Leonard Felson

Leonard Felson is an award-winning freelance writer. Trained as a general assignment reporter, he hasn't been able to kick the habit. As a result, he specializes in compelling stories across a variety of fields. His stories have appeared in major newspapers and magazines across the country including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the airline magazines of US Airways and Continental, Family Fun, First for Women, and such regional publications as Northeast Magazine, Connecticut Magazine and Hartford Magazine.

2005 ARTICLES:

The Region’s 20 Best High Schools

Will She or Won’t She?

Keeping the Young From Getting Restless

The Region’s 20 Best High Schools
Hartford Magazine,
August 2005

Our region contains a diverse mix of educational opportunities. But as you might expect, some schools stand apart from the others. Here’s what it takes to be the best.

Like so many kids, Noah Preminger had taken up a musical instrument at his elementary school in Canton. By high school age, his parents, Robert and Lynn, and his teachers recognized he had a gift for playing the saxophone that would never be sufficiently cultivated at small Canton High School. And they knew about the nationally acclaimed jazz program at West Hartford’s Hall High School some 10 miles away.

They talked to educators and music teachers and held a few family meetings. Finally, they did what today Lynn Preminger says was one of those big-time family decisions that they’ll never regret: they rented their home and bought another house in West Hartford so Noah could attend Hall High and play in the concert jazz band. “It definitely opened up opportunities for me that I never would have had in Canton,” says Preminger, now a 19-year-old sophomore at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.

Most families, of course, send their teenage children to their local district school. Yet with competition to get into the best colleges increasing every year, with a flurry of new themed-magnet high schools opening to students throughout Greater Hartford and with plenty of financial-aid packages and diversity programs making private schools available to a wider cross-section of the region’s population, knowing the best high schools in and around Hartford arguably has never been more important.

Nationally, surveys trying to rate high schools have been fraught with controversy over methodology. Newsweek, for example published its list of “The 100 Best High Schools in America” in May, basing its rankings on scores derived from dividing the number of advance placement courses offered and/or International Baccalaureate tests taken by all students at a school in 2004 and dividing that total by the number of graduating seniors. The logic is that the more students taking such rigorous and academically challenging courses, the better the high school. Other publications have devised even more complicated formulas to produce “top” lists.

We could have produced our own cold, hard statistical look at best-performing schools in Greater Hartford, but instead, we went directly to the people—college admissions officers—who effectively decide which schools are among the best based on whom they admit to their institutions. To encourage them to talk openly, we agreed to one ground rule: We would not link their names to the high schools they selected for our Best 20 list.

Virtually every admissions officer interviewed qualified his or her comments by cautioning how subjective and fraught with peril such exercises can be. They say you can’t compare such comprehensive suburban high schools such as Simsbury or Glastonbury with Hartford’s inner city public schools or any of those with small private schools such as Avon Old Farms. Nevertheless, they talked. So did several principals whose schools were identified as among the best, as well as other educators familiar with the region’s high schools.

What emerges, besides our list of noted schools, is in effect a discussion of the ingredients that make schools great including some surprises about hidden gems you might never have suspected. One such surprise is that, although they did not make our list, Hartford’s three traditional public high schools, Bulkeley, Hartford Public and Weaver, are making great strides given the challenges they face daily, say admissions officials who visit the schools regularly. Also worth watching, they say, are two other regional magnet schools, the Metropolitan Learning Center in Bloomfield and the new University High School of Science and Engineering, which is scheduled to break ground this spring on a new building on the University of Hartford campus.

Even schools not noted, several admissions officers say, can produce outstanding students. “Have they taken advantage of the best that school has to offer in terms of course work and rigor?” asks Richard Shaw, Yale University’s dean of admissions and financial aid. “What have they done both in the classroom and outside the classroom?” asks Shaw, whose university, one of the most selective in the nation, admitted only 9.7 percent of its 19,500 applicants for the fall semester that begins later this month.

Adds Lia Brassord, assistant director of admissions at Smith College in Northampton, Mass.: “So much comes down to the individual teacher in the classroom who gives students the sense that the sky’s the limit for them, that they can do anything they want to do.”

