Culture & Community | Education & Youth | High School in the Community | Arts & Culture | New Haven Public Schools | Wooster Square
Ashanti Troutman, who will be a sophomore at the school, and incoming freshman Ava Newton. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Ava Newton leaned forward, her phone balanced in her left palm as she sketched out the mast of a ship and began filling in the beams below. Across the table, Mercedes Williams watched intently, calculating her next artistic moves. Sarai Ampie suggested drawing a flexed bicep, to conjure the god Maui. All three rushed to illustrate clues to Moana before time ran out.
As she drew, Newton left behind years of difficult classes, pandemic pivots, and school bullying to step into her first days of high school—before high school had even started.
Newton is a rising freshman at High School in the Community (HSC), one of 44 New Haven Public Schools where students return to the classroom next Monday. On the cusp of the new school year, she and almost 60 of the school’s incoming freshmen are getting a social and emotional leg up with the school’s “Bridge Ambassadors” program, led by upperclassmen who were in the same place just a few years ago.
In addition to seniors, sophomores and juniors can also participate: HSC opened it up to any student who has experience at the school last year.
Bridge Ambassadors Soroya Flowers and Lizandralee Peña hand out evaluation forms to incoming freshman Messiah Danny, Cristopher Lopez, and Dulcemaria Sartillo.Lucy Gellman Photos.
“I love this, honestly,” said Soroya Flowers, a rising senior who did the Bridge Ambassadors program her freshman year, and was the first face to greet freshmen when they walked into the gymnasium last week. “This program made me have friends, acclimate to school, really become a leader. HSC is a special place … it’s a community that we’re building up. We don’t all get along all the time, but we all band together when things are hard.”
HSC pulled her through “a hard time” with remote learning, she added—and she wants to spend her remaining time at the school giving back. On a recent Wednesday, she sat at a desk, signing students in as they quietly entered the gym and perused a cart of books set up at the front of the room. By the end of the day, she was encouraging them with five words that became a Flowers-ism: “Set the curve for yourself.”
From the gym’s open double doors, five dozen freshmen trickled in, winding through the gymnasium to a classroom filled with tables and chairs. On a screen at the front of the room, the school’s motto glowed in white letters against a blue background.
Ambassadors at work. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Art teacher Nicki Vitale walked around with a bag of organic fruit lollipops, tilting it forward as students shook off remaining layers of sleep and pulled out the bright treats. Some chatted with each other in hushed, halting tones, most busied themselves with name tags.
The room wasn’t quiet for long. As Building Leader Cari Strand and Magnet Resource Teacher and AP Coordinator Dianna Carter came to the front of the room to welcome the class of 2026, ambassadors lined up against one wall, ready to jump into a series of icebreakers and get-to-know-you prompts that ranged from drawing to musical chairs.
A nervous sort of excitement buzzed through the room, jumping from young artists to nostalgia-soaked upperclassmen to math nerds waiting to step into their first geometry classes.
By the end of the day, some of those hushed strangers would be laughing together so loudly that the sound traveled out onto Water Street.
Mercedes Williams. Lucy Gellman Photos.
In the front row, 14-year-old Mercedes Williams was thinking through her fall semester classes, wondering where she would make her first friends of high school. A little over two years ago, she was a sixth grader at Betsy Ross Arts Middle School (BRAMS) when Covid-19 turned her world upside down. After studying theater at the school, she said she is excited to start a new chapter at HSC, where her sister was also a student.
Though she knows some of the current students, including Bridge Ambassador and rising sophomore Ashanti Troutman, she said that she wants high school to be her own kind of experience. She described the start of the year as a sort of blank canvas, waiting for her to fill it in day by day.
Several yards behind her, 13-year-old Kiley Monk was also wondering what the year would hold. A self-described math enthusiast, she said that she was looking forward to freshman year, and also admitted to being a little nervous “about not doing good enough in science classes and being lost,” she said.
Mercedes Williams, Sarai Ampie, and Kiley Monk. All are incoming freshmen at HSC. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Because she’s spent the last three years at Wintergreen Interdistrict Magnet School, she doesn’t know many of the 85 students in the incoming class.
Neither does Newton, who sought out HSC’s small structure after experiencing years of bullying at Hamden Middle School. While she said she is a little anxious “about people liking me,” she is also relieved to be “meeting new people, making new friends,” she said. She’s especially happy to be going from a school of over 800 to one that is a third of that size.
