What You Need to Know about Hartford’s Martin Luther King School: Part 1

Posted on Author Robert Cotto Jr.

MLK school pic

Recently, I saw a former Hartford politician who asked me, “Did you figure out what to do with MLK?” The person got a mean side eye and a question.

What happens when you wrecklessly expand privately-managed state charter schools, interdistrict magnet schools, destabilize the other schools with other neoliberal education “reforms”, and resist raising revenue for public services (as opposed to private stadiums, condos, and the like)?

You get situations like the Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary School in Hartford, Connecticut in 2016. MLK is a primarily Black and West Indian school that also has a smaller group of Latin@ students. The school is located in the city’s North End in the Blue Hills neighborhood.

Until a few weeks ago, the MLK, Jr. school was scheduled for renovation as new for $68 million. Mayor Pedro E. Segarra and the former city council members listed the school reconstruction as one of its capital projects on the city’s plan for renovating buildings and infrastructure. Screen Shot 2016-06-13 at 9.07.45 PM

Then the new Mayor recommended that the project and all other school construction projects be removed from the list of projects. Citing financial problems and not wanting to raise taxes, particularly on commercial interests, the Mayor and almost all new council members eliminated the school construction projects from the Capital Improvement Plan for the City of Hartford.

Screen Shot 2016-06-13 at 9.17.46 PM

Maybe the Martin Luther King Jr. school project was always a dream. But dreams are hard to extinguish.

Rather than fix the school, the school board majority, the Mayor, and Council seem inclined to just move the children out of the school without any guiding policy, no realistic plan for moving the students, nor a complete renovation of the MLK school. So parents, teachers, and students at the MLK school aren’t buying what the Mayor, Council, and Board of Education are telling them about the school. Some MLK school advocates are saying “we’re not moving“, while others simply demand a long-term plan.

Like MLK, these parents, teachers, and advocates, “refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.”

MLK check

The irony is the Mayor of Hartford has called a forum on “North Hartford Schools” on Tuesday, June 14 @ 5:30 p.m. at the Artist Collective. Apart from the issue that nobody uses the term “North Hartford”, the forum is odd. The Mayor of Hartford appoints a majority of members (5 out of 9) on the Hartford school board. The Mayor of Hartford, by charter rules, also effectively controls all other municipal levers of power with the Council playing a smaller role.

Given that the Mayor and Council have the legal power to finance and fix the MLK school in the North End of Hartford, or any school in the city for that matter, there really isn’t a need for a forum to fix MLK school. Just fix the school or come up with a real plan for them to move. That’s what the community wants as far as I can tell.

So how did we get here? And where do we go?

To be continued…

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Robert Cotto Jr.

Robert Cotto, Jr. is a Lecturer in the Educational Studies department. Before his work at Trinity, he was a Senior Policy Fellow in K-12 Education for CT Voices for Children where he published reports on Connecticut’s testing system, public school choice, and K-12 education data and policy. He taught for seven years as a social studies teacher at the Metropolitan Learning Center for Global and International Studies (MLC), an interdistrict magnet school intended to provide a high-quality education and promote racial, ethnic, and economic integration. Born and raised in Connecticut, Mr. Cotto was the first in his family to go to college and he earned his B.A. degree in sociology at Dartmouth College, his Ed.M. at Harvard University Graduate School of Education, and an M.A. in American Studies at Trinity College. He is currently completing his Ph.D. in education policy at the University of Connecticut Neag School of Education. Robert lives with his wife and son in the Forster Heights area of the Southwest neighborhood in Hartford. Views expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Trinity College.

One thought on “What You Need to Know about Hartford’s Martin Luther King School: Part 1”

  1. The 60 million for a baseball stadium nobody wanted tells a story about leadership that places resident second to commercial interests. Hartford children and MLK lose. A baseball stadium in limbo, and children in Hartford without a school. The only way to change any of this is to vote people out of office who place residents second to baseball stadiums nobody wanted.

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