State of Hartford Schools

In order to have a context for the state of Hartford’s Schools today, you have to go back a while and reflect on where we have been.

There was a time when a student could drop out of school and still land a job – even in public service – that could support him and his family for life. In today’s economy, you need a college degree just to be considered for such employment.

There was a time when schools taught the same pedagogy and content. As a result, teachers were virtually interchangeable. And schools closed in the summer so that students could help harvest the crops.

It doesn’t take a genius to see that American education continues to remain structured in many ways for a society and an economy that ceased to exist many decades ago.

As a result, the United States, once the undisputed leader in educational achievement, has fallen further and further behind the other industrialized nations of the world.

The United States ranks 18th in the number of high school students who graduate high school on time. The world leader is South Korea.

U.S. teen-agers finished 21st out of 25 nations in reading and math on the International Assessment of Student Progress, behind Lithuania and Poland respectively.

According to UNICEF, the United States while spending more than any other country on education, ranked 18th among industrialized nations in the effectiveness of its education systems based upon the amount of money spent.

Within that framework of educational decline, you have Connecticut, the U.S. state with the largest achievement gap between low income urban students and their more affluent counterparts in the suburbs. And within Connecticut, you have Hartford, its largest school district with the largest number of economically disadvantaged students. Our city was perennially dead last in every measure of education achievement prior to 2006.

The condition of education in Hartford was such that in 1997, the state, through special legislation dissolved the dysfunctional, Hartford Board of Education and ran the district until 2002.

When local control was restored, Hartford graduation rates were lower than they were before the takeover.

Then, under the leadership of former mayor Eddie Pérez, a new Hartford Board of Education decided that it had had enough of failure and went about restructuring the district around the singular expectation of closing the achievement gap, with the goal of every child graduating high school and attending a four-year college. They began by adopting a managed performance empowerment theory of action, converting to an all choice system of schools with money following the child. Those concepts became the pillars of our reform.

At the same time Congress passed the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act – which for all of its faults – remains the most important piece of civil rights legislation since the Civil Rights Act. It required that from now on, all education systems will be measured by how well they improve the achievement of their neediest students.

It created standards by which to gauge that improvement. Low income parents now know that if their child runs just a little bit faster than the suburban child who starts out in life a thousand yards ahead of him, he will eventually catch up – and there is an obligation on the part of the school that she or he attends to make that happen.

School reform in our nation has moved from theory to practice in the Obama Administration. Under Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, our federal government has sought to incentivize states into embracing reforms necessary to close the gap through its Race to the Top grant competition, which rewards states that genuinely commit to the change necessary to close the achievement gap.

As we all know, there are powerful, institutional, adult interests across the country - quite strong here in Connecticut - that are resisting to the changes needed close the achievement gap. They fail to take a long range view or understand that as long as our country and state continues its steady fall from educational grace, the economy and quality of life for everyone will diminish and alternatives to public education will become more and more sought after as the solution.

The challenge to closing the achievement gap has spawned a movement of education reformers, who share the same vision that the Hartford Board of Education boldly set into motion four years ago.

And today Hartford is one of the main stages of that reform movement.

Thanks to the generosity of the Sackler Foundation, the Center for Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington has been commissioned to develop a case study on Hartford’s school reform. The Center’s Director, Paul Hill, will be returning to Hartford in January to present his findings and comparison to other cities that are improving academic achievement.

On a national level, Hartford has been cited by Secretary Duncan and others as one of a handful of progressive school districts that have been successful in the turnaround of low performing schools.

On a state level, the Connecticut Commission on Educational Achievement issued a landmark report only last week recommending a comprehensive set of innovative changes to close the achievement gap in our State that mirror and expand many of the reform policies that have already been adopted by the Hartford Board of Education. I hope these recommendations will become the policy blueprint for Connecticut’s next governor.

Our schools have just completed their third straight year of significant increases on the Connecticut Mastery Test and the Connecticut Academic Performance Test that have established, once and for all, that you can have high performing schools in low income areas. I’d like to review highlights of the data from 2010 with you now:

Reading results are up again with an 8 percent increase in 3rd grade reading and 11 percent at the 10th grade. Third grade reading is the most predictive indicator of future student success. This year our schools recorded their highest increase in reading since the inception of CMT and CAPT testing in Connecticut.

Students rose in mathematics at every grade level in Hartford.

