Top: Ramzie Highsmith, a first-year teacher at Edgewood School who was the 2024 recipient of the Prospective Teacher of Color Scholarship from the Connecticut Teacher of the Year Council. Bottom: Student Board of Education representative and HSC student Jonaily Colón with fellow HSC student Fatima Armenta. Lucy Gellman Photos.
When Ramzie Highsmith was coming up through the New Haven Public Schools, he knew that if he could make it to his art class, the day would be okay. In high school, those classrooms became his safe spaces, teaching him to be comfortable in his own skin. That same motivation pushed him to excel in college, where he brought art into prisons with one of his favorite professors.
Now, he's trying to pay that forward for students in the same district that raised him. That is, if he can keep his job as arts educators are placed on the chopping block.
Highsmith, a first-year art teacher at Edgewood Creative Thinking Through STEAM Magnet School, brought that story to City Hall Wednesday night, as dozens of educators, library and media specialists, literacy enthusiasts, New Haven students, and emergency food and social service providers packed City Hall for a marathon hearing on the city's $703.7 million proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2025-26.
The hearing was part of a five-hour Board of Alders Finance Committee meeting, during which alders also heard from the department heads and staff in the Health Department, Elderly Services Department, Community Services Administration, Youth & Recreation Department (YARD), New Haven Free Public Library, Department of Community Resilience and several of the city’s special services districts.
The next Finance Committee meeting will take place on May 12 at City Hall.
Again and again Wednesday, educators spoke about the sheer impact of those positions, from teaching students how to do research to what it means to be a reading coach in the midst of a citywide literacy crisis. Many focused on the arts as not only a foundation for empathy and critical thinking, but also a way to improve academic performance and boost attendance in a district that still struggles from chronic absenteeism.
"We had lots of kids who felt safe being themselves," said Highsmith, stepping into the hallway to talk as fellow educators testified. He noted that New Haven has a long history of innovation in education; now is the time for the city to use it. "This is what New Haven is about. This is what New Haven is built on."
The hearing follows a tense meeting with the Board of Alders Finance Committee last week, during which New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) Superintendent Madeline Negrón announced an anticipated $16.5 million shortfall in the district's budget for the coming fiscal year. At that meeting, Negrón said there could be 129 student-facing staff cuts, including 29 arts instructors and 25 library and media specialists.
When asked if there were positions at NHPS’ central office that she might consider eliminating, Negrón emphatically said that there were not. She revisited that statement earlier this week, calling administrative cuts a possibility at a New Haven Board of Education meeting Monday.
Mayor Justin Elicker has currently proposed $69.3 million for NHPS, which represents a $5 million increase from last year. In addition, the State of Connecticut contributes $11,525 per student through the Education Cost Sharing (ECS) formula. Critics of the formula have called it fundamentally inequitable; more on that below.
Mind The Gap
Ben Scudder, who teaches history and environmental science at HSC. “If they can show up for us, I think we can show up for them,” he said of students who gave up their Wednesday night to be at the hearing.
While Negrón has warned of possible cuts for months, those calls have gotten louder—and extended far beyond the city—in the last two weeks. In part, that has to do with the way Connecticut currently funds public schools, as well as Yale’s $23.2 million contribution to the city and the end of pandemic relief funds. Those, in particular, have served as “a lifeline to the district,” Negrón said.
As they dry up amidst new threats to federal funding from the Department of Education, she has announced potential layoffs, larger class sizes, the elimination of current vacancies and school mergers, like that of Wexler-Grant and Lincoln Bassett Community Schools at the end of this academic year.
"I argue that it does not have to happen, not in Connecticut," she said in a press conference last week about the potential NHPS school staff cuts. “When you are already operating bare-bones, because that is the case for us in New Haven, and for many of my colleagues, a cut of this magnitude will affect every aspect of our programming, and it’s going to impact all of our students.”
That burden does not rest singularly on the city, she has added: the state has not changed its ECS per student foundation amount since 2013. During the state's current legislative session, which ends in June, Mayor Justin Elicker asked that the state increase that number to $12,488 per pupil, and keep up with inflation in the coming years. He also noted the state’s $400 million surplus and $4.1 billion in its Budget Reserve Fund.
“Per staffing guidelines, New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) would need 700+ more staff in order to have the number of teachers, social workers, librarians, etc. to meet the needs of our students, approximately $35 million to be fully staffed,” he explained in his testimony to the Connecticut General Assembly.