So what makes great schools?
Like Brassord, Nancy Hargrave Meislahn, dean of admissions and financial aid at Wesleyan University in Middletown, says she’s more interested in looking at high schools that have good teachers and interesting and exciting curriculum. “What do they do to reward their best teachers in terms of professional development?” asks Meislahn. “Are AP courses open to everyone? Do the schools have unusual programs? Do they have a variety of curriculum options? Are there other student services available for learning disabilities or learning differences?” And do schools affiliated with the growing number of part-day magnet schools, such as the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts, take advantage of those opportunities?

More concretely, says Larry Dow, dean of admissions and financial aid at Trinity College in Hartford, top high schools pay attention to the fundamentals: writing and requiring major term papers in students’ junior and senior years, exercises that stretch students and push them to think more deeply about questions.

The best high schools, however, also possess what Dow calls “the wisdom to achieve a healthy balance” between offering academically challenging courses and avoiding a culture that produces high anxiety among students to present the best credentials possible to get into select colleges. “In general,” Dow says, “ the best schools are always challenged not to become obsessive with the presentation of credentials, which has unintended, but negative consequences.”

Adds Rick Zeizer, dean of admissions at the University of Hartford: “There’s been too much emphasis and attention on the students who are being prepared for admission to the most selective colleges and universities in the country, which ignores a large number of students who are going to go off to colleges and do great things at places that aren’t the elite universities.”

Ultimately, says Ann Fleming Brown, senior associate dean of admissions at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., top high schools offer students the same “value-added” experience that a quality college education offers. “Any college can attract top students, but what has college offered and added to the experience? And most of the top schools do that very successfully. How are those particular communities engaging students?” asks Brown.

Yet addressing such goals, admissions officials and high school principals agree, often takes money, a factor, our survey found, that explains why so many standout high schools are in affluent suburbs or privately financed. “So much is driven by the wealth of people in town who put a premium on education because they themselves benefited from education and they want the best for their kids,” says Jacqueline Murphy, director of admissions at Saint Michael’s College, a Catholic institution outside Burlington, Vt.

Still, how do you measure a school’s success beyond college admittance rates and number of AP courses taken?

Douglas Lyons, executive director of the Connecticut Association of Independent Schools, a consortium of 91 private schools in the state, says that question can be answered “less on what students know upon graduation and more on what they still want to know. Pre-collegiate education is not just about giving kids facts, figures and skills. It’s about developing a disposition to enjoy reading, a child who’s disposed to reading as opposed to playing video games. A child who goes through school feeling it’s a drag is more likely to be disposed to the entertainment world; whereas, the best schools graduate kids who are disposed to independent learning for the rest of their lives.”

Visit some of those best schools in and around Hartford and you hear administrators echoing many of those same thoughts.

Says John W. Bracker, head of Watkinson School in Hartford: “We’re going to stretch kids in ways they’ve never been stretched.” That happens, he says, in part because the school has only 180 high school students, which means, there’s “no back row, no hiding here.” Students get lots of homework, so they are pushed to think, speak and stand up for their ideas, says Bracker. Smaller schools, he says, also allow teenagers opportunities they might miss in bigger public high schools: a role in a play or a spot on a team on which they might otherwise not make the cut.

Other high schools on the list include several that admissions officials describe as “the usual suspects,” comprehensive suburban public high schools supported by a strong property-tax bases. Among those schools, admissions officials took note of initiatives at Simsbury and Avon high schools to address what’s known in education parlance as “grade inflation,” where earning “A’s,” for example, comes easy.

Top suburban high schools also benefit from demographics.

“We receive a good product,” acknowledges Donald Slater, principal of Hall High School in West Hartford, the school that attracted Noah Preminger and his parents from Canton. In part, that’s because of involved parents whom Slater says are demanding and hold high expectations of their kids. But he adds, “We have high expectations of everyone including staff, administration, teachers and students to work to the best of their ability.” That culture, says Slater, fosters continual development to the point that when his Connecticut National Guard unit was called to active duty in Iraq for 15 months, he expected the school to be in a better place upon his return than when he left. “We’ve built a culture that grooms people, whether it’s staff or students,” says Slater.

