Superintendent Reynolds shares his vision and plans with New RoAR News

New Rochelle’s public schools have long been recognized for their overall excellence, but it is no secret that, like most public school districts, New Rochelle’s schools do not serve everyone equally, with significant disparities in opportunities and outcomes between various groups of students. 

New Rochelle proudly markets itself as a diverse city, but it is also a profoundly unequal city, with many of its residents challenged by poverty, racial discrimination, immigration issues, and disabilities.

All of these challenges affect educational opportunities and outcomes.  Students whose families are working multiple jobs to make ends meet, who may go to school hungry, whose parents can’t help them with their homework, who don’t speak English at home, or who have physical or emotional disabilities, can’t be expected to achieve at the same levels as students who face none of these challenges and whose parents can afford to pay for tutors and extracurricular enrichment.

In New Rochelle’s public schools, 58% of students are economically disadvantaged, 17% are disabled, and 13% are English language learners.  Not surprisingly, students in these groups don’t achieve at the levels achieved by other students or by the student body as a whole.  Because Black and Latinx students are disproportionately disadvantaged, they are less likely to meet educational proficiency standards than their white classmates at all grade levels.  Black students in particular are more likely to be disciplined and less likely to enroll in Advanced Placement classes and graduate on time. 

Some have seized on these educational disparities as evidence that the public school system can’t meet the needs of all its students.  The recent application of Capital Preparatory Academy to open a charter school in New Rochelle was based on the claim that the public schools are failing their disadvantaged students, though there is little evidence that charter schools in general, or Capital Prep in particular, are any more successful in educating disadvantaged students than public schools.

Private schools and charter schools can expel students who fail to achieve and send them back to the public schools, making their own outcomes look better.  Public schools, on the other hand, have the responsibility to educate everyone, from the most privileged to the most disadvantaged.  Meeting the needs of a large, diverse student body is one of the greatest challenges our public schools face. 

In an environment of pervasive inequality and racism, the schools alone can’t be held responsible for solving all the challenges faced by all their students.  Still, parents and the community have a right to expect that the public schools will do everything possible to enable every student to meet his or her fullest potential. 

To better understand how New Rochelle’s public schools are addressing the challenges faced by disadvantaged students, New RoAR News spoke with school superintendent Dr. Corey Reynolds.  New RoAR News sought to understand how the district views the differences in performance between racial, ethnic, and economic groups in the schools; how the district is trying to reduce or eliminate these disparities; and how the district is monitoring its own progress to see if its programs are working.

The interview with Dr. Reynolds will be presented in three parts. Today, Part I focuses on elementary education. Part II, on opportunities and achievement in the later years, can be found here. Part III, on cultural diversity and cultural competency, will be posted in a few days.

PART I: LITERACY AND TESTING IN THE EARLY GRADES

New RoAR News:  What is your highest priority area to address the needs of students in the New Rochelle public schools?

Dr. Reynolds:  My highest  priority is early literacy. We understand that the metric used to predict how many jail cells are necessary is based on the reading scores of 3rd grade Black males. This is one of the reasons why President Obama created the My Brother’s Keeper Initiative [MBK].  We are putting forth efforts to increase the reading rates of our Black males.  The stronger children’s reading is by grade 3, the more successful they will be on the back end. 

One of the things that we’ve instituted along those lines is our library card initiative for kindergarteners. Our MBK program coordinator, Nate Adams, has put together a very robust program that enables all of our students in kindergarten to visit the New Rochelle Public Library and receive a library card, which starts that desire to build reading at an early level.

We are also focusing on phonics and phonological awareness in our early grades, pre-K through 2, understanding that there is a difference in reading depending on grade level. In grades pre-K through third grade, students are learning to read. In grades 4, 5 and 6, students are reading to learn. So in order for them to capture that skill, we need to ensure that they have the basics, which are phonics and phonological awareness.

In the years that we were supposed to move away from phonics and go just to whole language, good teachers didn’t–we kept those phonics practices. So when the state said, “Oh my goodness, you have to go back to phonics,” we already had those in place for the most part. It’s what’s called a balanced literacy workshop, or a balanced program.  Most of us subscribe to a balanced program, so it wasn’t a huge shift for us. It was something that we were already doing, and we’re very proud of that.

Within the last two years, we have instituted a program where all of our kindergarten through grade 3 teachers have an opportunity to go for Orton-Gillingham training.  Orton-Gillingham is one of the most recognized, celebrated, and data-proven practices for students with reading disabilities, particularly in special education areas.

We realize that if those skills are so valuable to students after we recognize their need, why not offer that training to our teachers who are teaching in the early elementary space so that they’re applying those skills to all of our students?  I think we’re one of the first districts, at least in this area, where teachers can choose to go for their level 1 training, or continue on to become certified OG- trained teachers, and we pay for the training.  We now have a cadre of teachers who are certified trainers.  We’re bringing those practices into the district so that every teacher that comes in eventually will be trained in OG.

The main premise for that is to increase our literacy skills by grade 3.

