Next year, students living in the Waverly Townhouse public housing development in the West River area of New Haven may come home from school and see their teachers right next door. On weekday evenings, the students might come to the community center for tutoring. Parents might go over to teacher’s residences to talk about extracurricular activities or how their kids are doing.
The teachers would move in as part of a “Teacher in Residence” program that the Housing Authority of New Haven hopes to jumpstart next year. If the program is approved, the two teachers selected to live there will pay no rent at all—in exchange for additional help with afterschool programs.
HANH, which manages Waverly Townhouses and other public housing projects in New Haven, hopes to provide rent-free housing to four teachers between the Waverly Townhouses and the McConaughy Terrace development of West Rock. Intended for individuals or families with children who cannot afford housing, Waverly Townhouse provides 52 homes and McConaughy Terrace houses 201. This Teacher in Residence program is part of the larger “HANH Believes” initiative that focuses on helping children in the community succeed in school.
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A similar program with police officers inspired the initiative. The Officer in Residence program began several years ago, said Sergeant Peter McKoy, the New Haven Police Department liaison to HANH. Currently, nine officers live in different public housing communities across New Haven, including Waverly Townhouses. The officers pay no rent in exchange for keeping a closer eye on the community. They address security concerns, lighting issues, and complete extra rounds in the area. Officers file a report to the property manager each month and help the housing authority address concerns more quickly. “They help decrease the amount of calls for service in these locations for patrol officers,” McKoy said. “When the residents know that there is a police officer that is actually living there, they can’t get away with things that they normally could.”
The NHPD program also looks to combat negative perceptions of the police and foster a better relationship with the community. Part of this comes from interacting with officers out of uniform. McKoy says that they’re hoping to soon host activities that will allow officers to interact directly with children. That’s part of the reason why McKoy thinks that Teachers in Residence would compliment the NHPD program well. “One of the programs that one of my officers was thinking about doing was a tutoring program after school on certain days,” he said.
If that officer lives in Waverly Townhouses, he might get some help with his idea. To participate in the program and receive free rent, teachers will focus on strengthening afterschool programs in the communities where they live. “What these teachers could offer could be a more intensive tutorial service,” says HANH Executive Director Karen Dubois-Walton. The community centers in the Waverly and McConaughy developments will extend hours Tuesday through Thursday to give the teachers space to work. In the tutoring setting, the program hopes to provide a positive environment for peer mentorship where students can interact and help each other, according to Dubois-Walton. Teachers can also help parents link their children to other community based after school programs, like the Boys and Girls Club.
These efforts contribute to the partnership between HANH and the public education system that Dubois-Walton has pursued along with the Superintendent of New Haven Public Schools, Garth Harries, PC ’95. “A significant portion of our population comes from public housing,” Harries said. “And a key determinant in education is engagement at home and engagement in the community.”
He sees the Teacher in Residence program as an opportunity to use after school programs to engage students in environments outside of normal classrooms and help supplementtheir regular curriculum. But, Harries said, it would benefit teachers as well because it would “give teachers a way to understand the communities in which they work.” And with the incentive of free housing, Harries hopes the initiative will attract good teachers to the district; both Dubois-Walton and Harries noted that new teacher recruitment is an additional goal of the program.
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Eight years ago, a similar subsidy-based teacher program in New York City was founded to recruit teachers. The New York Times reported that under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the city would pay as much as five thousand dollars to help new recruits with the cost of moving to the New York area, and provide a four hundred dollar monthly stipend for two years. The teachers had to commit to working for three years in one of New York’s most challenging middle schools or high schools. City officials told the New York Times that they hoped to recruit 100 new teachers through this program.
Will Mantell, a representative from the Office of Communications of the NYC Department of Education, said that the 2006 program lasted only for one or two years. “The number of teachers in it was relatively low—around 40,” Mantell said. “We didn’t find that it added to the number of teachers, but it did help folks who were teaching in difficult areas at the time.”
He said it was discontinued after a year or two. He declined to comment on why, because the policy existed under the previous administration. Mantell said he was not aware of any similar subsidies under the current administration.
So helping teachers with housing isn’t a new idea, and in New York at least, it wasn’t particularly successful. But where New York fell short, New Haven might succeed. New York operates on a significantly larger scale in both size and budget than New Haven. The Teacher in Residence program is more concentrated, and hopefully easier to implement and track.
Dubois-Walton said she thinks that New Haven’s Teacher in Residence program is currently the only rent-free program in the country. Eventually, she hopes to expand, but for now it’s small. As a pilot program, HANH is only seeking a budget of about 25,000 dollars. Part of that goes towards paying the rent that teachers won’t pay, and part will cover expenses that teachers might incur from resources for the community center where they will tutor.
Elizabeth Carroll, the Director of Education studies at Yale, thinks that the small program could achieve success, given the relative size of New Haven. “Even if the impact of the pilot program is small, it can spark a discussion on family and community engagement,” she said.
However, Carroll expressed a concern over potential issues with the program. She wondered what support the teachers will receive, noting that “time is a precious resource for teachers.” She explained that while it is critical to get to know students’ parents and work together with them, the extra work outside the classroom could put a lot of pressure on individual teachers.
This problem could magnify if the teachers selected are early in their careers. First year teachers have less experience working with students than older teachers, and adjusting to classroom workload is difficult even without afterschool programs. Younger teachers might find themselves attracted to the opportunity, though, given the financial incentive and their lower place on the teacher pay scale. According to the New Haven Board of Education Human Resources Department, the average salary for a teacher is $58,387 while first year teachers earn less at $43,759. Superintendent Harries notes that many teachers early in their career work second jobs to help with finances. So the program could present somewhat of a paradox—it might attract younger teachers while veterans might be more prepared or suited to the task.
In fact, Dubois-Walton said, “Teachers that have expressed most interest have been new teachers in their first couple of years.” She remains optimistic, though. “Several teachers that are interested have come through Teach For America, which is very much focused on supporting these new teachers.” She believes that the combination of training from Teach for America and the support system in the New Haven Public Schools will allow these potential teachers in residence to be successful. Superintendent Harries agrees with Dubois-Walton’s sentiment, noting that they devote a significant amount of time to helping new teachers.
It’s also important to consider that they might not teach at the same schools that some kids in their development attend. According to Dubois-Walton, “New Haven moves so wholeheartedly into magnet schools,” so not everyone in these developments will attend the same local schools. That doesn’t necessarily limit the teachers’ impact in their community, however. “We just want these teachers to be a resource to each kid,” Dubois-Walton added.
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This debate will come to a head in a few months. While many of the program’s details have been spelled out, the free rent has yet to be approved. “It’s certainly not a guarantee,” says HANH Director Karen Dubois-Walton.
There’s no such thing as free lunch, right?
Dubois-Walton must first get approval from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, which oversees all local housing authorities. “Taking a [housing] unit offline is not something that is done lightly from our end or from HUD’s end,” she said. Just three weeks ago, HANH added the initiative to this fiscal year’s “Moving to Work” plan. The umbrella program provides funds to housing authorities, using creative solutions to improve the quality of life in public housing communities. Dubois-Walton remains optimistic the program will gain approval, even among the tangle of bureaucratic hoops.
If it does, then she and Harries will begin to iron out the details. Its specifics and effectiveness remain to be determined, but the larger goals of the program are clear.
“The way to break the cycle of poverty is to invest in the young people that live with us so they won’t be the next adults on our wait list,” Dubois-Walton said.
– Graphic by Julia Kittle-Kamp