Our graduation rate, which stood at 29 percent in 2006, has now reached 50 percent and, based on that success record, the U.S. Dept. of Education recently awarded Hartford $13.3 million to help increase our graduation rate even further.
Here’s the profile of achievement in our schools today:

The number of schools testing at Goal– Connecticut’s highest achievement category – increased from five to 10. That means that 10 Hartford Public Schools have effectively closed the achievement gap – a list that includes three neighborhood schools: Achievement First, Dwight Elementary and Parkville Community School.

In another step in the plan to convert to an all-choice system of distinctive schools, four more new and redesigned schools opened this year: Asian Studies from the merger of Dwight and Bellizzi, The Betances Early Reading Lab School, the Rawson Middle Grades Academy, and Connecticut’s first STEM School at Annie Fisher. Several new choice schools, including High School, Inc, Opportunity High School and Breakthrough II began their second year and become choice for parents.

Overall in 2010, Hartford’s CMT and CAPT scores improved at more than double the rest of the state. So in 2010 another step was taken to close the achievement gap.

Today, our District has its own Renzulli Academy for Gifted and Talented students.

In 2010, the Board of Education also gave parents and other stakeholders a major say in how their schools are managed through the formation of School Governance Councils. Among each council’s most important duties are the approval of the school budget each year, the development of an accountability plan that sets educational goals, approval of the school compact and the recommendation of a new principal in the event of a vacancy.

Hartford’s successes have come with major challenges for sure – the most severe of which is economic:

For two years, 2009-10 and 2010-11, the state’s flat-funding of education has forced the district to eliminate approximately 350 positions, including almost 150 teachers, to meet rising expenses. Now, with the pending expiration of stimulus funding, the state faces a shortfall of $175M in education funding, which translates into an additional loss to Hartford of about 25 million in 2011-2012. We have to accept that this will be a permanent adjustment to the size of government in which education is the largest segment.

In 2006, when student achievement was at its lowest, Hartford’s per pupil expenditure was over $15,000. It is now $13,600 and student achievement is much higher. We will have to design a system of effective, high-performing schools at an expenditure level of about $12,000 per pupil. This has to be carefully and thoughtfully done, guided by the premise that what we spend money on is more important than how much money we spend; and what we do in the future is more determinative of our outcomes than what we have done in the past.

This year, there will be a focus on better middle grades education. Nationally, student performance is flat in the middle grades. In Hartford, when we ran junior high schools at Fox and Quirk it actually declined as a result of attending these schools. It is better now at K-8 schools, but still behind student achievement at our flagship Hartford Magnet Middle School (HMMS).

Our first step this year was the creation of the Middle Grades Academy at Sara J. Rawson, modeled after the HMMS Core-Encore model. This year will mark the planning for opening in August 2011 of two new 6-8 middle schools at McDonough (450 student) and West Middle (300 students). These schools will be designed to meet the needs of the transescent, that challenging stage between childhood and adolescence. One school will adopt the national Expeditionary Learning Model and the other the Core-Encore design, giving us four middle schools utilizing two research-based programs and providing a choice for parents between K-8 schools and a K-5, 6-8 model.

To close the gap, our students desperately need more time in school; more time in instruction in the form up a longer day and/or year. In 2009, an audit by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) revealed that Hartford had the shortest school day in the region. A neighboring district, with which we are trying to close the gap, had a 45 minute longer school day, offering its students the equivalent of a full month more of instruction. Our children deserve the same and their needs demand it.

We have the opportunity, through the negotiation of several of our major collective bargaining agreements this year, to at least create a competitive school day so our children who need instruction time the most, do not receive less.

As we progress and our reform is strengthened this year, we will have a transition of superintendent leadership this summer and a renewal or transition of appointed Board membership next January, or perhaps some of both, depending on the election of the next mayor.

I think it will be very helpful that the Board of Education has adopted a Superintendent Succession Policy that enables it to look first to the several outstanding leaders of our reform currently within our system who can provide continuity and maintain direction while adjusting to current data, and changing circumstances to bring our system of schools to the next level. We are very different than we were 4 years ago and should be very different 5 years from now even as the same outcomes and theory of action are pursued.

And most helpful will be our collective commitment to develop more good schools faster and our lack of tolerance for chronically low-performing schools.
We tend to over emphasize the effect that any person or set of people at Central Office can have on the opportunities we provide to students through our schools.