Wednesday, several educators spoke directly to Negrón’s proposed cuts, noting the roles that both the state and Yale University could play in bridging the gap. Currently, Yale contributes $23.2 million to the city, a figure that Elicker has asked it to consider increasing in the coming year and a fraction of what it would pay if its $700 million in tax-exempt properties no longer held that status. Currently, the university’s endowment hovers around $41.4 billion.
Izzi Geller: “I read my students’ writing, I conference with them, I listen to them and I listen to them in general. I know their abilities and I design my instruction accordingly.”
Izzi Geller, an NHPS grad who now teaches at Metropolitan Business Academy, suggested not just taxing Yale and appealing to state legislators, but also looking more closely at costly contracts that the district has signed with outside vendors like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The corporation runs NWEA, a standardized, computer-based testing system that collects data on math and literacy levels.
Geller turned the clock back just a few months, to a morning they were pulled out of their class—a section of freshmen, still relatively new to Metro—to learn about the district’s new NWEA testing system. When it was implemented shortly thereafter, it “ate up four classes,” Geller recalled—valuable time in which they could have been learning with their students.
The results, meanwhile, were data points presented with no sense of who students were or what they actually needed in the classroom. “Given a 20-minute prep, sharpened pencil, and a piece of paper, I could have created an almost identical spread,” Geller said to snaps and jazz hands that rippled through the aldermanic chamber. “I read my students’ writing, I conference with them, I listen to them and I listen to them in general. I know their abilities and I design my instruction accordingly.”
Geller pushed forward, noting that such data is, in their experience, rarely used—and perhaps should not be handed over to a state “while they underfund us,” or to the federal government when the Department of Education is on the verge of slashing Title I funding. Twenty-two of New Haven's 44 schools are Title I, meaning that they serve a large number of low-income students. There are 580 Title I schools in Connecticut.
“What I am trying to say is that New Haven Public Schools leadership and city leadership—not teachers—are lacking creativity and courage,” Geller said. “NWEA is just one example of the many contracts failing to solve the problems we face. How can we possibly entertain the idea of cutting librarians and arts educators but continue pouring dollars into corporate contracts for tests that suck the life and joy out of our students?”
Geller, in their final 30 seconds of public testimony Wednesday, also pointed to better-funded, whiter and more suburban school districts, where increased outdoor time, K-12 arts education, and play-based learning are all an expected and normalized part of the curriculum. In New Haven, students are using iPads by the time they’re five. Does it have to be that way?
“Do whatever you have to do to keep our schools intact,” they said to cheers and shouts of yes! from attendees.
Scudder's students, Diana Robles and Japhet Gonzalez.
Ben Scudder, a history and environmental science teacher at High School in the Community (HSC), broke it down more creatively, with a countdown that got snaps and applause from many of the teachers still waiting to testify. Counting down from four, he looked to the state’s $4.1 billion surplus, noting “leaky roofs and empty classrooms” that already bedevil NHPS buildings.
Then there’s three, he continued—the number of days it would take for Yale, using passive interest from its $41.4 billion endowment, to cover the gap that Negrón has identified. Or two—how many times this week he’s called the Governor’s office, and how many days this week his history students traveled from HSC to NHFT’s Union Hall in Fair Haven to make posters, signs, and banners protesting the cuts.
“If they can show up for us, I think we can show up for them,” he said.
There’s one, he continued: the number of teachers that it takes to change a student's life.
“Our School Is Nothing Without Teachers”
And indeed, it was educators, school librarians, and students themselves who made the most compelling—and sometimes gut-wrenching—case for finding the funding to keep teachers in their classrooms, school libraries, and coaching positions, where they may be the reason students come to school, stay in school, and don’t fall behind in their classes.
Highsmith, who has just started his journey as an arts educator, is one of those people. Born and raised in North Haven, Highsmith first fell in love with the arts as a student at Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School (BRAMS), when he stepped into Maura Galante’s classroom for the first time. As a young, queer Black kid, Highsmith hadn’t figured out where exactly he fit in.
And then, suddenly, something clicked. It was like Galante was saying, “tell your story through these projects,” he remembered. So he did.
At BRAMS, Highsmith jumped into the visual arts, from painting and photography to an after-school museum club that is still going strong. After eighth grade, he attended Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School, working with teachers like Kris Wetmore and the legendary Christopher Cozzi to deepen his practice in the visual arts.
