Over the weekend, a University of Hartford student was arrested for a hate crime she committed against her roommate.
According to the Hartford Courant, freshman Brianna Brochu was arrested by the West Hartford Police Department. She was charged with third-degree criminal mischief and second-degree breach of peace. Brochu confessed to police that she was guilty of licking her former roommate’s eating utensils and smearing body fluids on her backpack.
In a press release sent out by the university, President Gregory S. Woodward said, “Acts of racism, bullying, or other abusive behaviors will not be tolerated on (the campus).” Gregory also added that he would do “everything in his power to work with the community to address related concerns together.”
The victim of the crime, Chennel “Jazzy” Rowe, posted a video to Facebook in which she described her experiences with her former roommate. Throughout the video, Rowe explains how unwelcome she constantly felt in her own room.
Rowe’s story gained a large following on social media. On Twitter, users began adding the hashtag #JusticeforJazzyto their tweets to ensure Rowe’s story would be heard and her former roommate would be punished for her crimes.
"Racism is dying out" "It's the older white people"
You're wrong & Brianna Brochu is the repulsive undeniable example. #JusticeForJazzy
Bullying? You got to be kidding me. This was a crime! Shame on you for trying to minimize this and alienating the victim. #justiceforjazzyhttps://t.co/DFj4aWLo0z
Brochu will appear in Hartford Superior Court on Nov. 15. According to the Boston Globe, she is currently out on $1,000 bail.
In the mean time, there will be a “March for Justice” on Nov. 8 that will begin at 5 p.m. The march will begin at the University of Hartford and end at the West Hartford Police Department.
Cement barriers, aerial surveillance, snipers and extra officers protected marathon runners days after the terror attack in New York City. The governor emphasized the leap to increase security as just a precaution.
The FBI is looking into suspect Sayfullo Saipov’s past and other people he could have been working with. The investigation has already found connections between Saipov and people who have drawn law enforcement’s attention.
Last Tuesday, eight people were killed and about a dozen injured when a truck drove down a bicycle path in New York City. Police shot Saipov as he exited his truck. Inside the truck, there were notes referencing the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
The Connecticut Network is going off the air. Connecticut’s new budget cuts are directly affecting the future of the network. There is not enough money allocated to the network for it to continue broadcasting.
Employees arrived at work on Friday to terminated email addresses, a partial equipment shutdown and Paul Giguere, CEO of the Connecticut Public Affairs Network, announcing the layoffs to employees.
CT-N is the public affairs channel that has provided information about state government and public policy events since 1999. It is operated by the not-for-profit company Connecticut Public Affairs Network.
The Connecticut state budget passed two weeks ago and many were concerned with what the education system would look like after the budget passed. It took almost 17 weeks to pass the two-year budget, according to the CT Mirror.
Years prior to this budget, a Supreme Court case mandated states implement the Education Cost-Sharing System. This system was supposed to take into consideration more than just the population of a certain area when looking at education budgets, according to the OLR Research Report. It was supposed to account for factors such as students that take public transportation, students who need more tutoring programs and students who need school supplies. The Education Cost-Sharing System was supposed to account for students needs, but it wasn’t enforced or followed.
This budget will allocate the money for education but it will also enforce the Education Cost-Sharing System. Areas that have students with more needs will receive more money.
Four different local Hamden positions are up for election on Tuesday, Nov. 7, including mayor. Polls will open bright and early at 6 a.m. and will close at 8 p.m.
Here are the candidates voters will find on the ballot and the positions they are running for:
Voters can head to any of the following locations within voting hours on Tuesday to submit their ballot:
This is the general layout of what the ballot will look like once voters go inside a voting booth (of course, candidate names will be different):
Results are expected to be available at roughly 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday, according to the Elections and Registrars Department. Results can be seen shortly after they are recorded at the office of the Elections and Registrars Department at 2750 Dixwell Ave. People can also try calling 203-553-7534, though results may take longer to be available by phone.
The 2017 Atlantic hurricaneseason has already proven to be extremely active and extremely dangerous. So far this year there have been 15 storms, 10 hurricanes and six major hurricanes (category 3 or stronger). These weather systems have resulted in more than 400 deaths, and more than $188 billion in damages. Connecticut has been spared the worst, but there is still a month to go in the season.