While leadership is important, particularly at the school level, the distribution of leadership is much more important. That is the essential premise of our managed performance empowerment theory of action that envisions a system of autonomous, distinctive independent schools, in which decisions are made by the principal, staff and parents of that school.

We are mistaken to think someone else with powers like Superman is going to come and accomplish the difficult things that have to be done to close the achievement gap. But we should know we have the power collectively to make things right for our children. This is not to imply that it’s easy. It’s hard and it requires hard work, political will and courage at times in addition to knowledge of the content, science and best practices of school reform; and as you know, there are many distractions.

But if this were easy someone else would have already done it and we would not be needed. Please remember that great line from the intro to the movie Waiting for Superman: “We are the one we’ve been waiting for…..” And let’s continue this crusade until every student in our City is able to attend a good school, a school that changes their life trajectory and life prospects simply because they were lucky enough to have attended that school.
So, what is the state of our schools?

Three years ago, I had to answer that question and said at that time that I thought it was very fragile. At that point, we had embarked on a reform strategy, the Board had adopted a theory of action and a framework for the creation of a portfolio of higher performing schools and we had redesigned the first five lowest performing schools that had just opened. There was lots of opposition, not enough understanding and our capacity to communicate the changes was woefully inadequate.

The state of our schools is much stronger today. It would be harder and take longer now to reverse the progress we’ve made. It is more convincing, in that you have demonstrated it multiple proof points that we can have a high-performing school regardless of the income level of the students who attend it.

At the same time, it is more compelling. The progress we have made shines a brighter and harsher light on how much more needs to be accomplished and how much more we have to change. In a system that has moved from a graduation rate of 29 percent to 50 percent what do we now do about the other 50 percent? In schools that improved from 25 percent to 40 percent of students reading on grade level, what does it take and how long does it take for the other 60 percent to achieve at the same high level? When do we reach the Sheff tipping point of 80 percent of Hartford families choosing Hartford schools rather than schools outside of Hartford that ends the exodus of families from City schools? When can every child realize his or her full potential by attending a good school?

And so, the state of our schools is stronger, convincing, more compelling, yet incomplete. So let’s get back to work like never before and seize this moment, this year, this period ahead when the wind of national school reform is blowing strong at our backs (even in this land of steady habits) to do more, faster, and to recommit ourselves to the gap-closing outcomes of Hartford’s education reform and create a better future for more of our students and for our City and our State.

Keeping Quality Teachers

During these economically difficult times Hartford Public Schools has had to contend with teacher layoffs as a result of Connecticut's financial crisis. As a school system, our goal in dealing with this situation has been to create as little disruption as possible to the students while the necessary changes and shifts are being made. However, current seniority rules do not lend themselves to the smoothest transition possible for our faculty members and our students.

Currently, layoffs occur at a district wide level. When a teacher is let go, another teacher with greater seniority is transferred to replace him or her.

This has become an issue for Hartford Public Schools because many of our schools have different educational themes. A teacher, who has been moved, must then be retrained in an entirely new theme. The situation also creates a gap in the skills present at the school where the teacher transferred from.

This system presents a particular challenge to new and redesigned schools that may have a large population of newer staff members.

We have appealed to the State Board of Education to allow us to alter the system in a way that would better serve the teachers, the administrators and the students and have requested that any "bumping" occur on a school-wide basis as opposed to district-wide. This would mean that no teacher would be forced to move to another school as a result of a layoff and take into account any extraordinary training that makes teachers particularly valuable to the schools where they currently work.

Letting teachers go without considering the quality of their work has become a topic of national discussion. As other school systems around the country are faced with financial difficulties, attention is being paid to the negative effects that having fewer teachers will create for students.

In a recent lawsuit against the Los Angeles Unified School District the argument was made that system-wide seniority resulted in the district and the State of California not meeting in the needs of their students. Also in 2009, several “Teacher of the Year” winners were let go through this process in states, such as Florida, Indiana and New Hampshire.

The U.S. government has also taken notice of the problem. The “Race To The Top” program has set aside $4.3 billion in federal grant money for states that can show that they are making a considerable effort to turn around schools in low income minority communities. States that have received funds from this program have put an emphasis on retaining teacher and administrative quality throughout these economic times.

Hartford Public Schools acknowledges the work of those professionals who have been passionate about our schools over the years. Recognition should also be given to expertise that gives teachers something special to pass along to their students.