Other suburban schools such as Bloomfield and East Hartford made the list for overcoming challenges in the school systems’ changing demographics. Bloomfield High, for example, experienced white flight beginning in the 1970s. When Principal Donald Harris was hired five years ago, he was the eighth principal in 12 years, such was the degree of instability within the school. “We’ve tried to put a level of discipline and consistency back into the structure,” says Harris. “Getting good grades needed to be reinforced. The message to staff was, ‘We’re going to support teachers.’ We updated curriculum and textbooks. And the school is coming back. Among kids, there’s a renewed sense of pride.”

East Hartford High, which also saw significant demographic changes, now has students from some 49 different countries. Recently, it’s begun to design the school more like an academy with teams of teachers assigned to groups of students for better accountability. A separate magnet school on the campus, called the Connecticut International Baccalaureate Academy, has garnered rave reviews.

Arguably, Hartford’s high schools continue to face the greatest challenges, although Rick Dalton, president of the Vermont-based Foundation for Excellent Schools, which works in low-income communities including Hartford, says the high schools are making steady progress. As evidence, look to Paul Stringer, principal of Weaver High School, who was recognized as Connecticut’s Principal of the Year in the last academic year.

Says Gregory Pyke, senior associate dean of admissions at Wesleyan: “The kids at those three big public high schools have every bit as much desire and drive as kids at any of the other suburban high schools. You meet some great kids there who will make absolutely every effort to make the very most of any opportunity, and that’s very attractive to colleges.”

Beyond the three big public schools, the city’s magnet schools, which draw students from throughout the region, are turning into models of how city and suburban kids can learn together.

For example, Hartford’s Sport and Medical Science Academy offers a rigorous academic curriculum with lots of opportunities to learn outside the classroom at places like UConn Health Center and area hospitals. What makes the school special, says School-to-Career Coordinator Jose Colon, is its “family-oriented environment” that’s safe and conducive to growing and learning. “Everyone knows everyone,” he says. Based at the corner of Ann and Asylum streets, a new state-of-the-art school is planned in Coltsville by 2007-08.

Regardless of a school’s ranking, however, Dalton, the foundation executive working in underprivileged schools, cautions educators and parents to keep another sobering statistic in mind. “Most education doesn’t take place in school. They spend about 10 percent of their time in school. You need to attribute a lot of education to family dynamics. Does a lot of conversation about religion, literature and world events take place at the dining room table? It’s as powerful as any seminar that exists.”

BACK TO TOP

Will She or Won’t She?
Hartford Magazine
June 2005

That’s what everyone wants to know: Will Gov. M. Jodi Rell ride sky-high popularity ratings to an elected term of her own? The busy leading lady weighs in on the big question and other burning issues.

When Governor M. Jodi Rell cuts the ceremonial ribbon at the Connecticut Convention Center in downtown Hartford on June 2, she’ll do more than officially open the linchpin of what state and city leaders hope will mark the capital city’s renaissance.

Symbolically, Rell will also underscore more than eight years of state involvement and an investment of almost $1 billion in state funds to jump-start the city’s revitalization. Without it, neither the $230 million center along the Connecticut Riverfront, the largest between New York and Boston, or numerous other new developments downtown, would have gotten off the ground.

The center’s opening will beg a key question for Hartford’s future: what can Rell do to keep the state’s momentum in the city’s economic turnaround going. And that question begs another burning question: After nearly a year in office and unprecedented popularity, will Jodi Rell, who turns 59 later this month, run for a full term as governor in November 2006.

To say Rell is one busy lady these days is to state the obvious. Although inundated with meetings and budget negotiations at the height of the state legislative session, Rell and her staff have agreed to squeeze an interview into her non-stop early-morning to late-night schedule to discuss those two questions. Her appointment secretary promises, “She’ll call you.”

Politicians are famous for running behind schedule or having aides scurry about, but at the appointed time, Rell herself calls. No advance team, no formal “Please hold for the governor” announcement. And Rell proceeded to answer questions directly, sounding relaxed, laughing occasionally, pausing in mid-sentence to search for the right word.

You’d hardly guess the governor is on the other end of the receiver, in part because she avoids that longwinded rhetorical style of some of her political colleagues. She talks briefly about her economic development policy and her political future, about her grown kids and her husband and her recent bout with cancer. After a while, it feels like you are talking to a friend whose job just happens to be running the state of Connecticut.