Connecticut’s coastline (photo via Google Earth)
On October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy tested the limits of Connecticut’s emergency preparedness programs. According to the National Weather Service, Sandy was a “worse-case scenario for storm surge for coastal regions.” By the time Sandy got to New Jersey, it was downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone, but the storm surge hit Connecticut right at high tide, causing massive amounts of flooding.
The Tropical Cyclone Report created by the National Hurricane Center reports that there was storm surge over nine feet in New Haven, resulting in floodwaters as high as six feet above ground level. Approximately 3,000 homes were damaged, and the state sustained more than $300 million in damages.
Five years later, is the state of Connecticut ready for another hurricane… or not?
Rick Fontana, Deputy Director of Emergency Operations – New Haven
“Our biggest fear in the city of New Haven is a hurricane,” says Rick Fontana, Deputy Director of Emergency Operations in New Haven. “It’s number one. It really is. We’re on the coast, and I think we’re pretty resilient, but when storm surge hits … that becomes a very significant issue.”
In the event of a hurricane, Fontana would work to develop strategies that will lessen the impact of a storm, plan and prepare for different types of storms, and help with the response to and recovery from a storm.
Fontana also serves as one of five regional coordinators in the state for emergency management. His job there is to communicate with the 30 towns in Connecticut’s Region 2 throughout an emergency, and relay information up to the state coordinators.
Quinnipiac’s Plan for Emergencies
Quinnipiac University, located in Hamden, Connecticut, falls under Region 2. Edgar Rodriguez is the chief of Public Safety and is also co-captain of the emergency management team at Quinnipiac. The team is made up of about a dozen members from various university departments, including public safety, facilities, health services, and academics. Rodriguez says the team has extensive plans when it comes to storms.
“We’ve come up with an emergency evacuation plan and we talk about if there’s a hurricane or a storm coming, what are we doing, how are we preparing for it,” Rodriguez says, adding that although the plans haven’t been approved by the state, they are still important to have.
When a storm comes, those plans get put into action.
The team begins a 24-hour-to-landfall. Members track the storm, gather information from the state and submit that information to Quinnipiac President John Lahey and Provost Mark Thompson, who ultimately decide whether students should stay at school or be sent home.
Once that decision is made, the emergency management team starts prepping all departments for landfall. Quinnipiac’s emergency management team only goes through the regional coordinators for assistance if it’s a minor, isolated emergency – such as power outages on one specific campus. In the case of an event as major as a hurricane, the protocol is to bypass the region and work directly with the state.
“The rule of thumb is every town or city should be able to sustain themselves for 72 hours,” Rodriguez says, explaining that Quinnipiac acts as its own sort of town for those 72 hours after landfall, with the emergency management team in charge. “Then after that, you start getting assistance from the state. But the entire time that’s happening, you’re communicating back and forth with the state.”
All the information goes up to the state emergency operations center in Hartford, is organized and then is sent out to the public.
“Every hour [the state is] sending us an update on the storm and we take that update and send it to everybody,” says Rodriguez. He feels that this system of organizing the information is a good way to keep consistency and keep everybody on the same page at a time when there could be a lot going on at once.
A building-Block Approach
Dan McElhinney, federal preparedness coordinator and national preparedness division director for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), explains that everyone takes a building-block approach for providing and receiving assistance after 72 hours.
“At some point [the town] may have to bring in mutual aid from surrounding communities,” McElhinney says. “When the mutual aid has been exhausted, they’ll ask for county level assistance, then they go to the state … then the state will declare a state of emergency. The governor then gets special powers to extend additional dollars to direct other state agencies to assist the local community. When the state no longer has the capacity, the governor will ask the president for an emergency or major disaster declaration. That’s when FEMA gets involved.”
FEMA’s regions (photo via FEMA.gov)
FEMA is divided into 10 regions, and McElhinney is in charge of FEMA Region 1, which includes all New England states. He says although FEMA can respond in numbers that would outweigh the state help 100-to-1, they are there to support, not to supplant.
“Basically under the Stafford Act, we pretty much have tasking authority over all the agencies and departments to assist the state in response and recovery,” McElhinney says. “We provide a lot of technical assistance, but we are not there to take over.”
Mandatory training
Not only does FEMA provide assistance in the aftermath, but it also provides training services. According to the Quinnipiac website, those who are on the emergency management team have to complete FEMA’s National Incident Management System training. This training is similar to the statewide Emergency Preparedness and Planning Initiative training exercises.