A NEW SCHOOL YEAR BEGINS

Hartford was for a long time the lowest performing school district in the state and so our task revolved around closing the achievement gap for our students.

We made great progress in that over the last two years.

We’ve seen most of our schools come up to much higher achievement levels; at the same time we have been successful in opening new schools that have attracted parents from all over the city and the region that are also high achieving. So if you look at the portfolio of schools that we offer to the public today, it’s a much higher achieving portfolio and our students are doing much better.

The kind of achievement that you see at our schools, what are students can accomplish, is very reflective of our system as a whole and the fact that when our students are provided the opportunity to attend a good school, they will excel the same as any child in the nation.

I am so excited to have our students back in school. We are looking forward to another great year and another year of gains and closing the achievement gap further for the children of Hartford.

I want to thank all the parents who have been so supportive in all of our schools. We had our children on time, in uniform and ready to learn. Our families have just been incredibly supportive of their schools and their students getting everything out of the education being offered.

Sustaining Progress In A Turbulent Economy

Pursuant to Connecticut State Statute and the Charter of the City of Hartford, I submitted to the Hartford Board of Education on March 3, 2009 a recommended operating budget for fiscal year 2009-2010.

The budget reflects progress on two important ideals reflected in the Core Beliefs and Commitments, and the Goals adopted by the board in September 2008.

In keeping with its commitment to value every child, the board adopted its first Student Based Budget (SBB), creating a fair and equitable system in which each student is funded by an appropriate grade-level allocation with the funding adjusted on the basis of his/her educational needs.

These resources follow the child to the school his or her parents choose. To maintain stability in a system with significant funding inequities among schools, the adjustment to Student Based Budgeting is occurring in stages over three years. One-third of this “equity gap” was closed for 2008-09 and two-thirds has been closed through this budget in 2009-2010.

To fulfill another major policy objective, 70 percent of available resources have been allocated to schools and classrooms to support instruction. Central office and central services are limited to 30 percent of the budget, which reflects the national average for public school districts and contrasts to less than one-half of resources spent in schools and classrooms by the Hartford Public Schools in 2006-07. Achieving the 70/30 percent goal required a 20 percent reduction in central office/central services, including the reduction of more than 40 current district level positions.

There are two major threats to the financial solvency of Hartford schools for 2009-10. The first is inherent in the implementation of the Sheff v. O’Neil settlement. The second is in the national recession and the resulting state revenue crisis. Together, they double the financial challenge our schools face when compared to others in the state and nation.

The Sheff quotas for Hartford minority students attending school in a racially desegregated setting will increase from the current 19 percent to 27 percent in 2009-2010. This quota can grow to 41 percent of Hartford’s students over the next five years.

The Sheff settlement agreement allows for no new magnet schools in Hartford and no suburban district has agreed to host a new magnet school. Next year’s quota, therefore, would have to be achieved through a loss of Hartford students and revenue to tuition-charging schools operated by the Capital Regional Education Council (CREC) and the bussing of Hartford students to suburban schools on a space-available basis through the “Open Choice” program.

Hartford enrollment will decrease as a result by an estimated 3.5 percent and payment to CREC will increase to approximately $6 million for 2009-2010. A 10 percent tuition increase will also occur if the legislature does not act to limit tuition increases by Regional Educational Service Centers, such as CREC, as proposed by the State Department of Education. Moreover, the current failure of the SDE to reimburse Hartford for the full cost of suburban transportation, unless corrected by the legislature, will create a financial loss for Hartford of $3M, meaning that resources for the education of Hartford students would be reallocated to bus suburban students.

Two-thirds of the budget for Hartford schools is supported by the state through the Education Cost Sharing (ECS) grant. Our dependence on ECS funding is proportionately higher than any other school district in Connecticut because of Hartford’s disproportionate rate of poverty and non-taxable property.

Gov. M. Jodi Rell’s proposed budget projects flat funding (2008-2009 level) for ECS in 2009-10 and 2010-11. The loss of the 4 percent ECS “hold-harmless” provision received in previous years creates the need to reduce more than $14 million in existing personnel and services to cover the higher cost of remaining staff and services. This includes a modest increase in salaries for the 12 labor unions that have collective bargaining agreements with the Board of Education, a significant escalation of employee and retiree health insurance costs and anticipated increases in other contracted services such as transportation and utilities.

