MICHIGAN: Hit the ground running: Dr. Nikolai Vitti on being DPSCD Superintendent

MICHIGAN: Hit the ground running: Dr. Nikolai Vitti on being DPSCD Superintendent

by | Aug 12, 2017 | Featured, Featured, K12 Education, Michigan, NNPA

By Ken Coleman, Special to the Michigan Chronicle

Nikolai Vitti’s voice trembles a bit when he talks about his maternal grandfather, Richard J. Past.

The man toiled tirelessly at Ford Motor Company’s Rouge Plant and passed away three years ago at age 84.

“After he retired,” Vitti recalls. “He had a lot of time with me. He was instrumental in taking me to my sports practices. I wouldn’t be the person that I am without him.”

Vitti, superintendent of the Duval County Public Schools in Jacksonville, Florida, was appointed to lead Michigan’s largest school district in April. He began work as a consultant earlier this month and takes the reigns officially on July 1. His starting salary is $295,000; his contract is five years.

Dr. Nikolai Vitti and family

Dr. Nikolai Vitti and family

The Dearborn Heights native comes to a school district that had 300,000 enrolled students in 1967 but now has fewer than 50,000 children.  What’s more, Detroit Public Schools Community District has struggled with financial challenges and has been under state control for 15 of the 18 years.

But Vitti maintains that he’s up the job.  At 40, he is among the youngest Detroit district superintendents ever. Only Arthur Jefferson, the district’s first black schools chief, was younger.  Jefferson was 37 when he was appointed to the post in 1975.

GROWING UP IN DEARBORN HEIGHTS

Vitti grew up during the 1980’s and early ‘90s. His father left the home when he was young so high school athletics, basketball and football at Dearborn Divine Child, provided roles models as coaches. Sports gave him the opportunity to fire up jump shots in Calihan Hall and go after the pigskin in the 80,000-seat Pontiac Silverdome. Equally important, he learned discipline as a team captain and it helped to prepare him for college and a public schools administration career.

“I think that I’m a strong leader because of those experiences,” he declares.

Although he struggled with dyslexia, Vitti studied at Wake Forest University in North Carolina and later earned the prestigious Presidential Scholarship graduate degrees in education at Harvard University.

Metro Detroit is one of the nation’s most racially segregated areas in the nation and Dearborn Heights, a white and tony working-class and middle class town, is 90 percent white. Racial segregation and hostile policies toward black and browns come to mind when one thinks about western Wayne County communities like his hometown.  However, Vitti, a son of immigrants who grew up a stone’s throw from ethnically diverse Inkster, points out that his experiences in his uncle’s pizzeria and in sports was enlightening.

“My view of the world was very different than the average Anglo-Saxon American growing in metro Detroit,” he points out.  “I was exposed to (ethic and racial) diversity at a young age.”

Moreover, Vitti is candid and philosophical when discussing race. He doesn’t mind questions about his marriage to Rachel, who happens to be black and hails from the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area.

“We should be proud of our identity,” Vitti states. “Far too often, whites try to erase race, which is linked to an identity. Idealistically, I look forward to a world where we recognize each other based on race because that’s linked to a history and a culture, experiences and values.”

The Vittis have been married for 16 years and have four children.

“I’M ABOUT THE WORK”

After college, Vitti worked in New York City, North Carolina, Miami and Jacksonville but not in metro Detroit. So what’s on his list of immediate to dos?

“When you talk about entry,” he says. “It’s about engaging internal and external stakeholders.”

Further, Vitti wants to “have an authentic dialogue” with area elected officials, which includes school board members, city, county and Detroit legislative leaders; as well as the foundation and clergy communities and school union leadership.

“At the heart and core of this is engaging teachers,” he states. “If you ask me, ‘Who do you really want to get to?’ it is teachers, principals, district staff, parents and students.”

What’s intriguing about Vitti’s approach to K-12 education?

“I’m adamant about focusing on what I call The Whole Child,” he states. “At the core, schools should be about reading, math, science, writing and social studies but we just can’t do academic work in our schools. It has to be broader than that.”

Vitti suggests a greater need for arts, music, foreign language and athletics. Several years ago, for example, he freed up about $20 million so that all Duval County elementary schools had music and art teachers.

In his public interview with the Detroit Board of Education several weeks ago, Vitti declared that wanted to put charters schools out of business. He believes that when traditional schools are doing their job well, there are better equipped than charter schools, which are also public schools.

“I believe that when traditional public schools and traditional education gets it right, they get it right better than any other form of education,” he says.

“I believe that when you look at traditional public schools, we have a better pool of teachers and principals,” he states further. “And we have a better bench than charters do. I also believe that, at its truest form, traditional public schools are closer to the community because there is a higher level of accountability. You have an elected local board.”

Vitti started work as a consultant this month and is prepared to enter contract talks with DPSCD unions, if necessary. “It’s part of the job,” he points out.  The Detroit Federation of Teachers executive board earlier this month rejected a tentative agreement with school district administrators.

He believes that through partnerships, internships and playing an active role in helping to move favorable public policy in Lansing  and Washington, D.C. small business play a greater role in urban public school education in general and DPSCD in particular.