Map of Hurricane Maria on the monitor in the New Haven EOC
“The state of Connecticut has gotten very aggressive on keeping everyone prepared,” Rodriguez says. “Every year in October or November we do a drill. It’s mandatory for every town and every city through the state of Connecticut and the last few years have been some type of a hurricane.”
During the two-day statewide drill, state officials provide updates as if there were a real hurricane approaching. The state sends out maps of the storm and asks participants to respond to ongoing situations.
“You just lost all power in your town, what are you doing? You’ve got multiple trees that are down, what are you doing? Are you opening up a shelter? How are you transporting people? How much help do you have? Is the fire department on standby? And you have to keep reporting back and forth,” Rodriguez says.
Emergency operations center – New Haven
The exercises are meant to be intense, but they’re also meant to replicate a real-life situation so that if and when a hurricane does hit, everyone is prepared. And apparently, you can never be too prepared.
“When a hurricane strikes, people kind of become complacent and never think it’s going to be as bad as it is. We’ve been fortunate, but … our departments on the preparedness level always scale one level higher than we normally would,” says Fontana. “We’re always prepared but we always prepare above and beyond because it’s easier for us to scale back than it is to scale up in the middle of a crisis.”
The training drills are mandatory for cities and towns that want to receive grant money in order to build resiliency in places along the shorelines or rebuild after a weather event occurs.
coastal resiliency and innovative thinking
Giovanni Zinn, city engineer – New Haven (photo via Yale.edu)
Giovanni Zinn, an engineer for the City of New Haven, explains why that grant money is so important.
“There’s a lot more land now and it’s low lying land,” he says. “In the large storms we face two major threats: coastal storm surge, where water is piling up in the harbor and coming up the rivers, and large rain events of six, seven, eight, nine, 10 inches in a short period of time. Where does the water go? When you get both at the same time, you have a particularly bad problem. And there’s no getting around the laws of physics. There are certain situations where you can’t drain the city.”
Zinn says that coastal protection methods — seawalls, living shorelines and storm surge barriers that are employed in some areas of the state — are “extremely expensive” and put financial pressure on local communities. He also said he thinks that those preventative measures are “not really a priority” and the long-term thinking tends to be put on the back burner.
But Guilford town planner George Kral says that hard infrastructure like a seawall is actually discouraged by the state of Connecticut.
“The view is that it doesn’t really solve the problem, it just pushes the problem from one place to another,” Kral says, adding that if anything, the goal is to implement green infrastructure instead.
Towns like Guilford have already completed major projects to raise the lowest-lying roads above flood level, as part of the town’s coastal resiliency plan. According to the plan, “coastal resilience is the ability to resist, absorb, recover from, or adapt to coastal hazards such as sea level rise, increased flooding, and more frequent and intense storm surges.” Kral says the plan has two goals: to educate the public on the the importance of coastal resilience, and to suggest actions local governments could take to make themselves more resilient.
And Guilford isn’t the only place thinking about preventative measures.
David Kooris, Director of the Rebuild by Design and National Disaster Resilience programs (photo via CT.gov)
David Kooris, the Director of the Rebuild By Design and National Disaster Resilience programs for the state Department of Housing, says that after Hurricane Sandy, the federal government reserved about a billion dollars in relief funding to be “competitively awarded to places that demonstrated a new way of recovery that better positioned them to be more resilient for future disasters.”
In 2012, the state of Connecticut had already received $160 million in federal disaster relief money, and was looking for more from the department of housing’s two competitions.
“Teams worked over the course of a few months and put together a proposal to the department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and to a jury of architects and urban planners to compete for portions of the discretionary funds,” Kooris says about the international Rebuild by Design program. “Seven out of the 10 were awarded funding – the largest being lower Manhattan at $330 million, and the smallest being Bridgeport and the State of Connecticut with $10 million.”
Based on the success of that first program, Kooris says HUD took another chunk of the Sandy money and created a new competition — this time at the national level — which became the National Disaster Resilience program. There were 68 eligible government entities (states, cities and counties) that could enter the competition, and 13 were awarded funding at the end – Connecticut coming in 9th place with $54 million.
Kooris says the purpose of competitively divvying the money up was to “move beyond the standard recovery funding through HUD and FEMA, which more than anything else is just rebuilding.” The programs forced cities and towns to work on disaster prevention, rather than disaster recovery.
