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.

Since the announcement of Equity 2020 a little over a year ago, trying to follow the school consolidation and building closure process feels a bit like Waiting for Godot: there is a lot of conversation but, ultimately, not much action.  

Recent Hartford Board of Education committee discussions on Hartford’s school facilities issues are only the most recent proof-point highlighting the continuing and rising costs of building maintenance and operations, especially in the under-enrolled schools, which inefficiently divert dollars from the students who need the most support.

The Case for Consolidation and Closure Is Clear 

The case for taking action is clear and can be made in a thousand different ways.  In committee and regular meetings, District officials and Board members have trained spotlights on several interesting cost effectiveness questions that need to be addressed as the budget gets further squeezed this spring and into the foreseeable future.  Here are a few:

• Building Upkeep During Transitions.  To prevent further problems, including the threat of vandalism, the District still has to heat and maintain the vacant Clark School, even though it is closed, no longer a candidate for renovation, and subject to being turned over to the City.  Nearly $1 million was spent to investigate and deal with the school’s original PCBs problem, which could not be resolved.  Even though the District stores and re-purposes water heaters and other components from transitioning schools for other buildings (as it has done with the kitchen equipment at the phasing-out Culinary Academy at Weaver), empty-Clark upkeep and maintenance remains an $800,000 item.

• Needed Improvements.  The District has a March 31 deadline for renewal of its State Alliance Grant for building improvements and will seek $2 million for neighborhood school improvements that really could use twice that amount of support.  As an example, the Olympic-sized swimming pool at Hartford Public High School recently had its circulator pumps fail and flood the perimeter of the pool as well as a basement room over a three-day weekend.  The pump repair was $10,000 and the cost of dealing with the flooding will likely be 17 times that.

• Deferred Action Is Risky Business.  District building improvement funds have been frozen for four years – and repairs (like those at HPHS) spring sudden emergency costs that cannot be avoided.  The Martin Luther King, Jr., School (the original Weaver High School) was recommended for closure nine years ago.  A plan to renovate it fell apart in the City budget crisis, when the City could not match a 20 percent share of the $64 million approved by the State.  An independent facilities study has identified $30 million of needed work at M.L. King; band aids won’t address problems like these.

• Dithering Costs Money.  The District recently noted that a withdrawal of a school redesign plan has a ripple effect on architectural and construction costs as well as curriculum redesign, to the tune of $2 million associated with the second round of the Weaver renovation.  That redesign is now headed for a third round – and the school system, the Board, and the community are going to have to get it right this time.

Redesigning Equity 2020 

But as the Equity 2020 process revealed, the students who need the most support can also be harmed by the school consolidation and building closure process itself.  When HPS restarts the revamped Equity 2020 process – which it must do soon – the process must look very, very different than before.

Guidance for what this process should look like comes from a number of sources, including reports and articles on successful (and unsuccessful) school closures in comparable cities across the nation. Best practices learned from these cities could help prevent another Equity 2020 debacle.

A revamped Equity 2020 process must integrate these six elements:

• Be bold, goal-oriented and transparent, with
• Expert support using best practices and with
• Meaningful community input to improve the original plan, that
• Guides coordinated and aligned action, that
• Optimizes asset/liability management, and that ultimately …
• Transforms educational experience.

Meaningful community engagement is key. Take this lesson learned from an urban planning consultant hired to support very successful closure and consolidation in Kansas City as compared to failures from Chicago’s efforts taken from an in-depth analysis in the Chicago Reporter.  Kansas City’s urban planner consultant shared key learnings from the process:

“…[U]pdating the repurposing effort’s website remained a priority. There, residents and community groups can find minutes from meetings and site tours, as well as documents that provide information about each school site, compile community feedback and explain the reuse strategy for each school. Community meetings are posted weeks in advance on the website, as well as on the initiative’s Facebook page.”  

Compare this against a less successful effort in Chicago:

“On the other hand… “Chicago’s process was opaque. Each alderman involved and informed community members as he or she saw fit; many didn’t hold meetings at all. There was no central point of contact for residents, and repurposing meetings were posted sporadically, making it difficult for communities to plan ahead. Chicago Public Schools didn’t keep records of the meetings, and the district’s repurposing website lacks any documents about proposals for the schools.”  

Successful engagement in Hartford must go beyond hosting a couple of presentation-style meetings. Hartford education and community leaders charged with a reconstituted Equity 2020 process must cultivate meaningful community input to improve the original plan. This might include hosting multiple community needs-assessment and feedback meetings along with public tours to inform the creation of the plan (prior to any presentation of a “draft” that looks more like a final version awaiting a rubber stamp).

Following the collective design of a plan (with real community input), there would be open and public discussions of the proposal with an eye toward going beyond saving money to also measurably improve (and where necessary) transform the education experience. Stated plainly, the newly consolidated schools must be better than the current neglected ones and money saved in the closure and repurposing of buildings must be reinvested in long-neglected communities and high-needs areas. Our children deserve nothing less.

Furthermore, we can’t wait. The problem is not getting easier; it’s getting harder – and will get even more difficult still – the longer Hartford sits on its collective hands waiting for action. From a 2011 national report on school consolidation and building closures:

“Selling or leasing surplus school buildings, many of which are located in declining neighborhoods, tends to be extremely difficult. No district has reaped anything like a windfall from such transactions. As of the summer of 2011, at least 200 school properties stood vacant in the six cities studied – including 92 in Detroit alone – with most having been empty for several years. If left unused for long, the buildings can become eyesores that cast a pall over neighborhoods and attract vandalism and other illicit activity.”

According to a 2013 report, Pew found more than 300 unused properties for sale in just a dozen city school districts. The Chicago Reporter article notes:

“The 2013 Pew study reported: ‘Officials dealing with surplus buildings say that districts should move aggressively to sell or lease facilities soon after they become empty, make information readily accessible to prospective buyers and the public… and, when possible, get outside help in determining appropriate uses of the properties and how they fit with the overall needs of the city. Kansas City followed that blueprint to a T; Chicago did not.”

Click here to access the 2017 Chicago Report article “In Kansas City, a lesson in transforming closed schools”, the 2011 Pew Charitable Trusts report “Closing Public Schools in Philadelphia”, and the 2013 Pew Charitable Trusts report “Shuttered Public Schools”.

The Bottom Line 

A national model, Kansas City enacted a policy of repurposing and re-using buildings, while consolidating and transforming schools.  Notably, City and school leaders came together to design creative financing and reuse solutions to ensure neglected and vacant schools become resources for the community again.

This point bears some emphasis in Hartford: The District and City already have failed impacted communities. Significant efforts should be made to ensure that the failures resulting from building closure should not further deplete resources for the impacted community.

A principle of “repurpose and re-use” is that vacant schools become resources for the community again.  Such a principle is fully consistent with the mayor’s laudable efforts to bring in a staff expert to combat blight on a comprehensive city-wide level.  This is the type of vision Hartford must have for a revamped Equity 2020 process to consolidate schools and close buildings.  This is the type of vision and leadership Hartford’s future and current education leaders must bring to the table.