“I’m breathing a sigh of relief after middle school,” she said. “I just hope to have a good school year.”
A few of the ambassadors leaned against a wall, lost in their memories of freshman year. This senior class is the last to have been in high school when Covid-19 hit the city, sending their freshman and sophomore years online.
Lizandralee Peña gets incoming freshmen into icebreakers. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Some of them, like Flowers, struggled to keep up as their homes became their classrooms. She said she is most excited for rites of passage that the pandemic took away or changed for her peers. The prom is one of them, she said. HSC graduation, which returned to Wooster Square Park last year, is another.
Lizandralee Peña remembered doing the program her freshman year as a way to meet new people. It became a lifeline: several of the friends helped get her through the pandemic. Now, she leads a production company or “ProCo”—that’s HSC speak for a student club—dedicated to positive thinking and mental health. After high school, she wants to go to college and study medicine or social work.
“I learned that sometimes you just gotta put yourself out there,” she said.
Rising freshmen Sarai Ampie and Messiah Danny. Lucy Gellman Photos.
As Strand and Carter spoke—assurances to the freshmen that 2026 may feel far away, but “you all are going to be walking across that stage together” before they knew it—Flowers hugged Peña and let the words wash over both of them. In 2019, the two met after getting off the same school bus—the number eight, Flowers remembered—and walking towards HSC. Three years after they entered the room as strangers, they’re having trouble with the idea of goodbye.
“It’s very bittersweet,” Flowers said. “At the end of the year, we’re all gonna go our separate ways. It’s time for us to be great.”
Wednesday, she and fellow ambassadors made sure the year started on a bright note. Splitting the freshmen into groups, students headed to different corners of the school, some sitting in the parking lot as others took over the gym, classrooms, and room in which they had started the day.
Outside, activities included rounds of "Red Light Green Light," set to upbeat music. Lucy Gellman Photos.
In one corner, Peña and Troutman circled up with freshmen, and started a first name game that had cries of "I forgot!" or "I think?" and "You got this!" flying across the small space. As students volleyed names back and forth, Messiah got to know Mercedes. Mercedes learned a little about Sarai. Sarai met Kiley, who managed to remember Ava. Ava learned about Naqibullah. By the end, everybody could name everybody else.
By the time they had flowed into a sort of large-scale Pictionary around Disney movies, they were sitting shoulder to shoulder, chatting amongst themselves. One at a time, a group member stepped out of the room, and fellow freshmen had just minutes to draw clues to movies including The Little Mermaid, Mulan and Moana.
When Newton selected Moana, comments went up from the table all at once. “The muscle,” she said, flexing her right arm until her bicep popped.
Lucy Gellman Photos.
“Oooh, the muscle, the muscle,” Sarai Ampie chimed in at exactly the same time. The two shared a quick glance, the kind of look that says hey, we could be friends.
“You have to have the Heart of Ti Fiti!” commented a teacher who was standing nearby, and a sudden rush of giggles came from the group. Ampie worked on the image of a muscle rising from an arm. Down at the other end of the table, Naqibullah Hayat Zaria pulled up an image of Moana on his phone, and began sketching out an image of the princess in blue marker.
When time was up, students invited Kiley Monk back in, and moved on to another movie.
Peña and Troutman don't mess around with musical chairs. Lucy Gellman Photos.
In the gym minutes later, students gathered around a line of chairs, walking around them until pumping music stopped. Laughter and breath rose through the room, ringing as it reached the ceiling. Flowers pulled a chair from the bunch, and made an apologetic face at Newton as she realized she was the only one left standing.
“Sorry homegirl,” she said, dragging the chair across the floor. “You look cute as hell, but I gotta do this.”
Nearby, rising senior Alani Calderon remembered entering the school three years ago with a kind of anxiety that filled their whole body. Before high school, they had attended St. Rose of Lima in Fair Haven, and knew every member of their class. At HSC, they didn’t know anybody. Then they shadowed a student—and realized that HSC was a place they could fit in.
Now, they are an active member of HSC’s student body, and working to grow a graffiti-themed ProCo out of a summer arts program at the school. They became a bridge ambassador for anxious students in whom they see a younger version of themselves.
“It helped me become more social,” they said of the bridge program. “I stutter and I stumble, and this helped me push myself. I did this to grow and improve, and I feel like they deserve the help. They need that same support, the community, the guidance. They need to know that it’s like a little family.
“It feels like a time skip,” they added of the end-of-school decisions now on the horizon. “I’m ready but I’m not ready.”