“Rarely you get the type of project that is new infrastructure – not repairing what was damaged – and do so in a way that explicitly addresses social and economic vulnerabilities in addition to environmental vulnerabilities,” Kooris says.
Connecticut’s plan involved combining “grey and green approaches” as Kooris puts it, by using “traditional, hard engineered solutions combined with natural solutions that mimic the functions of the environment.” He says that the state is planning to raise roads, build berms and add other green infrastructure to mitigate flooding in Bridgeport, in addition to pinpointing other coastal locations with the greatest number of critical facilities — power plants, roads, hospitals, wastewater treatment — and putting the majority of the investments into protecting those places.
where connecticut stands now
Since Sandy, officials have had five years to revise and strengthen emergency weather response plans.
“We have developed an emergency operation plan that’s worked on on a daily basis,” Fontana says. “Our primary goals … are preparing our residents, making sure that they’re prepared for any type of a disaster and making sure our infrastructure is protected.”
If another hurricane hit tomorrow, there are mixed feelings on whether Connecticut would be ready.
“If it were some kind of extreme storm like a category 5, that is a whole ‘nother ball game. The impact would be severe,” Kral says about the town of Guilford. “Hopefully we’ve done a little better job in terms of planning, but that remains to be seen I guess. If we had 50 inches of rain, we’d have a lot of problems.”
Kooris acknowledges there are still some things that need to be worked on, but for the most part, he says he is “confident that we have implemented targeted infrastructure projects … that reduce risk from future storms.”
As far as Quinnipiac goes, Rodriguez admits “you’re never going to be 100 percent” prepared, but he is confident that the annual mandatory state training has everyone as prepared as they can be to respond.
And in New Haven, Fontana recognizes that a category 3 hurricane “would be devastation to the entire coast” but he is confident in his department, which he says “works every day” and “works hard.”
“We prepare all the time. We plan all the time. We don’t respond all the time, and we don’t recover all the time, but we’re confident that we have the necessary strategies in place to handle a hurricane,” Fontana says.
Adding to his confidence is the fact that FEMA recently awarded the city of New Haven a class 7 rating for flood preparedness and recovery – the highest rating available. Having this rating allows homes in the designated 100-year flood zone to get a 15 percent discount on flood insurance. “So I think that puts it in a nutshell.”
The most important thing through it all? Keeping the lines of communication open, Fontana says, at all times.
“Consistent, timely, good information. I always say, ‘Be first, be right.’”
If the reports are true, then Quinnipiac’s men’s basketball’s new head coach is also the school’s highest-paid head coach…and he’s never been a head coach.
However, Baker Dunleavy, 35, does have the background of a basketball head coach. His father, Mike Sr., played in the NBA for 11 years and was also an NBA head coach for 17 years, spending two of those years as the Los Angeles Lakers head coach. He’s now the head coach at Tulane University.
“I was going to (my dad’s) practices watching the players, watching their footwork, watching them go through drills and trying to play them one-on-one after practice,” Dunleavy said. “But I wasn’t watching the coaching, the teaching, the little things that right now I wish I had access to. But just being around it, I think was a privilege and helped me a ton.”
Dunleavy’s brother, Mike Jr., is a 15-year NBA veteran that’s played for six teams.
Dunleavy was good enough to play basketball at the Division-I level. In fact, he played for Villanova University, one of the premier teams in college basketball from 2003-06. Even though he only played in 28 games in this three-year career, former teammate Mike Nardi realized the importance Dunleavy had to the team.
“Within his role as one of the guys coming off the bench, (Dunleavy) always knew what we were doing as a team,” Nardi said. He always knew what the coaching staff was looking for. He did a great job at pushing guys at practice…He knew what we were doing. Really good guy off the court. Smart, intelligent and great locker room leadership.”
Dunleavy didn’t have the same talent that his father and brother had to make it into the NBA, so he left basketball after graduation to work at Merrill Lynch. That only lasted until 2010, when he returned to his alma mater to work for his college head coach, Jay Wright, as the program’s director of basketball operations. After working his way up the program’s totem pole for a few years, Dunleavy became Wright’s right-hand man in 2013 when he was named the team’s associate head coach.
“Just the way our staff is and what coach Wright wants us to be is everyone pretty much has their hands on everything,” Nardi, who is now in his third-year on the coaching staff at Villanova, said on Dunleavy’s rise in the program. “Honestly, (Dunleavy’s) pedigree and his basketball-mind, he’s just very intelligent and knows the game very well. He has a calm demeanor about him that I think a lot of time helped coach Wright. You need someone that’s managing the game and helping you and see where the players heads are at.”
