HARTFORD, Conn — Hartford Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Leslie Torres-Rodriguez presented her 2021 State of the District Tuesday.
The presentation, in both English and Spanish, noted improvements in the district as well as additional work to be done.
Graduation rates have increased from 2020, but fall .02% short of 2019. 72.3% of the 2021 class graduated, up from 68.6% in 2020 and 68.8% in 2017.
The statewide graduation rate for 2021 was 89.4%.
“Hartford Public Schools has more than doubled the state rate of growth. Improving the graduation rate by 3.5% point since 2017,” the superintendent said.
The graduation rate increased for all students since 2017. Multilingual, Hispanic, and female students saw the biggest improvement.
Average daily attendance rates this academic year have fluctuated each month. It was 86% in May, but .02% higher in April and 1.5% higher at the start of the year.
The superintendent says it’s a collective effort with all partners in the community. She says data shows kids who are absent the first few days of school will tend to fall behind the rest of the year.
She said there are many reasons students have missed school from the pandemic due to transportation. They are trying to provide a more consistent schedule for families.
“We’re trying to address that by reducing somewhat the number of half-days on Wednesdays to provide more of a consistent schedule for our families, but also meet the needs that our staff has for their professional learning,” she said.
They are also trying to encourage attendance through assemblies and other fun ways to draw kids to school. They have also extended sports and extracurricular activities.
Hartford mom, Emily Gianquinto says she’s happy with her kids education. She has two children in the district.
“I live in Hartford for a reason and my kids are in Hartford schools for a reason,” she said. “I’m really lucky that my kids got into a magnet school and I know that there sometimes is a disparity between the neighborhood schools and the magnet schools.”
She says the district has done a good job with communication this year and their response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The district is offering new credit recovery courses this summer for high school students. There will also be early start programs for kids K-5.
Staffing levels are near 90%; a jump of nearly 5% within the last few months. The superintendent said there have been more than a thousand applications in the past six weeks. That same time period in 2021 saw 480 applications.
They launched a new marketing campaign and have also enacted more than $5 million worth of incentives and stipends to help recruit and retain staff. Dr. Torres-Rodriguez says there’s more to be done to increase the 27% non-white teachers.
Staffing and retention have been a concern in the district and the Hartford Federation of Teachers. In a recently-released survey of their members, President Carol Gale says it was of respondents' biggest concerns.
“I do see that the district is hiring on a pretty regular basis. I also, we get calls from people who are resigning and saying or I’m thinking about resigning,” she said. “That means that all of the staff in the schools will no longer be having to spend an ordinate amount of energy covering for the vacancies.”
She said the staff levels will reflect in the next academic year. There are certain areas that are harder to fill like special education and speech roles.
The superintendent did acknowledge areas the survey found including disconnect from district leaders, more say in academic planning, and better communication. Gale says they’ve been asking for this for years.
“We hear that sometimes the staff at the school level doesn’t really understand what the strategies are and we’re going to try to do better,” Superintendent Dr. Torres-Rodriguez said.
They said they will continue to collaborate with staff with new advisory councils. It gives teachers and staff the opportunity to feel like they have a say in the work and influence programming, she said.
Looking to 2024, the district set goals like reducing chronic absences to 12% or lower, increasing graduation rates to at least 83%, and increasing eighth-grade math proficiency and third-grade reading proficiency.
Tony Black is a multi-media journalist at FOX61 News. He can be reached at tblack@fox61.com. Follow him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
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