Pat Smith and Harriett Alfred. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Harriett Alfred and Patrick Smith always said they'd leave Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School together. Now, they’ve made good on their promise—and are looking at the professional and personal chapters that lie ahead for both of them.
Alfred and Smith, who were at the school for 38 and 37 years respectively, retired from Co-Op at the end of June, following the school’s graduation at the Shubert Theatre last month. In almost four decades together, they have brought up whole generations of musicians and music educators, from Latin Grammy winners and aspiring Broadway performers to classroom teachers who plan to carry on their legacy.
“It’s a bit of a shock, and it makes me wonder what’s next in our district and our country,” said Co-Op co-founder Keith Cunningham at a retirement party at Bear’s Smokehouse Barbecue in June, raising a glass to both Smith and Alfred. “I got very lucky in finding people who are essentially still there. I still remember hearing talk from kids in the hallways, like, ‘Wow, they are so good.’”
“It feels like I served my purpose,” said Smith. “I’ve shared love with a lot of people, and made people feel a lot of love ... Harriett and I do not mourn the past, we do not fear the future. We are just here now."
Smith teaching in 2022, shortly after he was named a semifinalist for the 2023 Music Educator Award by the Recording Academy and Grammy Museum.
For both—who are sometimes mentioned simply as MrSmithMsAlfred—it marks a bittersweet transition. In 1987, Alfred arrived at New Haven’s Truman School, where she ultimately taught for a decade. At the time, she was a freshly minted Hampton University grad, and had heard about New Haven from then-Superintendent John Dow. And something about the city, from the moment she stepped foot in a classroom, stuck.
Part of that was timing. In the 1980s, New Haven was offering a minority recruitment program that reached out to schools like Hampton, a historically Black college (HBCU) in Virginia. While Alfred was skeptical at first—she had wanted to be a singer, and it was only at the gentle urging of her mother that she pursued music education—the timing ultimately seemed divine. She needed somewhere to work, “and the door just opened,” she remembered.
Brenda Thomas, who went on to become the principal at the Polly T. McCabe Center, stepped in to help her find housing. Lola Nathan, who was then the assistant principal at Truman, had an extra room in her home and a way to get to school. For years, the two carpooled together, and it saved Alfred the pain of having to find reliable transportation right away.
“I loved my children at Truman!” Alfred remembered at Bears, as Co-Op teachers and alumni trickled in, congratulated her and Smith, and tucked into plates of sticky ribs, chicken wings and cornbread. After years of preparing to teach, she realized how much she actually loved public education. She still has the hanging wall calendar from that first year.
Alfred with choir students in August 2023.
The love, it turned out, was mutual: Alfred was often students’ first musical touchpoint, and it was a role she took seriously. Musician Marcos Sánchez, who went on to win a Latin Grammy, still remembers meeting her at four years old, and realizing that he wanted to be a musician.
After she heard him play the piano in her classroom—he was forever trying to get on the keys, and one day succeed—she tapped him to accompany the school’s choir and recorder ensemble. She told him, many times over, that he was a natural.
“She really made me really feel like I was a musician,” said Sánchez, who went on to become Smith’s band student at Co-Op (more on that below). “Soon I realized that’s what I wanted to do, and Ms. Alfred knew it from day one.”
But something still tugged at Alfred: she adored her work “but I wanted to stretch my repertoire,” she remembered. So when she got a call about Co-Op from Dr. Regina Lily-Warner, who for years served as the supervisor of music for the New Haven Public Schools, she knew it was time to make the leap. The year was 1997; Co-Op was still at 444 Orange St., where New Haven Academy now stands.
“Regina said, ‘Just get the kids singing. Engage them. I want to give them what you got,’” she remembered.
And so she did. Within a month, they were singing with the Langston University Choir. In the next decades, she would transform the program, from seasonal concerts in long, oxblood-colored choir robes to the school’s tradition of “Parking Day.” No sooner had she wished for an ally than she got one: Smith arrived at the school a year later.
“That was my work husband,” she said with a smile. “We pretty much built the program.”