One reason Rell must limit her time for press interviews, according to her staff, is that her schedule leaves her little free time. She gives morning radio drive-time hosts a few minutes occasionally. She's booked regularly with breakfast meetings, daily public events, meetings with staff and commissioners, dinners and other ceremonial events.

Known for being hands-on, and studying issues with the fervor of a law school student, although she never finished college, Rell “excels at homework,” her chief of staff, M. Lisa Moody, says. She pushes in private meetings for passage of campaign finance and ethics reform bills. She clarifies her position on same-sex civil unions, insisting that the bill disallow gay marriages, before signing into law a measure that makes Connecticut the first state to approve such unions without pressure from the courts. She announces an agreement to save 1,310 jobs in Hartford after MetLife acquires Travelers Life & Annuity, an acquisition that threatened to cut almost as many jobs. (In the end, MetLife agreed to cut 490 jobs.)

She meets with business leaders and economists about how to spur business growth in a state that has shown an anemic rate of job creation. There are meetings to avert statewide nursing home strikes, others to craft medical malpractice reform, discussions on ways to support stem-cell research, and repeatedly, as the issue surfaces, she vows not to issue a reprieve in the execution of convicted serial killer Michael Ross. By May, Rell, along with her staff, was negotiating with Democratic legislative leaders over a state budget, as she stakes out a position as the one holding the line on spending and higher taxes. “There’s always something everyday,” says Rell. “It’s just nonstop. You go from talking, perhaps, about education to the environment; then you’ll go to transportation. It’s truly a challenge, but it’s a good challenge.”

For nine and a half years, M. Jodi Rell (the “M” stands for a Mary) served almost unnoticed as Republican Gov. John G. Rowland’s lieutenant governor. When Rowland resigned last year amid a corruption scandal and threatened impeachment for accepting gifts from state contractors, friends and politically appointed employees, Rell took over on July 1, She immediately promised tougher state ethics laws and called for an end to a “culture of corruption.”

Ask political insiders to describe Rell, who will mark her first year in office as Connecticut’s 87th governor next month, and this is what you hear: “She’s down-to-earth.” “She’s earnest.” “She doesn’t play games.”

Rowland loved the limelight, and he’s often credited with spearheading all of the construction now rising throughout downtown Hartford. Overlooked is the role Rell played in those efforts. Two days before Christmas in 1997, Rowland asked Rell to chair a special task force that would deliver not another study that would gather dust, but an action blueprint.

“The one thing I remember the most was that everybody [on the task force] said let’s think outside the box and let’s think big and let’s not use ‘no’ as our first response,” recalls Rell, who began to see the challenge as a puzzle that required putting the pieces together. Those key pieces came to be known as the “six pillars of progress” which called for a convention center, a sports complex, a developed riverfront, a downtown higher education center, a rejuvenated civic center, an increase in easy-to-find and inexpensive parking and the development of at least 1,000 downtown apartments for young professionals and empty nesters, all of which, amazingly given Hartford’s history of inaction, has been built or are under construction.

“The progress that is going on in Hartford is really a tribute to both former Gov. Rowland and her,” says Thomas D. Ritter, the former Democratic House Speaker from Hartford who remembers Rell lobbying the Legislature for the funds needed to get the convention center and many of the other downtown projects in the works.

Asked what she can do to keep the state’s momentum going, Rell says she intends to continue to play a role in the capital city’s revitalization, but she sees development efforts moving into a second phase, where most future investments will come from the private sector. “It will be a combination of the two,” she says.

Richard D. Gray, her representative on downtown projects, is more specific, noting the increased number of private lenders willing to enter the Hartford market compared to a year ago.

“Do I see another billion dollars in state seed money coming? No, because it’s not needed. Let market conditions carry you through to the next phases,” he says, ticking off recent multi-million dollar investments in downtown buildings including projects by the Phoenix and St. Paul Travelers. “The seed money did what it was supposed to do. And you’re seeing a lot more folks interested in making investments” he says.