In his four years as associate head coach, Dunleavy’s Wildcats went 129-17 (.883) overall and 63-9 (.875) in Big East play. Dunleavy’s tenure as the Villanova associate head coach can be defined by one play. In 2016, the Wildcats won the national championship as Kris Jenkins made a three-pointer at the buzzer. The play is seen as one of the most iconic in college basketball history, if not sports history.
Dunleavy had a significant impact on the title, according to Nardi.
“I think (Dunleavy) was a great backbone for coach Wright and someone that he could always go to whether it be player relationships, recruiting, X’s and O’s, anything off the court with our guys,” Nardi said. “Baker was involved with everything, That’s why he’s where’s he’s at today. He was very prepared for this opportunity and he’s ready for it.”
On March 7, Quinnipiac relieved its 10-year men’s basketball head coach Tom Moore after the team went 10-21 in the 2016-17 season. Some of the early candidates for the job were coaches that had Quinnipiac ties like Iona assistant coach Jared Grasso, who played and coached for the Bobcats, and Southern Connecticut State head coach Scott Burrell, who was an assistant coach for the Bobcats for eight years.
However, DHR International, the search firm hired by Quinnipiac for the hiring process, keyed in on Dunleavy a couple of weeks after the national search began.
“I’d never seen the school, but I knew it had a really good reputation in terms of facilities. And that’s certainly the case,” Dunleavy said. “I knew it was a really good academic school, an up-and-coming academic school that was exploding in the northeast.”
“It’s never one thing. Just like a player looking to commit to a school, coaching’s the same way. You want to find the right fit,” Dunleavy said. “The environment that I was used to was a really well-rounded place…I thought that on the surface was a fit. Came to school, saw the place and was blown away but what it looked like…then by far the most important thing meeting the athletic director Greg Amodio and meeting Dr. (John L.) Lahey the president, and then from there on and continuing to meet other coaches and administrators.”
And if Dunleavy’s as good as advertised, then Quinnipiac is lucky to have him as multiple other schools were looking to hire him, according to Nardi, who is also a close friend of his.
“I think we all knew that day was coming much sooner than later,” Nardi said. “He was just waiting for the right fit and waiting for a job that he thought he could thrive in and be successful…Not to say that those other programs weren’t good positions or spots, but Baker just didn’t feel that at the time that was the right move for him.”
In his two interviews with the school, Dunleavy discussed how to run the program and how it can take the next step.
“Now that we’re here, the next step is establishing an identity,” Dunleavy said. “My eventual goal for this program is to be a perennial contender in the MAAC. That’s the end-goal. You can’t get there right away. My job right now is to establish a culture, an identity, a style of play, recruit and develop the players I have right now and make them the best they can be.”
In establishing the identity of his team, Dunleavy wants the Bobcats to do the simple things really well.
“We talk about playing really hard first and just being an effort team. I think every team in the country talks about that, but who commits to it? And we want to be a team that plays together,” Dunleavy said.
The men’s basketball team is coming off of its third-straight losing season in conference play. To add to this, the team lost its top-two scorers from last season in Mikey Dixon and Peter Kiss due to transfer after Dunleavy was hired as the head coach. The team also lost five other players due to graduation or transfer.
It’s clear that the school wants Dunleavy to make the NCAA Tournament after Moore failed to do it in his 10-years at Quinnipiac. But both sides aren’t expecting that result to come right away.
Only time will tell if Quinnipiac managed its wealth properly in the former Merrill Lynch employee.
As the world struggles to wean itself off of fossil fuels, the town of Hamden is taking the initiative to try and go green in a new event.
Photo from Town of Hamden Facebook
On Saturday, November 4, Hamden will hold its first-ever “Environmental Services Day.” The event is being held to encourage people to be more eco-friendly with food trucks, free electronics recycling, paper shredding, and a chance to learn about the benefits of renewable solar energy.
Haley Starvaggi, Hamden’s Solid Waste & Recycling Coordinator, said that she was inspired to address environmental concerns after many residents wanted to find an area to shred mass amounts of paper.
The contents of the event, such as hiring an outside company to shred large quantities of paper, were originally planned to be included in the farmer’s market held earlier in the year. When that did not pan out, this snowballed into an event that could educate the town about ways they could do their part in environmental conservation.