Smith with former band students Jesus Cortes, Joseline Tlacomulco, Kevin James, and Bryan Carrera.
In those early years of Co-Op, “it was thrown together,” Cunningham remembered of the music department. Before Smith and Alfred, there had been a rotating slate of educators, none of them especially good. “The people that we had were not folks that had extensive musical training. It takes a real skill if you are a talented musician” who can also work with students as an arts educator.
Smith and Alfred, who became fast friends, were both. Before Smith arrived at the school in 1998, he wore many hats, from director of bands at Yale University (where he also earned his graduate degree in music) to a music educator for the North Haven Public Schools. When he arrived at Co-Op in 1998, there were only five kids in the band, and no blueprint for a formal program.
Working with Alfred, Smith grew that five-member group to a 65-piece wind ensemble, two 25-piece jazz bands, and a 45-piece orchestra. Alfred, meanwhile, built a 100-voice choir with seasonal shows that now feel more like a stop on the Cowboy Carter tour. With the theater department, both also built out the school musical, making it into a glimmering production with a full pit and soaring vocals.
Meanwhile, the two became inseparable—and deeply beloved by dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of students who passed through the school.
Sánchez, who was one of those first five students in the band, saw that transformation in real time. During Sánchez’ time at Co-Op, Smith had students record an album every year, each of them responsible for a track. If students needed to stay late, he stayed there with them, then shuttled them home in his little blue Subaru.
Sánchez talks to students in October 2020, when school remained online during the fall semester.
In the process, he became not just a mentor, but also a confidant, life coach, and second father figure to hundreds of students. Decades later, Sánchez still calls him for advice, on everything from music production and the finances of being an artist to parenting.
“Smith loves music obviously, that’s his passion, but he’s interested in more than the music part,” Sánchez said. “He’s really paying attention to the human side of things, and how we can use music to make an impact in other parts of people's lives. He could have done anything with his talent, and he chose to stay there and be part of something even greater.”
The work has come with plenty of challenges, both teachers added. In almost four decades, the two have weathered multiple superintendents, administrators, and shifts at the district, including the sudden transfer of the school’s arts director to Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School this spring.
Five years after Alfred started at Truman in 1987, Dow retired, making way for Superintendent Reginald Mayo, who served the district for two decades before retiring in 2013. But Mayo’s departure ushered in a rotating door of administrators—Garth Harries, Carol Birks, Iline Tracey and Madeline Negrón, with a return from Mayo in the interim between Harries and Birks.
They’ve watched arts education and retirement benefits take a hit at the district, including in a round of proposed teacher cuts that never came to pass earlier this year. They’ve watched the school, a tight-knit arts community, suffer immense loss, including alumnus Henry Green in 2018 and student Camryn Gayle, a dancer whose death touched students in every department, in 2021.
But none of those obstacles, Alfred said, may have been as immediate as the pivot to remote learning in March 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic hit New Haven. When schools announced that they would be closing their physical doors in 2020, Alfred struggled with the eerie quiet of isolation, and the task of conducting a choir online. Smith worried about his students, including a sax player whose landlord allegedly threatened the family with eviction when she practiced in her apartment.
It wasn’t just the hurdles of remote learning, they said—some students didn’t come to class, others didn’t turn on their cameras—but also the addition of compressed sound, of muting and unmuting, of devising lesson plans that were never supposed to happen on a screen in the first place.
During those first few months of remote learning, the two worked with area music educators and Yale Bands Director Thomas Duffy to produce a video for the Namibian hymn “Meguru,” which featured several students (now alumni) from Co-Op and the Neighborhood Music School. Over the summer of 2020, as protests roiled New Haven, Smith taught himself to use video and audio editing software that would enable the same kind of projects at the school.
By that fall, as schools remained physically closed, Smith and Alfred asked students to record themselves from home as part of their schoolwork. The clips, recorded in homes and apartments across the city, became the backbone of a cover of Tito Puente’s “Oye Como Va.” Alfred, with the help of tech theater wiz Janie Alexander and Arts Director Amy Migliore, staged a virtual musical the following spring.