Rell would love to see Hartford join the ranks of many comeback cities, and when visiting other cities, she asks herself, “Can we do that here? Is it possible to make that happen in beautiful, downtown Hartford?” Her favorite example is Denver’s 16th Street Mall, a 16-block retail core that includes housing, offices, hotels, a tree-lined median, cafes, restaurants and two regional transportation centers, not far from where Rell’s daughter, Meredith O’Conner, and her son-in-law live. “To me that’s exactly what I see on our horizon: a vibrant, thriving committed downtown. It isn’t going to happen overnight, but we sure are on the right footing,” says Rell. “This is our capital city and we want to showcase it, and we [the state] want to be a part of its revitalization.”

Rell doesn’t have time to elaborate, but Gray later says the governor would not hesitate to “judiciously make investments.” “She’ll use the same kind of thought and vision she used to envision the six pillars to get us there,” he says.

That is, if she decides to run for office -- and wins -- 17 months from now. It is the question Rell intends to grapple with over the next few months, one that no one at the State Capitol or across the state is willing to answer.

Her approval ratings remain among the highest for any elected official in the country, largely based on voters’ impression that she is strong on integrity issues. A Quinnipiac University poll in April showed Rell’s approval rating at 80 percent. The poll also suggested that were she to run against Attorney General Richard Blumenthal or U.S. Sen. Christopher Dodd, arguably the Democrats strongest candidates, she leads both of them, 46 to 43 percent against Blumenthal and 50 to 39 percent against Dodd, although they too have not announced plans to run. Rell also leads by more than 3-t0-1 ratios the three Democrats who already have announced bids to run, Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz, New Haven Mayor John DeStefano and Stamford Mayor Dannel Malloy.

State Democratic Party Chair Nancy DiNardo, sounding like a party chief about to mount her campaign against the governor, dismisses Rell’s high poll numbers as holding little meaning and believes that even if Rell decides to run, the Republican candidate would be beatable. Claiming April poll numbers were inflated because the poll was conducted just as Rowland was about to start serving his yearlong prison term, DiNardo says what they reflect is voters’ relief that Rell is not Rowland. “She really hasn’t done a lot,” says DiNardo. She depicts Rell’s budget as “very much a Rowland budget, a very typical Republican budget,” and what’s more, asks DiNardo, why didn’t Rell, as lieutenant governor, ever ask Rowland, as allegation after allegation grabbed headlines, “What’s going on?”

Adds Democrat Kevin Sullivan, the former state Senate leader who became lieutenant governor when Rell assumed the governorship and himself a potential gubernatorial candidate: “She is a good person and gets a lot of goodwill just because she’s not Rowland, but it’s not clear that her Republican priorities as governor are much of a break with the past. As good as her poll numbers look today, it’s a long way to the 2006 election,” says Sullivan.

One reason Rell hasn’t announced her decision on running centers around the news she got three days before Christmas last year, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She could have undergone the long and energy-draining process of radiation and chemotherapy after surgeons removed the tumor, which was small and had not spread; instead, after talks with her husband, Lou, her daughter, Meredith, and her son, Michael, she chose to have a mastectomy followed by reconstructive breast surgery. Nine days after the surgery, she walked into a joint session of the General Assembly to a roaring welcome from both sides of the aisle and delivered her first State of the State address.
On this day in late April, less than two weeks after completing reconstructive surgery, Rell says: “I feel fine. I’m healthy and everything is positive, so that’s good news.” But, she admits, “Obviously, your priorities are somewhat changed and you think, okay, what do I really want to do?”

Still, as Rell talks, she sounds like a candidate. “I love doing this job, and I’m going to tell you, I believe I’m making a difference. One of the things I said when I first came in and took the oath of office is that we needed an attitude change in Connecticut. People needed to see their leaders as leaders. They needed to have faith in those leaders.’ And she adds, “I have tried to live by that.”

She talks about encounters with everyday people around the state, about an email from a resident who says proud to say he’s from Connecticut. “I just can’t tell you how good it makes me feel to hear that, because for a while people were not proud to be from Connecticut and people were bemoaning the fact that their public officials were less than honorable.”
So is she running? One weekend in late April, she told her husband, “We need to talk about what we’re doing.” And Rell says his reply was: “Hon, whatever you want to do, I’ll support you.”