“Without a strong traditional public school education system and I mean traditional public education system,” Vitti states. “we’re not going to develop students who are employable with the right skills for the future and the now.”

So what’s the best thing about coming home to metro Detroit?

Vitti states:

“The peace and opportunity that comes with serving the city I love and people who share many of my life experiences at one of the most important and defining moments in the city’s history.”

MICHIGAN: One school at a time, one neighborhood at a time

MICHIGAN: One school at a time, one neighborhood at a time

by | Aug 12, 2017 | Featured, Featured, K12 Education, Michigan, NNPA, resources

By Keith A. Owens, Senior Editor

If you live anywhere near the Durfee Elementary School building and Central High School on the city’s west side, then you already see it happening. Because you really can’t miss it. It’s kinda big.

Beginning on July 31, 12,000 volunteers descended upon Durfee and the surrounding neighborhood for a six-day whirlwind transformation/overhaul/cleanup designed to remove blight on 300 city blocks, board up 300 vacant houses, and perform essential home repairs for 50 homeowners in the area.

Just one example of what Life Remodeled has done for Detroit neighborhoods

Just one example of what Life Remodeled has done for Detroit neighborhoods

“We invite students from school, we invite community residents, churches, mosques, synagogues, businesses, people from every walk of life that you can imagine,” said Chris Lambert, CEO of Life Remodeled which is spearheading the project.

Lambert said he and his team typically spend at least a year working with the community figuring out what the community wants. Then they work together with that community to plan the blight removal project.

And that’s just for starters.

The initial whirlwind is really the kickoff of what will be at least a two-year effort spearheaded by Life Remodeled to transform the Durfee building into what will be known as a Community Innovation Center, and thereby transform an entire neighborhood in the process. And in case you’re wondering, this isn’t the first time Lambert has managed to pull this off. Life Remodeled, founded in 2011, is already developing a respectable track record of transforming neighborhood schools in troubled areas as a means of upgrading the entire neighborhood.

The organization’s first school-based project, costing roughly $5.5 million, was in 2014 at Cody High School. In 2015, Life Remodeled stepped it up a bit and took on Osborne High School. That project cost approximately $5.7 million. Both of these projects were a long way from the initial project in 2011, which involved pulling together 500 volunteers to build a home for a single mother and her four children in Westland. In six days.

“The process evolved from a vision that was big at the time but miniscule compared to what we’re doing right now. …It’s evolved from focusing on building a house that benefited one family at a time, to now benefiting a community asset that benefits the entire community,” said Lambert.

“This one is very different from what we’ve done in the past. In the past we’ve worked in existing schools that are still operating today. …This one’s very different because we’re working in a vacant school now. The former Durfee Elementary Middle School.”

In addition to other benefits, Lambert said that there has been a noticeable positive impact on crime in the neighborhoods surrounding their earlier school-based projects.

According to Lambert, the Detroit Police Department  measured crime stats on the blocks where they worked, both before and after the project, “And it actually dropped in 10 out of 11 categories, “including 47 percent reduction in homicides.”

From the website:

“The Community Innovation Center will operate in collaboration with Central High School and the Detroit Public Schools Community District to provide hands-on education to students. Entrepreneurs will guest lecture in classrooms and students will have the opportunity to learn subjects, like math and finance, with real examples from case studies of business ventures taking place within the center. Community members of all ages will have access to resources and space in order to learn about entrepreneurship and how to start or grow their own businesses. The center will also serve as valuable community and recreational space for families and their kids.”

“As 2017 marks the 50th year anniversary of the 1967 Detroit uprising, Life Remodeled and our partners will invest in the neighborhood surrounding Central High School, the city’s first public high school, in the community where Detroit’s civil unrest began. This year’s project will serve not only as a powerful commemoration of the progress that has been made, but also the progress we continue to strive toward.

We are proud to announce Life Remodeled’s first two-year commitment to Central High School and the surrounding neighborhood as we take on our largest project to date.”

So why did Lambert and crew decide on Durfee for this year’s project?

“We really chose Durfee the same way we chose every other neighborhood. There’s really two things that we look for; significant need, and radical hope. And when we say ‘significant need, what we’re looking for is neighborhoods that have high levels of crime and high levels of blight. And we’re looking for schools that have academic challenges that can be addressed with a construction/renovation project. When it comes to radical hope, we’re looking for a neighborhood that already has a foundation of sustainability in place or in process,” said Lambert.

What the community surrounding Central High does have “is a very rich history of resilience. And it is geographically located in close proximity to downtown and Midtown. And a tremendous amount of development is coming this way. And so what we want to do is help create more equity and inclusivity in the community so the community will have more power to shape the development that’s coming.”

Hopefully, if all goes according to plan, this is the kind of impact that will result in all future developments as well. Using schools as anchors to rescue communities.

“We haven’t decided what neighborhood we’re going to next, but what we’d like to do is to prove that this model of repurposing vacant schools can be of great benefit to the city and continue to do it in other Detroit neighborhoods.”

It’s an idea that definitely beats shutting them all down.