Furthermore, the lack of full funding in the governor’s budget for more than 2,000 suburban students attending Hartford host magnet schools will require Hartford to charge tuition to the 52 suburban districts whose children Hartford educates.

This dual challenge requires a dual response:

When 80 percent of Hartford’s minority families choose Hartford schools for their children, Sheff will come to a close. This “demand principle” of the Sheff settlement agreement enables our system of schools to compete. It gives urgency to our two highest priorities: the replacement of chronically low-performing schools with high-performing schools of choice and the improvement of existing schools to reach the “Goal Range” of student achievement as measured by Connecticut state assessments.

The national economic recession and resulting state revenue crisis requires that we look at our reform plan through an even sharper lens. In our small state of 167 school districts, the deficit will herald an era of more affordable government and inevitably less government. Both President Obama and Gov. Rell have counseled that we must separate the things we would like to have from the things we must have.

Regardless of how robust our plans may be, sustaining our brief progress in an environment of reduced resources will require a laser-like focus on budgetary priorities that provide the greatest leverage in closing the achievement gap, defeating Hartford’s literacy crisis and enabling more students to graduate high school prepared to attend a four-year college.

These are the “must haves” and they must be the respected priorities of each of our schools. Supporting this focused work must be the priority of our district replacing what we have done before. Reform measures necessary to close the achievement gap cannot be an additive to the current attributes of the existing system; they must replace them.

We must manage our resources more judiciously and effectively than ever before and take advantage of the opportunities presented by the deficit’s challenge to the status quo to create the higher-performing schools our community and region must have. We must work relentlessly at this until every child in Hartford can attend a great public school and our state’s achievement gap is closed.

A New Tradition: Academic Awards

This year, Hartford Public Schools presented its first-ever Academic Awards. More than 100 students from 29 elementary schools and their families were honored for excellence in reading, mathematics, science and perfect attendance.

Judging from the loud applause for the winners and the hundreds of snap shots that parents took, the ceremony held at our Sport and Medical Sciences Academy was a huge success.

Our hope is that, as the awards become a tradition in Hartford Public Schools, more students will strive to achieve this important recognition.

Vastly improved student success is the main objective of our reform strategy of creating an all-choice system of high-performing schools. The district expects to make the awards an annual event that showcases student success and, in so doing, builds on the momentum we’ve created to close the achievement gap. A second ceremony for high-achieving secondary school students will be held later in the year.

Last year, our students scored the first increase in seven years on both the Connecticut Mastery Test and the Connecticut Academic Performance Test. The increase in the percentage of students within goal range on the CMT was more than three times the statewide average.

A total of 16 schools improved meaningfully over the previous year, while four schools moved down in achievement for an unprecedented net gain of 12 schools that surpassed expectations.

We raised the cohort (four-year) graduation rate by 7 percentage points – from 29 percent to 36 percent. In 2008-2009, we also opened 11 new high-achievement academies and learning centers and approved five more for 2009-2010.

The awards have the potential of motivating further success. They are based on three principal criteria, devised by Dr. James Thompson, the district’s assistant superintendent for elementary schools, and his staff.

The first requirement is that the student must have reached a Level 4 or Level 5 on the CMT. Level 5 is the highest score that a student can achieve.

The second requirement is that the student be a positive role model for his or her peers. He or she must be of good character, show leadership, have no suspensions or lateness’s on record, always come to school in uniform, have excellent behavior and perform some form of community service.

Finally, the student must display a passion for the subject matter for which he or she is receiving the award.

We look forward to many more Academic Award ceremonies.

Leiglative Priorities for Hartford Public Schools

The State of Connecticut’s financial crisis is threatening to hold back the rate of progress that Hartford is making to close the worst-in-the-nation achievement gap between low-income urban students and their suburban counterparts.

Our challenge in the coming year will be to weather the state’s economic predicament while maintaining the promising but fragile measures and capacity that have led to the recent learning improvements of Hartford students.

According to the Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now (ConnCAN), Hartford secured more than three times the gains in the percentage of students within goal range on the Connecticut Mastery Test than the statewide average.

The threat to our progress is based on the fact that Hartford has the highest rate of poverty and one of the lowest amounts of taxable property per capita among Connecticut’s 169 school districts. As such, Hartford depends on state revenue for about two-thirds of its operating budget, more any other district in Connecticut. The vehicle for state support is the Educational Cost Sharing grant (ECS).

