Torrington plan criticized
Kloczko: 'Looping' to mean fewer dropouts
It drew both good and bad reviews from education experts.
Superintendent Cheryl F. Kloczko wants to treat the middle school and high school as one entity that happens to be in two separate buildings. Her goal is to create continuity for students and the administrators who guide them through these critical years and therefore, she hopes, address issues including the district's historically high dropout rate.
Kloczko has created a director of secondary education position, a non-union administrative post intended to oversee both schools. The position replaces the assistant superintendent. Ten people will answer to the person in the newly-created post: seven assistant principals, a director of guidance and those in two positions that are also new this year.
They will be curriculum instruction assessment and technology, or CIAT, positions. One will be for science and math and the other will be for English and social studies.
A third CIAT will be for elementary education.
The CIATs are renamed positions that were added into the budget because of state mandates. Their roles — initially called Response to Intervention, or RTIs — have also been expanded to help the district implement the common core standards.
FREDERICKS HAMPTON, an associate professor at Cleveland State University in Ohio, devotes his research to the practice of teachers following students through multiple grades, or "looping."
"(Looping) provides more time for relationships to develop and administrators to understand how teachers and students can work together," Hampton said.
Hampton said his research has found students in the middle and upper class families have a wider base of support and that the traditional and looping models both work for those students. It's the high risk students, students whose native language is not English and students in poverty, for whom looping will be more beneficial.
"Students, particularly from the lower end of poverty spectrum, have more disruptions in their lives. They move more frequently and tend to come from non-traditional families. (Looping) provides more stability and structure with consistent administration."
TORRINGTON HAS FACED a high drop out rate and students living in poverty for years.
Almost 35 percent of the school's 1,100 students receive free or reduced lunches and its dropout rate is in the teens, according to state education data.
Torrington High School sees its largest number of students dropping out in freshmen year, said Board of Education Chairman Kenneth P. Traub.
The new education plan was developed over months. Kloczko worked with the superintendents' network, part of The William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund in Hamden, that involved a group of educators from the University of Connecticut and Harvard University and superintendents who meet regularly to discuss educational leadership.
Kloczko said she also consulted with the school board's leadership periodically with questions like "How about this?" or "What if we do this?" Kloczko said the changes weren't discussed in meetings with the board leadership.
THE CHANGES aren't going over well with everyone. Paul Stringer, vice president of the Connecticut Federation of School Administrators and a retired principal at Weaver High School in Hartford, wrote a letter to Kloczko lambasting the plan.
"It doesn't make any sense," Stringer said in an interview. "There are so many matters of concern of what a principal needs to do: You need a figure in charge of that building and everything in it — students, parents, staff, custodians. To think you can take a position and give it to someone else, who many not have ever sat as a principal or probably not be schooled as a principal, and think everything is hunky dory."
Kloczko said the new director position will require the person hold a school administrator certification.
HAVING TWO SCHOOLS OVERSEEN by one principal is not uncommon, especially in Litchfield County where population and enrollment are dwindling in some towns.
Both New Hartford and Winsted have one principal overseeing two schools, but those schools are elementary schools. Stringer said having one administrator oversee two schools is rare and he always recommends against it.
Stringer said he's spoken to the accrediting agency, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, and said he's raised his concerns with them.
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