He headed to Southern when he realized he wanted to teach, growing his skill set as an apprentice with Professor Patricia Bode and the Remember Love Recovery Project. Last year, he was the recipient of the Prospective Teacher of Color Scholarship from the Connecticut Teacher of the Year Council. By the time he graduated, he was one of the state’s educational rockstars.
And yet, his job already stretches him thin. Like many of his colleagues, Highsmith works with hundreds of students, from lessons on painting to an anime group he advises after school. More than once in the past year, he’s had to dip into his own pockets for supplies, including clay and plaster that ran about $300.
When he’s not in with students, he’s lesson planning, working to create a curriculum that reflects New Haven. That includes units on artists like Faith Ringgold, Jeffrey Gibson, Charles McGee, Courtney Ahn, Jen Stark, Frida Kahlo and Junji Ito.
Lydia Douglas, who is in her second year in the district and her first at L.W. Beecher. Because she teaches everyone from Pre-K 3 to eighth grade, students have extremely different social, emotional and educational needs.Sometimes her job calls for crayons, and sometimes it calls for tissues, she said.
Nearby, filmmaker Lydia Douglas checked to see how long it might be until she gave testimony to the alders. As an art teacher at L. W. Beecher Museum Magnet School of Arts and Sciences, she works with kids from pre-kindergarten—as young as three and four—all the way up to eighth grade. In a given week, that’s a total of 480 kids, who all have very different educational needs and expectations.
Prior to her time in New Haven, Douglas taught in Waterbury and Maryland; she spent last year teaching art at Augusta Lewis Troup School. She’s been in a lot of classrooms; she knows what lean budget years can look like. But when she first heard about the potential cuts—particularly the sheer scale of them—she was shocked.
“It’s devastating,” she said. She recalled a student who is “hell on wheels” in class, but calms down when she’s in Douglas’ presence and making art. “I’m shocked and I’m angry and I’m in disbelief. When you make art, you’re using all the different parts of your brain. We [arts educators] support and supplement academics.”
As she tucked into her dinner from a spot in City Hall’s hallway, several students added their voices to the conversation, noting how lost they would feel if certain educators just disappeared from their classrooms. For most of the night, they remained completely silent at the back of the aldermanic chamber, lifting signs that read “Save Our Teachers,” “Every Student Deserves Fully Funded Schools” and “Fund NHPS.”
HSC students Diana Robles and Japhet Gonzalez.
Diana Robles, a junior at HSC, suggested that the cuts wouldn’t just be upsetting—they would be disruptive, too. In 2023, her science teacher left halfway through her freshman year, and students fell way behind. HSC is a small school: a single teacher represents three or four classes that students take. The impact would be palpable.
“Our school is nothing without teachers,” added junior Japhet Gonzalez, recalling how safe and seen he feels around the school’s Japanese teacher, Rebecca Sipper. The thing is, Gonzalez said, he doesn't even take Japanese. He just knows that her classroom is a safe place if he needs it.
Down the hall, student Board of Education member John Carlos Serana Musser chimed in, calling Negrón’s announcement part of an attack on education that is happening on the city, state and federal levels at the same time. “It would be a different conversation if we were a poor state with not a lot of money,” he said. But that’s not the situation Connecticut finds itself in.
For Musser, the cuts feel personal: it was a literacy coach that helped him stay caught up in reading when, as a result of partial deafness, he had childhood reading delays. Years later, he loves Cross’s school librarian, Mary M. McMullen, for her constant kindness and seeming ability to help students with any requests.
In addition to teaching Musser best practices for research—a skill that helped him get into Williams College this year—she helped him find and write poetry earlier this year, when he was crafting a Valentine’s Day message for a special someone.
Lynch prepares to testify.
“We, New Haven Public Schools students, deserve more, not less,” he said later in the evening, while testifying alongside HSC junior and Board of Ed member Jonaily Colón. “We need librarians who enrich our learning in school. We need smaller classroom sizes. We need more holistic education with arts and music. We need the basic additional resources, so that students who are struggling won’t fall through the cracks.”
Back inside the aldermanic chamber, teachers echoed that message over and over again. Eric Teichman, who was recently named the Connecticut PTA Outstanding High School Educator of the Year and has rebuilt the band at Wilbur Cross High School (read more about that here and here), stressed that “the arts are not expendable,” pointing to the life-saving and life-giving work arts educators do each day.