Hartford’s dependence on ECS funding means that the district experiences the greatest volatility in times of economic recession.

Like every school district, about 80 percent of the budget for Hartford schools pays for salaries and benefit costs. Most of the remaining 20 percent is fixed costs. Short of operating fewer days, it is unrealistic to think that an adjustment to a lower percentage of state revenue can be made without a significant reduction in personnel. Such a reduction will, by extension, reduce General Budget allocations that directly impact our reform efforts.

In its 2009-2010 proposed budget, the State Department of Education made three optional proposals to deal with the fiscal crisis: a) Reduce the ECS grant by 12.3 percent; b) Reduce the ECS grant by 6.5 percent and reduce categorical grants by 18.81 percent; c) Reduce categorical grants by 37.62 percent.

It is estimated that Proposal A would lower the district’s general budget by at least $23 million, while Proposal B would lower the budget by at least $12 million.

Hartford Public Schools has followed up the state’s proposals with its own set of legislative priorities for 2009-2010:

1) PROTECT THE ECS “HOLD HARMLESS INCREASE – Under ECS, the district budget increases 4.5 percent per year to cover wage and benefit cost increases in its 12 collective bargaining contracts and operating contracts such as transportation. The estimated increase for 2009-2010 is about $7.5 million or $333 per student. Without it, the district must reduce personnel and services to fund wage and benefit increases.

2) SUPPORT ECS FUNDING OVER CATEGORICAL FUNDING.

3) TIE REDUCTIONS IN ECS FUNDING TO A REDUCTION IN THE MINIMUM NUMBER OF OPERATING DAYS REQUIRED OF DISTRICTS – Operating for fewer days is the highest-value lever in reducing operational costs. In Hartford, a $13.8 million shortfall could be absorbed by operating eight fewer school days, about 4 percent of the academic year.

4) FULLY FUND “PAYMENT IN LIEU OF TAXES” (PILOT) – The intent of PILOT programs is to compensate cities and towns for real property tax losses due to exemptions applicable to state-owned property, private colleges and general and free standing chronic disease hospitals. The value of PILOT to Hartford is significant, considering that 50 percent of all real property in the city is non-taxable. Full funding of PILOT translates into an additional $10 million for Hartford.

5) SUPPORT DEVELOPMENT OF A GREATER HARTFORD UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT -- The issue of rising costs and diminished revenues is exponentially magnified in Connecticut because the state has 169 municipalities, all raising revenue to support education at the same time. That is a good starting point for regionalization. The creation of a Greater Hartford Unified School District would allow neighboring communities to create economies of scale that would: a) Reduce unnecessary duplication of programs and services; b) Remove duplicative administrative structures and excessive administrative costs; c) Provide volume purchasing power; d) Allow for decreased costs in transportation through a consolidated system; e) Provide a larger health care benefits pool; f) Reduce economic and racial isolation for students; g) Equitably distribute resources.

The state of our reform requires stability to be sustained. We believe abovementioned set of legislative priorities offer the best possible means of continuing our progress toward closing the achievement gap while enduring the state’s financial crisis. We invite your comments on our recommendations.

Mission of Hartford Public Schools

Together We Can Raise Student Achievement

Many changes are taking place in the Hartford Public Schools as we take the first steps toward transforming our system of schools into one where Hartford students are achieving on a par with other students in the state.

The Hartford school board recently adopted a new mission and vision for the district. In addition, the board has adopted a strategy for change that will guide us as we work to accomplish our goals. The school year calendar provides more instructional days before state testing and for the first time, summer school will be mandatory for our youngest students who are not reading on grade level.

These are just the first steps of many that we will take to help our children receive an education that will prepare them to participate in today's global economy.

I have said many times before, this is not rocket science. It is methodical, hard work, but it can be done, and it has been done by dozens of similar school districts across the country. It will require focus, perseverance and a willingness to change on the part of staff, and steadfast political determination on the part of our board members to get the job done.

I have met many wonderful teachers, administrators, parents, corporate executives and community leaders who are eager for change and want to help us succeed. I am more optimistic than ever that we can get the job done.

We are encouraged by the City of Hartford’s motto: Post nubila, Phoebus, which means, after the clouds, the sun. Together, we can do this.

Steven J. Adamowski
Superintendent of Hartford Public Schools