“The focus of the event is two things. It’s to reducing energy consumption at their house, as well as take care of recycling, some of those things you can’t put in your curbside bin… you are not advised to put shredded paper into your recycling bin. If you have important documents to shred, this is a more environmentally-friendly way to do it,” said Starvaggi.
Energy Efficiency Coordinator Kathleen Schomaker said that while she is not sure how much money can be saved in the average Hamden house by going solar, you can save money based on how many products using fossil fuels you convert into renewable energy.
An example of this Schomaker gave was that if you converted your house to solar power and then traded your car in for an energy efficient electric car, you would save more money and resources than if you converted your house without getting rid of your gas-powered car.
The event is being held in conjunction with Solarize CT, a partnership between the government and a company that installs solar panels, which is trying to convert people in Connecticut to solar power. They do this by selecting panel installers and help offset costs of converting a home to solar-powered energy with special financing options.
This is not the first time that Hamden has experimented with more efficient ways of fueling the town. According to New Haven Register, Hamden unanimously approved the construction of 4,000 solar panels in the Wintergreen Avenue landfill by True Green Capital, which will help save the town $600,000 in energy costs over 20 years.
Mayor Curt Leng released a statement praising Solarize CT’s mission and encouraged residents to find out if their house is able to be converted to solar power.
“The Town of Hamden is very happy to bring Solarize CT back to our residents for a second round. Hamden is committed to sustainability and this program is a great way for our residents to become involved and take control of their energy bills … It truly is a great way to save money and help our environment too!” said Leng.
Starvaggi said that if it is successful she would like it to happen annually.
“I think our ultimate goal is to attract people with the paper shredding and electronics recycling, and then while they’re here doing those things they would want to do no matter what, then they’ll stop by and get some more information that might get them thinking about improvements they might make around their house to reduce energy consumption,” said Starvaggi.
Environmental Services Day will happen on November 4 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at 2750 Dixwell Avenue in Hamden, Connecticut.
The Summit Learning Platform is a free online program the Cheshire Public School District brought into the student curriculum this year. Summit Learning is centered on personalized learning and progress tracking for students. This program allows teachers to customize their instructions to fit student needs and build strong relationships between the teacher, student and his or her family.
Cheshire Public School Superintendent, Shawn Parkhurst, brought in Summit Learning for grades five, six and seven. As of now Cheshire Public Schools is the only district in Connecticut that is using the program. Historically, Summit Learning got together with Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, who helped get engineers to build the platform. This program was first used out of a charter school in California and some schools in Washington before going national.
The students from Cheshire access Summit via Google Chromebooks, however, you can access Summit through any computer or tablet. Cheshire does not use Summit full time for every student in every classroom.
–Doolittle School located on 735 Cornwall Avenue in Cheshire uses Summit to help teach social studies and science. This school’s highest education level is the sixth grade.
–Chapman School located on 38 County Club Road in Cheshire used Summit to help teach science and math. This school’s highest education level is the sixth grade.
–Norton School located on 414 North Brooksvale Road in Cheshire uses Summit for all sixth grade subjects. On the school’s website they highlight technology as being an integral part of their learning environment. Norton uses Smartboards, Chromebooks, iPads and Google apps for student learning. This school’s highest education level is the sixth grade.
–Highland School located on 490 Highland Avenue in Cheshire uses it for two out of the five sixth grade classes.
–Dodd Middle School located on 1000 Park Place in Cheshire is just for seventh and eighth grade. Students are broken up into teams by color. The teal color is the only team who uses Summit, especially for math.
Some may argue that Summit is cutting edge and can be personalized to each students needs. Others may say it replaces the teacher role in the classroom and allows for students to have too much screen time. Another argument to investigate is what kind of school districts use Summit. Summit may be used in challenged school districts where achievement is not high. Some schools may offer this charter program for various students who need to do better by taking more responsibility of their learning and adapt skills to be more independent.
Parents in the Cheshire School District have voiced their concerns whether or not Summit is necessary and safe for their children.
One parent says his daughter at Dodd Middle School uses Summit for all her subjects.
“When I talked to the superintendent, who is really responsible for bringing Summit to the schools, he basically said last year in the spring of 2017 he brought it back to the school and talked to various teachers about who was interested about learning about the platform.”
This parent said that he doesn’t think there is a lot of data to support the claims that Summit is a successful program for student learning.