Drawing on testimonials from one of his own students, he noted the connection between arts learning and social and emotional development, skill and confidence building, time management, and a sense of academic consistency at the school.
The arts are also part of what gives New Haven its cultural richness, he and others noted: it’s the school bands, drum lines, and ensemble groups that are called on to perform at public events like pep rallies, Fair Haven Day and the St. Patrick’s Day and Elm City Freddy Fixer Parades. Without arts educators, those groups would likely cease to exist.
Wilbur Cross arts educators in force: Eric Teichman and Melody Gallagher, testifying for the second time this week.
“When we dismantle arts programs and student supports, we erase futures and silence potential,” chimed in Marissa Iezzi, who teaches over 100 students as the band director at Mauro-Sheridan Interdistrict Magnet School.
Melody Gallagher, a visual arts teacher at Cross and 18-year NHPS veteran, advocated for more inventive solutions to cutting costs, recalling how unexpected flooding recently destroyed her arts classroom. It didn't feel new: when Gallagher started teaching, her classroom's ceiling leaked in seven places.
This time, the water damage wiped out $1,200 of supplies, including the work of 50 students. Wednesday night, she pointed to how exhausting it is to have to justify the need for equitable arts education in the district because her students—and her city—is both more diverse and less rich. Or as she said, “my tired is tired.”
“Districts like ours, that predominantly serve Black and Brown families, have always been under-resourced, underserved, and underfunded, and it needs to end,” she said. “Ultimately, we’re neighbors, citizens, and a good amount of what makes up ‘the people’ of Connecticut. We can put an end to this now.”
Many kept the focus not on just what they stand to lose—Teichman has two mortgages and a four-month-old baby; Gallagher has rent that has increased much faster than her salary—but on their students, some of whom see them as mentors, bonus parents, and safe havens.
Without arts and libraries, teachers said, they worry about the students who already struggle to come to school, don’t know how to grow their critical thinking skills, or have found a sense of safety, belonging and achievement in their classes.
That’s already true for Gillian Greco Lynch, the general music teacher at Nathan Hale School who is in her 13th year in the district. As she recalled both Wednesday and at a heated Board of Education meeting earlier this week, she has at least one student who is chronically absent—except on the days of her music classes. On those days, the student shows up. When teachers met to address the issues, they realized that her arts classes must be part of the plan to keep her in school.
If the cuts go through, Lynch said, they will further burden her colleagues, who will shoulder the weight—and try to bridge the gap—left by arts instructors and library media specialists.
Marissa Iezzi, who teaches over 100 students as the band director at Mauro-Sheridan Interdistrict Magnet School.
Metro educator Julia Miller, who is both NHPS and Connecticut Teacher of the Year, lambasted the proposed cuts, drawing attention to both the state’s outdated ECS formula and need to adjust its “fiscal guardrails,” which the Connecticut General Assembly first put into place during a tight budget year in 2017. Then, she turned her attention to the city, asking that the district keep cuts “as far from children as possible.”
“We should not be stealing arts and athletics and libraries from our children,” she said. “These are not extras, but are in fact integral to students’ development and engagement.”
She conjured Metro’s library, a place that has become “truly the beating heart of our school,” thanks in no small part to library media specialist Charline Cupole. In her time there, Cupole has built out everything from reading guides to a maker space, teaching students how to do research, running a school-wide book club, and spearheading professional learning and development opportunities for staff.
Last year, seniors taking Miller’s class in restorative justice asked their peers “where in the building they felt the greatest sense of healing, support and safety.” Many answered that it was the library.
“How can we say we care about literacy, and then eliminate all of our librarians?” she asked. “How can we develop happy, well-rounded and engaged students while decimating our arts programs? How can we inspire the next generation of teachers when we are creating impossible situations in which to teach.”
Towards the end of hours-long public testimony, NHPS Lead Librarian Kim Rogers reiterated that need, noting the sheer scale of loss to the district that 25 library and media specialists would represent. In under three minutes, she combed through NHPS’ budget allocations, from Negrón’s decision not to fill vacancies (“that’s teachers!” Rogers said) to the funding she has already removed from custodial staff, tutors, and after-school programs, clubs and activities.
“I’m asking you to continue to ask the hard questions of the Board of Ed,” she said. “What are you doing well with the money, and where do you need help to do better with the money you’re being given?”