New Haven Looks For Answers in Massachusetts Vo-Tech School

Searching for ways to help public-school kids who won’t get college scholarships, New Haven officials took a look inside the bakery and auto shops of a Massachusetts school.

Mayor John DeStefano made a trip Wednesday with seven city and school leaders to Shawsheen Regional Technical High School in Billerica, Mass.

The prospecting trip came as they probe the idea of opening a vocational-technical program closer to home—and in so doing, create an alternate pathway for the kids who don’t have the grades or the aspiration to snag Yale-funded college scholarships through the city’s school reform drive.

The trip began at 7 a.m. outside City Hall. DeStefano climbed into his 2004 Toyota Prius, where Alderman Marcus Paca was already waiting in the back seat. Mayoral staffer Elizabeth Benton, who specializes in education policy for the mayor, took the wheel. In total, eight city and school officials headed north, with two reporters in tow.

From the front seat, between paging through through The New York Times, Hartford Courant and Wall Street Journal, DeStefano outlined the motive behind the trip.

He said he aims to come up with a counterpart to New Haven Promise, a college scholarship program funded by Yale University and the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven. The program offers full tuition at state colleges for kids who live in the city, attend a public school, and keep up good behavior, a B average and 90 percent attendance.

DeStefano said when he started talking about Promise, he got a common reaction: “Oh, that’s great, but there’s a lot of kids who don’t go to college.” What about them?

The city has some vocational training scattered through high schools like Cooperative Arts and Humanities High, Career High and the new Engineering and Science University Magnet School (ESUMS). The New Haven Board of Ed runs Sound School, a regional vocational aquaculture school. But it has no comprehensive vo-tech school that prepares kids to be plumbers, bakers, hairdressers or auto mechanics.

For those trades, about 300 New Haven kids per year head over the town border to Eli Whitney Technical High School, a state-run vo-tech school in Hamden.

DeStefano said the city has long been interested in creating a more intensive program like Eli Whitney. Now might just be the time: As the state grapples with a fiscal crisis, Gov. Dannel Malloy has proposed shifting control of the state’s 17 vo-tech schools to local school districts.

New Haven is interested in taking over Eli Whitney, DeStefano said, though no concrete plans have been made.

With an eye on that possibility, he plugged Shawsheen Tech’s address into a dashboard navigator. As Benton drove through the rain and fog up I-91, the dashboard showed the car was getting between 40 and 47 miles per gallon of city-bought gas.

READ MORE