“The schools that are using it are not schools like Cheshire, who have good teachers on its own. I am still on the fence about Summit. I am trying to understand if we really need this yet. It is so new and for next year to potentially have the whole school district using it doesn’t make much sense.”
Summit is divided up into different pillars to how the education system works.
Image from Summit Learning Website
One is personalized learning time. Students work through various modules with learning objectives that has provided content so they can work at their own pace. The module will have notes, articles and YouTube videos to help them study and understand the material before they take a quiz. To move onto the next section, the student must score at least 80 percent.
Two is mentoring time to help students set goals with a teacher at the school. On Summit the teacher can add or subtract material Summit uses and can even display their own material. Students are responsible to set goals for what they want to accomplish each day or week. This is a way for students to be responsible for their own learning.
Three is the classroom. This is part of the student education geared towards critical learning, complex thinking, project and presentation based learning. The material going on during computer time is supposed to correlate to what’s going on in the classroom setting led by the teacher.
Another parent expressed that she went to the schools informational sessions about Summit. She felt if this program was used properly it sounded worthwhile. She said that “personalized,” and “cognitive learning,” were common buzzwords the district would use to sell the program.
“My first concern was the advertisements,” she said. “A lot of the articles the students use have pop ups from third parties, like Web MD, which is concerning. The school district had to put an add blocker onto Summit. These kids are 10 and 11 and on the side of their articles there are links to other concerning topics.
This parent said that whenever she talks to someone in the community there is a different answer and a different opinion. She also said that she was shocked Shawn Parkhurst did not know that these articles were on the platform.
“The superintendent said he would go through each article to approve it appropriateness,” she said. “It is a concern they didn’t even realize this was a problem in the first place. It is a big waste of time that they have created all of this work for themselves since we had a good curriculum before. It was a mess about how the district put it out.”
Image from the document Parkhurst sent to families surrounding the myths and facts of Summit
Image from the document Parkhurst sent to families surrounding the myths and facts of Summit
Image from the document Parkhurst sent to families surrounding the myths and facts of Summit
Three parents said that their children have been complaining about the program, saying that it is too much information for them to handle. They said that this program has caused their children to be nervous about going to school in fear that they will not be able to keep up with their peers.
One mother said that she feels the overuse of screen time in the classroom is detrimental to her son’s development.
“Friends of mine who work in education and work with kids think these students are too young to work with this material and filter what is or is not important,” she said. “They need that face to face interaction with other students and their teacher. When kids are still developing socially and emotionally, still forming habits and commination, they need to see things first hand for their development.”
Shawn Parkhurst said he spoke with teachers in the district and has held information sessions with parents when he decided to bring Summit Learning into the Cheshire curriculum.
“We have had personalized learning as a strategic plan for the past 10 years,” he said. “We have had many teachers who are using Google classrooms and Chromebooks in previous years. We shared it with our team and they shared information about it when it was still at its building level. Teachers saw it as a way to enhance what they were doing and move forward. There was an application process to see if they have the minds and philosophy for this. There is also only development with that.”
When we asked Parkhurst how he felt the school should deal with concerned parents, he advises families to not rely on online research and work directly with their children.
“Regarding the parents feedback, we have been transparent from the beginning that we will provide education night for parents,” he said. Any parent that has requested or reached out to us, we have met with them individually. We recommend that they go to the child itself and to their school instead of researching and finding general information online.”
On Nov. 6 there will be a board of education curriculum committee meeting on 29 Main Street at the board of education offices. The Summit Learning program will be one of the topics covered so attendees can ask questions and have a discussion.
Melissa Kaplan, Hamden resident and English professor at Quinnipiac University, contemplated putting her two children in private school after being told the school district was not good enough.
“I kind of second guessed myself and said ‘What are you doing?’ The whole point is not to run away, but to make the schools stronger themselves and to not participate in that problem, but actually do something about it,” said Kaplan.
Twelve years later, she is making changes to fix those problems and running as a democratic candidate for a four year term as an elected official in the Board of Education (BOE) in the upcoming elections, happening on Nov. 7.
Alongside making changes in the Hamden school district, she is changing the lives of many students at Quinnipiac University.
About three years ago, Kaplan became the Associate Director of the Honors Program at Quinnipiac. Now she is the Interim Director of the program.
Since her move to the town, Kaplan has been actively involved in her children’s education as well as the greater Hamden school district.
