Hartford Public Schools Supt. Beth Schiavino-Narvaez announced a five-year plan that, if fully implemented, should result in a 90-percent graduation rate and a 100-percent college acceptance rate by 2020.
“It will match what is happening in the suburbs,” said Schiavino-Narvaez. “That’s one of the reasons we designed it that way. It was designed to level the playing field.”
In order to get there, Schiavino-Narvaez will focus on three key points:
- Creating a K-2 literacy curriculum that aims to have every child reading proficiently by third grade
- Expand High School Centers of Innovation to combine blended, project-based learning between magnet and neighborhood schools.
- Establish an “Accelerated Agenda,” an effort to give more resources to the schools that need more, rather than dividing resources evenly throughout the district.
“They are ambitious [goals], and that’s by design,” said Schiavino-Narvaez. “We wanted to set the highest expectations and we also want them to be doable.”
In order for her incentive to find success, she admits, the district needs financial help. Right now, they fall a few million dollars short.
“What we’ve had to do is break things into bite-sized chunks and say, look, we’ll work with a smaller number of schools or phase this in over time,” said Schiavino-Narvaez.
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That’s enough for parents like Cynthia Jennings. Her kids already graduated from Hartford schools, but she hopes her grandchildren will have resources their parents did not.
“It does a lot for the integrity of a child to know that they can graduate from high school, and that they should,” said Jennings. “They need to see their neighbors are graduating, their friends are graduating and that their parents are back into educational programs.”
Right now, 71 percent of Hartford Public Schools students graduate and 72 percent get accepted into college.
