Hartford Schools Superintendent Torres-Rodriguez’s issued the comment/warning during a Board of Education Workshop last month that future school closings and/or consolidation in Hartford is an issue which “warrants attention…sooner rather than later.” 

Based on this comment/warning, the past downsizing of Hartford schools, for which the Superintendent has recently adopted the phrase, “right sizing,” deserves a review.  Thanks to an email to me by a Hartford teacher, this review will focus on the Batchelder School.

In 2016, then Hartford Schools Superintendent Beth Schiavino-Narvaez appointed an advisory council to consider a plan for school closing and/or consolidation.  This group was called the Equity 2020 Committee and included parents, teachers (yes, teachers!), community and school leaders, among them, parent and current BOE member, Shonta Browdy. 

However, Schiavino-Narvaez also hired a consultant company, Milone & MacBroom of Cheshire to assist with the data analysis of possible school shafting plans.

When Schiavino-Narvaez’s plan hit the fan, there was community agita with Shonta Browdy stating, “I want nothing to do with how this played out.  This is not what this committee came up with.  This is what the consultants came up with…”  The Hartford Courant reported at the time that Browdy wasted no time in leaving the meeting where the plan was unveiled, and that she “planned to cut all ties with Equity 2020” (Hartford Courant, 14 Oct 2016, A1).

As part of Schiavino-Narvaez’s plan, the Batchelder school would not be closed but its grade configuration would be reimagined to a prekindergarten-to-grade-5 school.

When Schiavino-Narvaez suddenly announced that her country needed her and she would be leaving the district to join the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA), then Mayor Luke Bronin “asked” the BOE to hold off on taking any school consolidation action until a new superintendent came on board.

Unfortunately for Hartford, that superintendent would be Leslie Torres-Rodriguez, someone with zero school district leadership experience and only slightly more school leadership experience than yours truly (I have no school leadership experience).

Within a year, the newly anointed superintendent came up with her own plan for school closing and consolidation.  However, Torres-Rodriguez, staking out a modus operandi for which she would become well known, bypassed the annoying advisory council thing and headed straight for the consulting group path, hiring the group Education Resource Strategies (ERS), a group which would stay on the HPS payroll (at least publicly) until 2023, advising Torres-Rodriguez on such things as budget and financial strategies, strategies which led HPS to a historical budget deficit this year.

Torres-Rodriguez’s plan included the closing of the neighborhood public school, Batchelder, and reimagining it as a magnet school, in essence, kicking out the neighborhood kids so there would be space for kids from the Hartford suburbs.  The Courant reported that one Batchelder student said the following to Torres-Rodriguez: “Please don’t close our school.  It’s like a home to me.  All these kids in my new school will have sunshine, but I will have a rainy day. Please don’t close our school and give it to the kids from the suburbs” (Hartford Courant, 14 Jan, 2018).

Another student, reports the Courant, stated: “Mommy, don’t we matter?  Aren’t we good enough like those other kids?”

Despite this and like pleas from the community, Batchelder would become, starting in the school year 2018-19, Montessori Magnet at Batchelder School, retaining some neighborhood students but dispersing the majority (along with some teachers) to other Hartford schools.

Former Equity 2020 member Shonta Browdy’s attitude toward Hartford school consolidation planning seems to have evolved over year between Schiavino-Narvaez’s plan unveiling and Torres-Rodriguez’s first major faux-pas as superintendent.

Although Browdy’s concern in 2016 was the presence of the consulting group and although there were to be no school closings in 2016, Torres-Rodriguez’s plan included both of these elements, yet now Browdy stated, “…what else do we do” (Hartford Courant, 14 Jan, 2018)?

Torres-Rodiguez told the Courant that critics of school closing are not looking at things through the same lens as she must, like a superintendent (14 Jan 2018).  Well excuuuuuuuuuuuse me, Miss I-should -never-have-been-superintendent-in-the-first-place.  Torres-Rodriguez stated that her “task” was to look at the picture “broadly for the entire district.”  She then spent the next seven years contracting with a plethora of outside partners to services small groups of students, not the entire district.

One element in the decision to close Batchelder was enrollment.  The Courant reported in 2018 (April 10) that Batchelder has a capacity of 732 students.  Six years prior to becoming a magnet school, Batchelder averaged 470 students per year (EdSight.gov) for a building usage rate of 64%.  In the six years since it has become a magnet school, Batchelder has averaged 363 students for a building usage rate of 49%.  When the Superintendent made her “warrants attention” comment last month, she was speaking of the number of schools with 350 students or less.  Is Batchelder the magnet school, with its low enrollment, on any future chopping block as it was when the school had 100 more students per year that it has currently?

In the six years prior to becoming a magnet school, Batchelder averaged 18% Black or African American students per year.  In the six years since becoming a magnet school, it has had 13% Black or African American students per year.

In the six years prior to becoming a magnet school, Batchelder averaged 76% “Hispanic/Latino of any race” students per year.  In the six years since becoming a magnet school, that number has dropped to 60% per year.

In the six years prior to becoming a magnet school, Batchelder averaged 3% white students per year.  In the six years since becoming a magnet school, it has averaged 19% white students per year.  This increase may be the goal of the Sheff v. O’Neil resolution, but an unintended consequence of that goal finds neighborhood minority students separated from family, friends, and schools that have become “like home.”  And we expect to see academic improvement from these displaced students?

If pre-magnet Batcheler was considered a low performing school academically, thus the eclosing and reimagining as a magnet, one must consider the fact that using the district’s combined average District Performance Index (DPI as provided by EdSight.gov) for math, ELA, and science, Batchelder the magnet is averaging only six points a year higher over the past six years than Batchelder the former averaged over the six years prior to becoming a magnet school.

Dropping enrollment in Hartford schools over the past several years has naturally resulted in lower enrollment in many Hartford buildings.  Torres-Rodrigeuz warns that half of the district’s schools will have less than 350 students next year.

Cting statistics from the National Center for Education Statistics, Education Week states that the average school size in 2021 was 555 students, 637 when looking at suburban schools.  This data will no doubt excite Torres-Rodriguez who aligns Hartford schools with other districts when it suits her agenda but ignores alignment with other districts when it paints HPS in a negative light…like in teacher salary, length of school day, or in its world languages program.

While a good argument for keeping a school open which has only 100 kids while the capacity of the building allows for 700 would be a tough sell, in the end, making school closing and/or consolidation decisions based only on data or dollars is to ignore common sense and social humanity and after the dust has settled, like at Batchelder, the  district, the students, and the community are no better situated than they were before the move.

Prepare your anti-closing battle plans now because with the current clueless and gutless board of education, which is so far up Torres-Rodriguez’s…which allows Torres-Rodriguez a free reign on management of the district with nary an effective word on oversight, we will see more ineffective and harmful school closings in Hartford.