As a practical matter, Rell will need to decide what she wants to do before the end of summer or no later than early this fall. Whether it’s yes or no, it takes at least a year to raise the massive amounts of money required to run for governor. (In 2002 Rowland raised $6.5 million compared to the $2.4 million Democrat Bill Curry raised.) “If it is to go forward,” Rell says, “then obviously it has to be with the support of a lot of people, but it also has to be with the full-steam-ahead approach.”

Meanwhile, Rell has garnered lots of fans, not just in the last year, but also over her nine years as second-in-command and her 10 years prior to that as a state representative from Brookfield in western Connecticut. Amazingly, several of her admirers are Democrats. One of them is State Comptroller Nancy Wyman, a longtime friend of Rell’s, in part because both women began their careers in the House of Representatives about the same time and both worked their way up, sharing many of the same challenges as they tried to balance political careers and family life. When Rell found out she had cancer, Wyman was by Rell’s side. And though the two may differ on policy issues, Wyman says Rell has always achieved respect among her peers. “Jodi was a person who read the bills and was good on her feet on debating the bills,” says Wyman.

Another Democratic fan of Rell’s is Janice Gruendel, Rell’s senior advisor on early childhood issues. Gruendel, on leave as co-president of Connecticut Voices for Children and a lecturer at the Yale’s Child Study Center, watched Rell navigate her way across a broad constituency of business, school and library leaders over a three-year period when Rowland put Rell in charge of getting Connecticut schools more wired to technology. Since taking the helm at the State Capitol, one of Rell’s top priorities has been early childhood education, which is why Gruendel, considered one of the nation’s experts in the field, has Rell’s ear.

Like Rell’s role in Hartford’s physical revitalization, Gruendel believes Rell is playing a parallel role by investing in “human infrastructure as our work force for the future.” And though Democratic leaders have criticized Rell’s budget proposals, Gruendel credits Rell for recognizing that economic development and child development need to be linked if Connecticut is to advance. “She’s laser-focused on the outcome,” says Gruendel.

Perhaps the first question Rell will have to answer about a gubernatorial run is whether she is up to the physical and mental challenges an election demands, suggests Judith B. Greiman, who served as counsel to House Democrats when Rell was a state legislator and has worked with Rell over the years. If yes, Connecticut Democrats may face the prospect of yet another four-year term without holding the governorship, despite their control of both legislative houses.

Kevin Rennie, a former Republican state representative and astute observer of the state’s political affairs, says that Rell “shows great aplomb at being governor. The fact that she’s so normal has restored confidence and hope, and it’s reminded people that someone who has other interests in life can be a wonderful leader. Everything about her shouts moderation and that’s the Connecticut way. She’s a perfect fit. Virtually everyone knows and likes someone like Jodi Rell. She is exactly who she appears to be. She has no artifice and in an age of artifice she stands out for that.”

BACK TO TOP

Keeping the Young From Getting Restless
Hartford Magazine,
April 2005

To boost the region’s economic and social growth, the Hartford business community is pulling out all the stops to get young professionals to work, live and play here.

The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art is pulsating. More than 750 people, most of them young professionals, are packed into a gallery not so much to view art, but to meet, drink and dance. DJ music blares, shocking pink lights shine on the walls, tall round cocktail tables stand around the hall and women dressed as ’40s-era ?cigarette girls? walk around offering patrons packs of candy cigarettes.

The event, called Collage and funded by the Hartford Financial Services Group Inc., has been drawing crowds like the one this late February night every three months or so for the past year. For metro Hartford, it illustrates one picture of how the region’s business community is embracing the challenge of attracting and retaining talented young people. Indeed, both business and arts leaders are increasingly recognizing that creative initiatives in a town long burdened with an image of rolling up the streets at 5 o’clock are proving a necessity if the region wants to compete with other urban areas for this new generation’s best and brightest.

The museum event is not the only example. This month, www.InternHere.com is launching to make it easier than ever before for employers to connect with potential college interns in Connecticut and western Massachusetts. (See related story.)

