The day after the Hartford Board of Education rejected a request for a contract extension from superintendent Christina Kishimoto, Mayor Pedro Segarra spoke on WNPR's Where We Live about the reasoning behind the vote, and the future of education reform efforts in the city.
JOHN DANKOSKY: Now last night, you and the rest of the Board of Education in Hartford essentially gave a 'no-confidence' vote to Christina Kishimoto, the superintendent of schools in Hartford. She had asked for a vote because she wanted to know her status from the board. Why indeed did the Board of Education in Hartford say no to Christina Kishimoto? Why will she be out as a school reformer in Hartford?
HARTFORD MAYOR PEDRO SEGARRA: Well, I think that first of all, I see it not as much as a vote of 'no-confidence' but as an assessment in terms of where we are in the reform effort. I think that the Board, Dr. Kishimoto and others who are looking, acknowledge that she has made some contributions towards the advancement of reform in Hartford.
The question remains whether reform has reached all sectors of the community, especially the most vulnerable sectors and those families that were to benefit the most from the reform effort and when you desegregate the data, there's real concern about there not being enough progress there. And what is it that we need to do as education leaders? Because this is so important, so important to our families and to our community that we need to accelerate the rate of that reform and who would best be able to take it to the next level.
And after an assessment of where we've been and where we need to go, the decision was that that pace needs to be accelerated and that we need some new leadership to enable that to happen.
DANKOSKY: When you talk about 'desegregating the data,' I take it that this is one of the important issues here, that the superintendent has been talking about numbers of success that maybe aren't the same numbers that the board is asking for having to do with which schools are successful and which schools are not successful. Can you explain that to our listeners?
SEGARRA: We have a wonderful portfolio of schools. A lot of them encompass brand-new magnet schools that have sought to change the educational landscape and fulfill the mission of having a portfolio system of schools. We also have a lot of neighborhood and community schools that are surrounded by communities that really need to be more integrated because the performance of those schools is definitely not up to pace with what the other schools are doing.
And this is important because these are our most vulnerable communities, these are our poorer communities, and these are our communities that really feel left behind and I think last night at the board meeting we saw that with a lot of the parents who were extremely concerned and rightly so because the reform effort was initiated with them mostly in mind. So that's very important and we just want to make an effort for the future leader to be able to integrate those communities a lot stronger - to really integrate all the partners.
This reform effort is not about the superintendent. It's not about me as mayor. This reform effort is really about making sure that these children who have been living in cyclical poverty have the best opportunity at life.
DANKOSKY: Of course, this opportunity has not been forthcoming for these children for not just the last eight years, not for the last twenty years, the last thirty or forty years and I guess one of the questions a lot of people would have is, if not this superintendent, if not this plan, what then? We've had so many changes in Hartford, one of the most troubled school districts in the entire nation for so many years. What change can happen that will make things better? What do you get next?
SEGARRA: Well, I think that the thinking at some level needs to be linear but also at some level, there needs to be an extremely strategic leadership that really encompass - reform, reform at the basic core, reform is a community engagement piece and the parental engagement piece. And we're not saying that we're not backing down on reform, we're not saying that reform has not led to substantial increases from where we were over the past seven years. We just feel that in order to close that achievement gap, you really need a powerful, really powerful individual to go in there and work with all the stakeholders, including the mayor.
I think that I can leverage myself as mayor in much stronger ways than I have but a lot of that has to come from the leadership that's at the board.
DANKOSKY: But do you think that the mayor, long-term Mayor Segarra, should be on the board? You are, you originally said you weren't going to be on the board, your predecessor was on the Board of Education. Should the mayor play the role as the mayor or should the mayor be making the call-in part, along with the rest of the Board of Education?
SEGARRA: All reform efforts that have been successful have required and have had a significant mayoral involvement because this is so intertwined with the future of our city, this is so intertwined with the poverty that we have in our city. So there cannot be a disconnect between the mayor and the reform effort.
But that involves the mayor as a stakeholder, one of many stakeholders. So it requires a great level of cooperation, a great level of making sure that we not only work at a level of the educational reform but that also, I also engage the superintendents in work towards poverty reduction and we have some efforts that are going on in that. We hope to strengthen those. We have an Opportunity Hartford project that seeks to alleviate some of the poverty and these different systems need to come together, they need to come together and the parents, the families, need to really come together and we're hoping that that can be accelerated in the future.
DANKOSKY: Pedro Segarra is the mayor of the city of Hartford, thank you sir for joining us for a few minutes here on Where We Live, I appreciate it.
SEGARRA: Thank you sir.