Evelyn Ronan, Contributing Photographer

Nearly 300 teachers, students and locals supporting the city’s teachers’ union gathered at a Beaver Hills school Monday afternoon to spell out their demands for the union’s ongoing contract negotiations with the school district. 

Activists and union members made calls for increased pay, smaller class sizes and enhanced healthcare benefits for teachers just before the Board of Education met for their biweekly meeting at King/Robinson Interdistrict Magnet School. The New Haven Federation of Teachers’ current contract, which was approved ahead of the 2023-2024 school year, will expire in June of next year. 

“We want schools that are fully staffed, teachers who stay in New Haven — who live in New Haven because our pay finally catches up to the surrounding towns and our health benefits are no longer managed by greedy insurance companies in Hartford,” NHFT president Leslie Blatteau ’97 GRD ’07 said to rally attendees. “We know this is possible, and that’s why we’re here to fight for it.”

Union leaders have called on the district to boost its budget transparency and prioritize higher pay as it approaches a new round of negotiations. The school district has been at work since the spring mitigating what began as a $23.2 million deficit. In April, New Haven Public Schools Superintendent Madeline Negrón unveiled a plan to cut over 70 vacant staff positions, close one school and merge two others. 

The city’s 2025-26 fiscal year budget included a $5 million allotment to the school district. Last month, the Board of Alders authorized a transfer of $3 million in surplus state funding for “educational purposes,” which the district can access at the end of this fiscal year.  

Justin Harmon, a spokesperson for NHPS, declined to comment about the rally and teachers’ demands, citing the school district’s policy against speaking to the press about ongoing contract negotiations.

Around 5:20 p.m. on Monday, Mayor Justin Elicker arrived to attend the Board of Education meeting and paused outside King/Robinson to watch the rally. He said in an interview that the city lacks the support it needs from the state to fulfill the teachers’ demands.

“We all can agree that teachers should have high quality health care that doesn’t cost them a lot,” Elicker said. “How do we pay for it? We struggle so hard with that because the city has dramatically increased our funding towards New Haven Public Schools, and the state’s funding has remained relatively flat.” 

Taite Lipchak, a representative from the New Haven Immigrants Coalition, cited an immigrant protection  that NHFT members are pushing to be included in the contract. The stipulation would prevent Immigration and Customs Enforcement from entering New Haven public schools without a judicial warrant, an existing informal measure in the schools, he said.

“Our biggest goal is to push the board to fully codify this policy through NHFT,” Lipchak said. “We need to prevent ICE in our schools, and we need to prepare our teachers to use protective measures against ICE.” 

A group of students from High School in the Community in the city’s Wooster Square neighborhood attended the rally. Justin Welch, a 12th grade student, said in an interview that some teachers at the school are considering leaving NHPS to work in other districts where staff are paid more. 

“We really recognize that what affects the teachers affects students,” Diana Robles, another 12th grade student at the school, said. “We just want to show that we really care. We appreciate the work that they do every day, choosing to go to school every day and going through these difficult situations, like trying to negotiate a contract and kind of getting pushed back all the time, but still showing up.”

Steve Staysniak, a social studies and English teacher at Metropolitan Business Academy, spoke about the debilitating effects of the teacher shortage on schools. 

“We had a teaching position at Metro we couldn’t fill for two years,” he said. “We just had kids sitting in a classroom with no one to teach them.”

Staysniak said that New Haven teacher pay must be up to snuff with surrounding districts to retain talented teaching staff. 

Vandy Esposito, a library media specialist at Nathan Hale School and a member of NHFT’s bargaining team, said that when it was time to produce a new health insurance plan that wouldn’t cut into teacher raises, the board came “totally unprepared.” 

“It was the same economically unsound plan we had last year, but now with higher teacher contribution requirements,” she said. 

At the rally, Blatteau praised the CT Partnership Plan, a healthcare program for public school teachers in many of New Haven’s neighboring school districts. Though the NHFT bargaining team has advocated for New Haven teachers to participate in the same program, Blatteau said, the school district has not complied with their requests.

“Many of us are struggling to make ends meet, having to work multiple jobs, to do more with less each day to live a dignified life,” Hyclis Williams, the president of New Haven’s paraprofessionals’ union, told the crowd at the rally. “We want to send a clear message: Respect us and our students, our school and our community. We love what we do, but love alone does not pay the bills.”

The NHFT’s current contract with the Board of Education will expire on June 30, 2026.