The importance of attracting and keeping 20 and 23 year-old professionals here may well serve as a barometer of the region’s economic and social health for the foreseeable future, says Richard Florida, an economist considered by many to be the nation’s leading guru on what’s needed to revitalize America’s cities, Hartford included.

Business leaders still remember what Florida said when he visited a group of 50 of them last May. ?Regions that are open to what young people have to offer, that are open to keeping them in the area and using their talents – those regions create a buzz, and that buzz sends a message outward that here’s a region that’s creative and thinking out of the box," recalls one member. Ultimately, that buzz and that young talent serve as an economic catalyst not just for the region’s business health but for its social and cultural health as well."

Talk to young professionals – including those who grew up here, moved away and have returned or those who’ve come from out of state for attractive jobs – and you hear a buzz that suggests the new initiatives are stating to work. If so, the trend would dispel conventional wisdom that the region is losing its most talented youth to bigger cities like Boston, New York and elsewhere. A recent demographic study, comparing the size of the cohort or 24-to-29-year-olds in Hartford County between 1998 and 2002 shows that 20-somethings are actually moving into the region, says Linda Osten, principal community development planner of the Capitol Region Council of Governments. That contrasts from the ’90s, when not only were 24-to-29-year olds migrating out of the region, but members of every other age group also were leaving, largely because of the recession.

To be sure, economists and business leaders readily admit fundamental political and economic hurdles remain, not the least of which is metro Hartford’s anemic ability to create new, well-paying jobs.

Yet on several fronts, there are signs of success. Part of that stems from the housing boom downtown, the first time in two decades. Nearly 1,300 new apartments are under construction or already occupied, many by 20- and 30-somethings who love the idea of walking to work and to downtown clubs after-hours. The most recent deal, announced in February, will turn Hartford’s former Sage-Allen department store building on Main Street, a dormant eyesore for years, into a mix of 78 loft apartments and student housing for University of Hartford students by the fall of 2006.

Another reason for optimism comes from anecdotal evidence suggesting that despite metro Hartford’s smaller size (population: about 800,000) compared to larger urban regions, young professionals are discovering that they can make an impact both in the businesses that hire them and in the communities they live in. "If you want to be in politics or on a board, it’s not that remote," says Richard Sugarman, founder and president of the Connecticut Forum, which sponsors popular issue-focused discussions with nationally known guests at the Bushnell and is purposely making sure young voices are involved in making decisions for its organization.

And perhaps most significantly, signs that Hartford’s showing up on young people’s radar screens stems from more cooperative and aggressive efforts by Hartford business community to lure and keep talented young workers by funding events like Collage and the new website for interns. Increasingly, Hartford companies also are offering the most sought-after young professionals incentives like sign-on bonuses nd relocation packages, human resource officials say. Salaries too are rising in some cases as officials try to stay competitive with other regions.

"In retrospect, there was never anything wrong with Hartford,? says Thea Montanez, 25, who perhaps more than anyone personifies the issues facing the region. ?There was something wrong with me and my attitude. My move back here was really about how you shape your environment. I discovered that here’s a place where I can make an impact and create value."

Like many of her generation, Montanez couldn’t get out of her native Hartford fast enough. Born to Puerto Rican parents, her family moved to the safer environs of suburban Bloomfield when she was eight or nine. But she grew to despise the city, calling it “the H word,” and describing it as a place “where there’s nothing to do and nowhere to go.” After graduating from Syracuse University, she landed an internship in New York’s fashion industry and later job in a Madison Avenue boutique. She thought she was living the definition of success: her own apartment and a social life with an eclectic group of oh-so-cool young professionals. But after two years of 70-hour-work weeks in order to afford her rent and Manhattan lifestyle, she wondered whether she had confused glitz with real life.

The turning point -- perhaps symbolically -- came when the massive power blackout of August 2003 hit New York. Montanez saw an internal light, realizing how lost she felt in the big city. To clear her head, she drove home to see her parents a month later and was overwhelmed with what she saw: construction cranes soared against Hartford’s skyline, a sight she couldn’t remember ever seeing before. She noticed banners and billboards that boasted: ?Hartford: New England’s Rising Star,? and her curiosity led her to actually research whether the change she sensed was more puff or substance.