“The biggest challenge was keeping our own psyches healthy,” Smith said. “‘Oye Como Va’ began as a therapeutic way for us” to process everything that was happening.
When in-person classes resumed in fall 2021, the two kept up that momentum, helping students navigate the transition back to in-person learning, masks and all. They braved the Omicron variant and helped stage a production of Sister Act that made it, miraculously, to opening night and had a full run. They welcomed new music faculty, including strings teacher Henry Lugo in the fall of 2022.
Co-Op teachers get one last selfie together.
They kept on innovating, through new musicals and Grammy nominations, through guest artist visits and graduations.
“It’s just a blessing to know that the Lord allowed me to use my gifts to teach,” Alfred said, as former NHPS Supervisor of Performing and Visual Arts Ellen Maust took a seat next to her. “They learned to cooperate, they learned to communicate, they learned to have discipline.”
“I think it’s an era that just shifted,” added Maust, who first met Alfred when she was a music teacher at Nathan Hale School, and Alfred was still at Truman.
Across multiple generations, several alumni echoed that feeling, wishing both teachers the best going forward. Rachel Kearse, a Sondheim Award winner who is studying elementary education at the University of Connecticut, remembered Alfred as both life-changing and life-giving, the person who made her fall in love with education and believe that she could do it too.
“She’s a school mom, a mentor—she just became that person I could go to,” Kearse remembered in a recent phone call. During and beyond 2020, “she did everything in her power to make sure we were engaged. By senior year, I was her go-to girl and I took that title very proudly.”
During Kearse’s four years at the school, which were upended by Covid for multiple semesters, Alfred passed on not just musical knowledge, but also life advice, including the importance of being that safe place that students could go to. Kearse held onto that lesson: she now wants to work in a school district that feels like (or is) New Haven. She will finish UConn with her degree in elementary education next year.
“I think she’s just like the epitome of amazing,” Kearse said, remembering how Alfred made the trip to Storrs to see one of her choir concerts. “There is nobody that is like Ms. Alfred. She is the type of teacher you think about years after you’ve studied under her. You can just tell that she really cares about students.”
At a retirement party for the duo, other alumni echoed that message, beaming as they remembered hours spent pushing themselves in their music classrooms. A 2014 graduate of the school, clarinetist Jesus Cortes went on to study music education at UConn, then landed a job teaching middle school band in West Hartford. He tries to model his pedagogy—and his vibe—after Smith.
“I think what I took was the genuine relationships he had with his students,” he said. “He was kind of a parental figure.”
Bryan Carrera, a music teacher at John C. Daniels School of International Communication and member of the East Rock Brass Band, also credited Smith with helping him fall in love with not just music, but also music education. After graduating from Co-Op in 2018—he plays the trombone and the tuba among other instruments—he also went on to study K-12 Music Education at UConn.
“Everything that he taught me in music could be applied to real life,” he said.
Back at a cluster of picnic tables at the retirement party, music teacher Jaminda Blackmon said that Alfred has been one of her greatest teachers. After starting with the New Haven Public Schools as an assistant teacher in 2007, Blackmon helped build a music program at Lincoln-Bassett School, then created a theater program at Wexler-Grant Community School that ran until this June.
“Oh my God, she’s amazing. She really is,” Blackmon said of Alfred. “She’s been my unofficial mentor forever. I’ve stolen a lot of things, like ideas, from her classroom. So this is bittersweet … It’s gonna create a huge hole.”
While they will no longer be teaching at Co-Op, both Alfred and Smith said they aren’t done teaching. Smith, who is also active in the New Haven Symphony Orchestra and Orchestra New England, will be working with the GRAMMY Foundation, including on a joint musical event for the New Haven Public Schools at the end of August.
Alfred, meanwhile, is still figuring it out. She’s still very active in her church choir, at Zion Seventh Day Adventist Church in Hamden, and the New Haven Heritage Chorale. She plans to travel to see family members. Then, she’ll see what’s next.
“Right now,” she said, “We’re just gonna wait for the door to open.”