sold-out opening game for the Yard Goats, new downtown developments (including a Barnes & Noble bookstore as part of the eagerly awaited opening of UConn’s expanded campus off of Front Street) as well as a widely-praised comprehensive revamp to Hartford zoning regulations, all of which will contribute to even more social and economic activity and long-term sustainability in downtown Hartford.

Beyond reinvigorating downtown, Mayor Bronin shared in detail how his administration’s efforts in a range of departments have led (or will lead to) improved support, renovated facilities including a South side library, infrastructure improvements including a heavily used North Side street (Albany Avenue), as well as a comprehensive and focused strategy to address blight removal, renovation, and resale. Hartford is on the rise, and much of that is due directly and indirectly to Mayor Bronin and his team at City Hall.

And others are noticing.  High on this list of success is the recent announcement of having secured tens of millions in financial commitments over the next five years from corporate partners Aetna, The Hartford, and Travelers – a success only possible with painful but necessary steps to clean house and cut City spending.

A Sobering Reality 

“While I am proud of the progress we have made on many fronts, there is one arena where too little change and progress has been made, and where there is a moral imperative to do far more: education.”
– Mayor Luke Bronin, 2017 State of the City Address

Mayor Bronin’s State of the City address outlined many of his administration’s achievements and highlighted meaningful progress in many long-stalled areas of need.  Yet, as acknowledged by Mayor Bronin, his administration has not yet made such quality or quantity gains in education.

Compare the mayor’s role in addressing the fiscal crisis, promoting regionalization, union renegotiations, the fight against blight, or key quality of life issues like resolving a flawed 311 system.  In each of these areas as well as several others, Mayor Bronin and his leadership team came together publicly and with a clear mandate directed from the top across departments to solve problems, making the combined whole greater than the individual roles and parts.

Now is a time where city leaders are called to step up as education leaders.

Beyond protecting against threats to our children’s health and safety, as reported by the State Office of Child Advocate in their report (which MUST be heeded; see Achieve Hartford!’s recommendations), our city leaders have a lot of ground to cover to meet the needs of long neglected focus areas and communities within the Hartford Public Schools.

Where is the mayoral mandate and vision for education? What would it take for the mayor to drive and align our education leaders just as he did City department leaders involving union renegotiations or budget cuts?  How can incentives toward alignment focused on high priority needs be brought forth in HPS?

The Bottom Line

We hope this State of the City address signals the start of a dramatic shift from Mayor Bronin to focus on personally using his mayoral mandate to intervene and drive a shared, collective and laser-sharp focus on improving community schools. Hope is high … but hope is not enough.

The leadership Hartford needs requires a vision for high quality schools within a high functioning city, AND the concrete plan to operationalize this vision. Hartford schools need top to bottom transformation rather than incremental change. Signals from Board leaders and candidates for superintendent suggest they are ready to take steps into the leadership roles required of them. Will the Mayor push them and become the “education mayor” Hartford needs?

For our part, we are doing everything we can to lay out a blueprint for systemic change in Hartford that can help guide collective efforts to improve schools, and we look forward to working with the mayor, the next superintendent, and so many others critical to putting education reform in Hartford back on track.

Below is the section of the address that the mayor devoted to education on Monday:

While I am proud of the progress we have made on many fronts, there is one arena where too little change and progress has been made, and where there is a moral imperative to do far more: education.

Yesterday and today, Vanessa de la Torre and Matthew Kauffman of the Hartford Courant published a wrenching examination of the gap between neighborhood schools and magnet schools. It is a gap that every parent, every teacher, every student in Hartford knows too well.

In the coming weeks, the Hartford Board of Education will choose the next leader for the Hartford Public Schools. Fixing that gap and strengthening our neighborhood schools must be the single most important priority for our new Superintendent, and I pledge to be a full partner.

We have two candidates with deep roots in our community, and a strong commitment to the schools, children and families of Hartford. I look forward to hearing from them as they publicly share their vision. And I look forward to working with our next Superintendent to make the vision real.

Among the challenges facing the next Superintendent is the fact that many of our schools are severely under-enrolled, but in desperate need of renovation.

We cannot build schools without a plan for filling those schools. And no one can justify spending millions of dollars maintaining, heating, and servicing half-full, deteriorated buildings, when those dollars could go instead to teachers, paraprofessionals, social and emotional learning, art, music or books.

Our next Superintendent must lead our community in a collaborative process that ultimately allows our district to focus on a smaller number of better neighborhood schools. But that plan can’t just be about which buildings stay open and which buildings close. The Board of Education must also be able to look parents and students in the eyes and say, honestly: things may change, but they will change for the better.

Here is the full text of the address, as delivered, and the Courant coverage, plus its summarized five takeaways.