Students, staff, and teachers from New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) are demanding answers from the city’s Board of Education over unprocessed maintenance requests and facility concerns that have been brewing for years.
The city’s Board of Alders Education Committee held a public meeting Tuesday which had a near five-hour runtime. School employees, parents and faculty packed the pews of City Hall brandishing photos of broken, moldy, or dilapidated equipment in their classrooms.
Leslie Blatteau, president of the New Haven Federation of Teachers, said the union has filed 52 facility maintenance requests since August, against the city’s Board of Education. Board members said they were sorting through months of backlogged complaints.
The union announced 16 of the 52 complaints it raised are overheating, ventilation, or air quality issues. Of the 36 other complaints, 22 have not yet received responses.
Blatteau implored the city to prioritize its public schools, especially at such a crucial moment of politicized pressure and neglect from the federal government.
She noted that the district does not have a uniform standard for things like safe classroom temperatures and cleanliness.
“We have to invest in our schools, and that includes the physical infrastructure,” Blatteau said, receiving raucous applause from teachers and students at the meeting.
Chief Public School Superintendent Madeline Negron said the city was spending between $5 and $10 million less than what is required to fix maintenance issues.
NHPS’ contract with AMB Industry Groups, a third-party company that performs facilities assessments, ended on Wednesday.
Negron and Blatteau said at the meeting the contract would not be renewed and NHPS would instead be shifting to an in-house facility maintenance system, meaning the district would use existing staff as opposed to private contractors to remedy maintenance issues.
These maintenance needs would typically be overseen by a facilities manager, but NHPS’ district-wide position has been vacant since Dennis Tondalo, who was appointed to the role in August, held the job for exactly two days before resigning.
Teachers who testified during the public comment portion of the meeting recalled having to replace marching band uniforms and instruments damaged by mold, classroom temperatures bordering on 90 degrees for weeks, and cleaning rat feces off learning supplies.
Karlee Ciarcia, a teacher at Truman school in New Haven’s Hill neighborhood, said sweltering classroom temperatures caused her to develop chronic migraines. “One migraine lasted over 7 days and got so bad that my doctor sent me to the ER,” Ciarcia described. “The heat was the cause.”
Another teacher, Kathleen Lupoli, shared that after weeks of her classroom reaching 90-degree heat, she had an unexpected miscarriage, which she said could have been caused by the incessant temperature of her classroom.
Alders and school administrators asked Chief Executive Officer Justin McCarthy and other representatives from the city who attended Tuesday’s meeting to explain how facilities maintenance requests are processed and what the city is doing to address complaints that have been stuck pending for months.
Alders expressed frustration with the school board’s responses.
“I guess I’ll just have to wait until the Board of Education comes and I hear the same thing: a bunch of excuses and no solution,” said Alder Angel Hubbard.
“Tell me what you need. Is it money? Is it staff? Is it materials?” implored Fair Haven Heights Alder Mildred Melendez.
Some of the solutions levied by teachers and school administrators involved closing schools with poor HVAC quality, increased transparency on facilities requests from the city’s Board of Education, and investing in bonds, as many neighboring school districts have, to offset funding deficits, though the Board has yet to share whether they will take these recommendations.