Kaplan was sworn in on the BOE in September to fill in a seat that was recently vacated due to an unexpected resignation of another BOE member. She applied for the position with this letter of intent.
Kaplan has always been political; she believes that teaching itself is political, and when it comes to the upcoming elections in Hamden, she believes anything is possible.
“I think one of the things we’ve learned from this past election is that there are no guarantees,” she said. “Hamden is a traditionally blue town and out of the nine districts, eight have traditionally been democratic, but it’s not to say that we don’t have a tough race ahead of us.”
Although the elections are approaching soon, Kaplan has been actively involved with her political career outside of the race.
She recently took her ‘intersexual feminism ideology’ and her activist actions outside of the classroom in various ways.
She was involved with the BOE before running for the position, as well as being apart of other groups such as the Hamden Parent Supporting Education Excellence (SEE) and The Connecticut Parent-Teacher Association (PTA).
One of her duties, due to the current political situation, was ensuring the safety of transgender and non-binary students in the Hamden school district.
“You can’t cherry pick your issues,” said Kaplan. “If you are going to stand there and fight against sexism, that is intersexual, and so it’s also fighting homophobia, racism, classism and all the various classes of ‘isms’ that exist. So for me, advocacy was really very important.”
Kaplan has only been apart of the BOE for less than two months, however, she is very excited about it and looks forward to working on fixing issues within the community.
“[We are] Getting different initiatives passed and dealing with issues of diversity and inequality in our school system and also focusing right now on the state budget and funding and making sure that our students’ needs are taken care of,” she said.
Kaplan has had a voice in the Hamden community as well as within the Quinnipiac community, so she fights for those who do not but need their voices to be heard.
Although the BOE deals with different topics, one of Hamden’s biggest issues of the moment is the financial situation.
“We have a bunch of different committees, some of them deal with curriculum and policy. Others deal with finance, and that’s one I had a lot to learn about,” said Kaplan. “I think that’s also the most important one because we are dealing with a lot of budget cuts and so we need to find a way to make the most out of the little that we’re given.”
Jody Ian Goeler, the Hamden Superintendent of Schools, proposed this budget for the 2017-2018 school year.
Other issues include special needs education and sexism within the school district.
“I think there needs to be initiatives to really provide equity and equal opportunities for students,” she said. “One of my projects also, I’m sure it’ll be met with some resistance, but I’d like to get rid of the sexist dress code.”
Kaplan is the newest member in the BOE and believes she has a lot to learn from her colleagues, who have connections and knowledge and are helping her fight her battles.
“It’s very humbling to be mentored by these people,” said Kaplan.
When it comes to balancing her schedule between the BOE and being a full-time employee at Quinnipiac, she laughs and says it is stressful, however, so far she has been able to manage.
“I think it’s kind of dealing with competing jobs in terms of my time,” she said. “But I think they are also complimentary as well – supporting students in the classroom and advising students, and then supporting students in my school district.”
Although she cannot be in two places at the same time, she makes time for both jobs and for all students she has been involved with, especially her students in the Honors Program at Quinnipiac.
“I absolutely love the students in the Honors Program and it’s a privilege to work with them,” Kaplan said. “As much as students have learned from me, I have learned from them as well.”
Kaplan sees many activist actions coming from her students at the university and she feels proud to think she might have had something to do with their initiative and courage.
“I’m always moved by their acts of activism,” she said. “It’s something as singular as a student coming out in class for the very first time – the courage, the bravery. Or students who create organizations on campus where they feel the need for something where the school isn’t perhaps feeling a need for them so they create that space and that arena for themselves.”
Another thing she loves about her students is their passion for knowledge.
“They are not there for the grade, they’re there to learn and what meaningful learning is something that not only just happens in the classroom, but it transcends,” said Kaplan.
Kaplan is also very passionate about creating a connection between her two jobs, therefore, creating a connection between Quinnipiac students and students from the Hamden school district.
In the past, students from the Honors Program at Quinnipiac have served as mentors for students at Hamden Middle School and Kaplan wants to expand this program.
“I would love to branch it out and have students outside of the Honors Program to mentor in the elementary schools and even the high schools,” said Kaplan.
Kaplan, whether she is working for the BOE or Quinnipiac, wants to maintain the relationship between Hamden schools and Quinnipiac and hopes that more students and faculty take initiative to make that happen.
