CT schools chief: He won’t meet with group not ‘directly affiliated’ with schools. Church group objects

Members of St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church in Meriden have concerns about the public schools, but they say they don’t feel as if the administration has been willing to listen.

Members, many of whom have children in the schools, and their pastor, the Rev. James Manship, have sought a relationship with the public schools superintendent, Mark Benigni, but they say they have been stymied in being able to meet with him.

Benigni’s unwillingness to sit down with them is frustrating and disrespectful, Manship said.

They have met with Robert Kosienski, president of the Board of Education, who attended a parish assembly in May, and Evelyn Robles-Rivas, supervisor of language and community partnerships, but say there hasn’t been progress on several fronts.

Manship and parents say the key is a meeting with Benigni, who is in charge of running the school system day to day.

“Leadership has just said, we need to move on,” Manship said. “We’re not getting any answers; we’re not getting any movement. And so we want to meet with our superintendent, see if we can develop relationship with him. And if he’s interested we’d like to learn from him and hopefully he’d like to learn from us.”

He said “the mentality is just tell us what your problem is, and we’ll solve it and leave us alone. That’s not helpful.”

In an email, Benigni said he met with Manship Jan. 9 one-on-one at Manship’s request. “It was clear that many of his concerns were national and state-wide in nature,” Benigni said. “I offered members of the Meriden Public School’s team to meet with Fr. Manship and/or the St. Rose of Lima Education Committee.”

He also said he would be willing to meet with two members of the St. Rose Education Committee who have children in the schools, provided they meet with his staff first.

In an email to St. Rose’s committee, he said, “I will not be meeting with your group or any other parent group not directly affiliated with the Meriden Public Schools.”

‘The face of our education system’

Denia Ortiz, whose children have graduated from Meriden schools, said it’s important to her to meet with Benigni. “I think he represents the community and the Board of Education,” she said. “We need to meet him for building relationships. We don’t want problems. We want to be a partner with the person who represents our community.”

“He’s the face of our education system,” said Jessica Rodriguez, four of whose five children are in Meriden public schools. “It’s just not the school board; it’s the superintendent as well. I feel that it is important because he is interacting with our teachers; he’s interacting with students, other staff and I feel that he should be involved with getting to know the community more.”

Rodriguez said the school board believes there is a lack of parent engagement, “but I don’t think that they understand the community enough to realize or acknowledge some of the challenges that our community are facing.”

With issues such as bullying, translating, difficulties in meeting with teachers and other issues, especially given that many parents speak little English, the gap between them and the school system seems especially large, the parents say. More than 60% of the 8,600 Meriden public school students are Hispanic and 1,686 are English learners, Manship said.

“Why not just simply meet with the group and get to develop a relationship with us?” Manship said. “There needs to be a lot more work that needs to be done. To do that, why not be able to see us as an ally rather than a threat? And you can’t know that if you just keep pushing the people down and say, meet with the Spanish liaison person, Dr. Robles. Meet with her, meet with her. We’ve already met with her.”

Robles-Rivas is not among Benigni’s senior staff, Manship said.

St. Rose parishioners said they showed their interested in the educational issues during listening sessions held at the parish, when 80% of the concerns were about the schools.

“A good number of them had to do with bullying,” Manship said. “And then there were other things about issues around tutoring, instructional issues, mental health issues for the kids. This kind of disconnect from parent and child, frustration that people were feeling.”

An Education Committee was formed out of the process, which made a number of proposals, such as a simple graphic about how to respond to bullying, in Spanish and English, rather than “their policies and procedures, and it’s just pages and pages and pages of words,” Manship said.

“We found with our families here that when bullying comes to the fore, it’s very emotional, so it’s an emergent situation,” he said. “Either your child is a victim of being bullied or being accused of being a bully and on the verge of being suspended from school or some disciplinary action taken.”

One mother who was called in about a bullying situation was not able to get a Spanish speaker to meet with her, he said. Manship said the parents asked for an interpreter to be available within 15 minutes. “Very concrete stuff,” he said.

“Bullying is something that the district addresses when it happens. We take it very seriously,” Kosienski said. “And they asked even if we could create a flowchart, which we did for them. We posted it online, and each and every school has it located and it’s also at our meridenk12 online.”

He questioned whether the St. Rose parents define bullying accurately. “I think that some of the people … have a different definition of bullying than the actual definition. If two kids aren’t talking one day, that’s not bullying,” he said. “All their questions were answered and they were answered thoroughly.”

“We didn’t make demands, these are proposals,” Manship said. “We know that we’re not going to get everything that we ask for.”

School communication

Another major issue was communication between parents, teachers and school staff. The parents “made a proposal about (how) the school system likes to use ParentSquare. It’s an application to communicate between school and parent,” Manship said.

Manship said that’s not effective when it comes to serious issues such as bullying, emotional issues or to discuss how a child is performing in the classroom.

“It seems to be a really kind of disconnected understanding why this is not always the best way to communicate with our parents,” he said.

One parent was asked through the app whether her child had a learning disability, he said.

“I don’t think a teacher and a parent should be having a texting communication and put the parent off, quite frankly,” Manship said. “She just didn’t know how to respond to it. So have a better understanding about when that technology is useful and when it may not be useful and putting a little bit more guidance about that use.”

Like other issues, there has been little progress on the issue, he said.

“If there’s an issue, a teacher will always meet with a parent,” Kosienski said. “Also we communicate via ParentSquare, which is a nationally used program. And we also have in-person meetings. Anytime a parent wants to meet with a teacher, that’s fine. Again, I think their best understanding was they want to have a group of people from St. Rose of Lima go out and meet with the teacher and that’s not how it works.”

“If there’s a language issue, our ParentSquare translates into over 100 languages,” he said. “So there’s really no issue, and we have people who are bilingual in each and every school. We have a bilingual supervisor, we have an equity supervisor, who all can make these meetings happen. They go through the process of going to their principal as well if they’re not happy with something, or something’s not being done at the school level.”

Another St. Rose suggestion was “in the beginning of the school year that the parent makes a declaration to the school, this is the language that they would prefer to be communicated in about their child and about their school,” English, Spanish or both, Manship said.

Manship is also worried about students moving from grade to grade without learning the subject matter, while the school district focuses on test results.

“But these test results are not the whole picture,” he said. One student graduated from Maloney High School with straight A’s. “She went to Middlesex (Community College) and could barely do math. … There are others that have gone on with great grades out of the school system here. And they get into a community college or state university system and they can barely do the work and some of them just leave, just drop out.”

Still another concern is that more than 140 teachers were hired with emergency funds during COVID-19 and Manship is worried there won’t be money to keep them on staff.

“This money is running out this year. What’s going to happen to those positions, how are they going to fund them?” Manship said.

“That depends on our funding from the city of Meriden,” Kosienski said. “And it’s also depending on our funding from the state of Connecticut. We’re hopeful that through the Alliance District and subsidies and grants, we hope to be able to keep the staff that we’ve hired through the ARPA monies and keep those teachers in place. That’s our hope. And that’s the hope of every member of our board and every administrator in our district.”

Manship said those details are among the things the St. Rose parents would like to understand.

“That’s the kind of a conversation that we wanted to have,” Manship said. “By meeting with the folks, we’re trying to understand, what are they up against? What are we up against as a school system, and where could we be of help and where things might need to be adjusted?”

“But again, not to have the conversation, not to meet us, meet with our folks and to air this stuff out back and forth, there’s not a need to polarize on except the fact that you’re not meeting with us. That’s just not acceptable.”

Ed Stannard can be reached at estannard@courant.com.