We’re also using a program called MTSS, which stands for Multi-Tiered Systems of Support. It’s ensuring that our Tier 1 programming, which is our core programming for the general education students, is strongly held for those students.  Once we start to see a decrease in performance, even slightly, we start to put in some additional skill sets that might be necessary for that student or that group of students. That’s called Tier 2 intervention.  It’s not special education–it’s for every general education student so that they fall back into the Tier 1 grouping.  We look at student data every six weeks, and when we see that a student might not be performing the way that they were six weeks ago, that’s when we start those interventions right away to try to get them back on track.

We are very proud of the implementation of our dyslexia screening assessment in grades K-3. That’s helping us to address the needs of students in relation to building their literacy skills, because oftentimes what happens is students might present with dyslexia and it might go unrecognized for quite some time.  And it’s proving to be successful for us in recognizing students.  Of course, we’re using our data to inform our instructional decisions through our MTSS.

And we’re expanding our pre-K operations for our students. We’re offering full day pre-K at our partner schools, and we’re looking one day, if the budget can afford it, to have full-day pre-K here for all of our students.    

NRN:  What does the District understand about racial disparities in the New Rochelle public schools, and what is the basis of this understanding? What are the most recent quantitative data that indicate racial disparities in the NR public schools?

CR:  Let me start off by saying something that might be a little controversial.  One way to address the disparate information that we’ve seen relating to student performance, particularly Black males in this district, is to get more reliable data.

Historically, when we look at the students who take our state tests, we find that there’s a large number of [parents of] Black males who opt out of state testing. So a lot of the data that we have is showing the result of a smaller group of Black male students who are taking the tests.

I’m going to get a little bit more controversial.  When you think about the subset of parents who might be savvy enough to withhold their children from a test, you’re looking at the higher economic echelon of our Black families. So if you put the two together, you can infer that some of our better performing students are not being counted in our data. That’s been taking place for at least a dozen years or so.  A part of the pushback was almost a political statement that you’re not going to pigeonhole my child, or we’re not going to subscribe to your non-culturally responsive testing.  A lot of that is residual, so a lot of the data we’re looking at represents a subset of our Black male students, because we don’t have enough Black male students taking the test.

To prove to the state that our students are performing at an appropriate rate, we’ve elected to use “Star” data.  And we’ve noticed that our student participation rate in Star has almost flatlined as relates to our Black males and is at a much lower percentage.

Looking at our state tests [for math grades 3-8], about 3218 students [took the test].  Of those students, there were 606 Black or African American, and that equates to about 45% [of our Black or African-American students].  But when you compare them to their counterparts, for the district we had a 57% participation rate.  Asian American students had about 73% participation last year. Our white students have flatlined at 77% participation.  Our Hispanic or Latino students have increased by about two percentage points from 47% to 49%.

What I try to impress upon parents is that opting out of a test is robbing your child of an opportunity to learn a skill. Whether you count what the test says or not, it’s a test-taking skill that is going to be missed in a pressure situation. What we find is, those students who opt out of these testing opportunities at an early level are often unprepared to take the tests that they must take, like SATs. So we try to dispel that notion of, you know, sticking it to the government, for lack of a better word, and allowing an opportunity to get another skill. So you’re learning how to sit for a test, you’re learning how to manage your time, you’re learning how to read questions that you may not be used to hearing in a classroom setting. We are trying everything in our power to bring those students back into the testing environment.

NRN:  Given this low participation rate, what do the data show?

CR:  Looking at our Star reading results for K-5 students performing at or above benchmark, about 39% of our black students participated at or above benchmark, compared to our Latinos or Hispanic students, who were at about 31% proficiency, our white students were at about 63% proficiency, our Asian students at about 60%, and our American Indian or Alaskan Natives at about 25% proficiency.  District-wide, we had a 42% proficiency rate, when you average everyone. So our Black students are still performing at a lower level than some of their counterparts, and similarly for our Latino students. So what we’re trying to do  is encourage participation, but also to ensure that our core programming is delivering to our students the instruction necessary for them to perform well on these tests.

Taking a look at our Star math, we have about 45% of our students who are Black or African-American at or above the proficiency level, 47% of our Latino students are proficient, 75% white, but overall district wide 54%. We’re looking to see that the skills that our students need to be shored up in are recognized early. That’s what the Star data actually allows us to do. We get to analyze those tests, look to see those skill sets that the students need, and adjust our instruction accordingly.

Unfortunately, the tests are skewed to certain cultural backgrounds. Not necessarily based on race. It’s based on experience. I’ve always used the example of the word “stoop.” Now that’s a very cultural word.  Most people are used to “porch,” depending on where you come from, as opposed to “stoop.”   In New Rochelle, you have a very urban setting. Many students don’t know what living 1/2 mile away looks like in a suburban setting.  The wording that might be used on tests can be very culturally biased, which leads to frustration for many of our students.  

[Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that the position of MBK Coordinator was eliminated in the 2025-25 budget. The position was moved to another line, not eliminated.]

Part II of this interview, “Opportunities and Achievement in the Later Years,” will be posted next week.