Arts Students Slam School Staff Cuts

by NORA GRACE-FLOOD

Roughly 100 students at an Audubon Street arts magnet school walked out of their classes and into the city’s public arts district to protest staffing cutbacks and to stand in solidarity with affected teachers. That mass student action took place on Monday afternoon on Audubon Street near Orange Street, right outside of the main building of Area Cooperative Educational Services (ACES) Educational Center for the Arts (ECA).

The protest followed news that ECA, a regional half-day high school arts program on Audubon Street, is overhauling the school’s department heads positions — currently filled by five teachers who double as broader liaisons and leaders for the program’s five divisions of study, including dance, visual arts, music, creative writing and theater — in order to reel in budget woes next school year. This restructuring is “deeply personal because we’re such a small school,” 16-yearold ECA student Naomi Borenstein said at the protest.

“A lot of the department heads have families,” she said, worrying that some of the school’s top teachers would be forced to find work elsewhere due to salary cuts. “If they abolish the department heads, that will ruin ECA.”

Enrollment Drop, $500K Deficit

ACES Executive Director Tom Danehy said the school’s board voted on April 5 in favor of a budget that would demote the department heads from full-time equivalent employees to part-time teachers (all of ECA’s other teachers, like the school’s students themselves, are part-time, since ECA serves as a supplemental arts program for kids who are dually enrolled in other schools) and hire a new assistant principal to take on their outstanding administrative responsibilities. He pointed to declining enrollment, a $500,000 operating budget deficit, and losses in funding as drivers of the staffing changes.

For example, he said that the student body has decreased from 319 students in 2018 to 266 today. That change, he said, may be due in large part to state rescission of funding back in 2018 which restricted New Haven youth already enrolled in magnet schools from attending ECA. In other words, the only New Haven students allowed to participate in ECA are those enrolled at Hillhouse and Wilbur Cross.

In all, the five department heads’ associated salaries and benefits came to a total of $548,098 this past year, according to Danehy. By concentrating administrative work between two people – the school’s principal, the newly hired Kevin Buno, and an upcoming associate principal –rather than five, Danehy said ECA will cut those salaries to $219,508 the following year and save a total of $142,750 (the yetto-be-hired associate principal’s salaries and benefits will come to $165,831).

In a Friday letter to parents, Danehy further announced that, “Recently, ACES engaged Odyssey Associates to study the program at ECA. The full report should be available soon, and we will share it with all of you once it is available. So far, we know the study will document an array of positive and negative data points: students’ and parents’ overall high satisfaction with the programming at ECA; rather than on administrative responsibilities.

Department heads are currently tasked with a combination of direct teaching and administrative duties. With next school year’s approved budget, those department heads will have the opportunity to stay on as teachers working on a half-time basis, while the additional .3 full-time equivalent roles they previously served as administrators will all be re-assigned to the principal and his associate. Danehy suggested that department heads were previously spending the majority of their time on administrative responsibilities rather than teaching; with the change, they will spend all of their hours in the classroom.

Danehy noted that those five teachers should be able to maintain full-time employment if desired by picking up additional teaching gigs with ACES’ other schools. He also said that none of the teachers should lose their benefits, but that if the teachers did not take on additional work moving forward, they will have to pay higher shares on their insurance premiums than they currently do. None of the five affected teachers responded to requests for comment from the Independent for this article. This restructuring comes less than a year after ACES purchased an adjacent law office building on Orange Street for $975,000 with plans to convert that site into ECA school “programmatic” spaces.

“Really Sad That This Is All Happening”

However, students — who have already been vocal alongside parents online in calling for greater transparency from school leadership and creating a petition to reverse the budget vote — spoke up in person and en masse about how the restructuring could impact what they described as a singular educational opportunity and student “safe space.”

Over the course of an hour on Monday, students took turns sharing stories of how their department heads have changed their lives, expressed their concerns that cutting back teacher salaries could lead to the departure of beloved staff, and mourned the stymieing of artistic development by monetary savings.

“My mom has been here for 20 years,” one ECA student named Joaquin, whose mother leads the visual arts department, told his peers. “She went here as a student. She’s an alumni and now she’s teaching here. Before that, my grandmother taught here.”

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Danehy said that in addition to shaving some money from ECA’s budget, the restructuring would “prioritize teacher/student interactions” by granting department heads more time to work with students

“You’re next!” another student cheered from the audience.

That continuation of artistic education now feels uncertain, Joaquin responded, as he observes his mom and other artists struggle to provide for their students in the face of limited funding.

“All the other department chairs are feeling really bad,” he said. “It’s just really Con’t on page 10

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