A few months later, she moved back to Hartford, quitting her New York job and subletting her apartment, settling into her childhood bedroom with her parents. “The funny thing is, I never felt happier,” she says. “Coming back to Hartford was the best thing I could [have done] personally and professionally.”

Soon, she was working for the Hartford Image Project, a non-profit marketing consortium formed to tell the story of the region’s efforts to transform from a nine-to-five office destination to a vibrant 24/7 center. Earlier this year, Connecticut Convention Center, which opens at Adriaen’s Landing in June, hired her as senior events manger.
Montanez is hardly unique.

Ari Santiago, 27, grew up in West Hartford and went off to Tufts University, outside Boston, with no intentions of moving back. But when an opportunity here led to a job he says he couldn’t refuse, he parlayed that experience into his own start-up company, IT Direct, which helps small- and medium-sized professional firms with their computer systems. Santiago lives at Park Place Towers in Hartford, an apartment complex bustling with young professionals, and he got active in Access Hartford, an organization aimed at keeping young professionals in the community through social events and community volunteer work networking.

“A lot of my friends from high school who didn’t stay say, ‘I’m surprised you’re still here.’ On the other hand, a lot say they want to come back,” says Santiago.

One night recently at The Hartford Club, a private downtown club founded in 1873 that was on the brink of closing because of aging membership and declining interest, clusters of young professionals are mingling at a Martis Gras get-together, part of the club’s newly formed Young Professionals Committee. Among those is Jennifer DiBella, 31, who grew up in South Windsor, went to the University of Connecticut and now works as a lawyer at the small Hartford firm of Cranmore, FitzGerald & Meaney. She and her husband, Marc, son of former state Sen. William DiBella of Hartford, live at Bushnell Towers. From their living room they can see Bushnell Park and the State Capitol to their west; and the Connecticut River, Adriaen’s Landing, City Hall and the Atheneum Museum of Art to their east. At the right time, church bells peal from Main Street churches below. ?It was an easy choice living here,? she says.

But young professionals who grew up here aren’t the only ones rediscovering the region. David J. Grant, 25, interned at St. Paul Travelers. After Grant graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (he’s from Gardner, Mass, northwest of Worcester, Mass.) the company hired him for its information technology leadership development program. Last summer he moved into the former SNET building, which last year was converted into the new apartments. It’s become the meeting place for his friends after work before they plot their night’s entertainment in the city.

Nag Odekar, a 34-year-old marketing manager, was wooed from Fidelity Investments in Boston to The Hartford. Born in India, he lived in Scotland and England, went to Oberlin Conservatory for degrees in music composition and philosophy, spent time in Vienna studying German, got an advanced degree at Julliard and master’s degrees in composition and conducting at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. With those credentials he expected a great job, but he soon discovered that given the job market, he probably would find work on a college faculty somewhere like Iowa or Texas. Instead, he learned how to do marketing in Boston, which led to the job opportunity at The Hartford and professional challenges he probably never would have had at Fidelity.

What’s surprising to those who meet Odekar, given his world experience is that he loves the region. “In a big city, you get lost. Here you have the opportunity to be part of the community so you can get all the good stuff of the city, but at the same time have the intimacy of a smaller community,” he says. Odekar also appears in a slick new promotional DVD the Hartford Image Project produced, which companies use as a tool to recruit young professionals from across the country.

Yet despite the increasing positive buzz about metro Hartford, many hiring managers say the region still isn’t at the top many of the best graduates’ list of places to work and play. That’s why companies are helping to sustain arts groups like the Atheneum or Real Art Ways’ Creative Cocktail Hour or places like the Charter Oak Cultural Center, which sponsored its first Spanish language theater series recently.

“We’re nurturing these organizations because they are luring young professionals and we want the people we’ve attracted to the company to have fun and want to stay,” says Godkin.

To attract and retain its top young talent, United Technologies Corp. now funds such events as the Hartford Symphony’s Rush-Hour Classics, an after-work program that includes classical music, and often, pre-concert cocktail parties, says Krista Pilot, UTC’s director of community relations. In January, in an effort to draw younger employees into its community volunteer projects, UTC sponsored a ?Green Team,? that’s focused on environmental projects.

The challenge of attracting and retaining young professionals to metro Hartford has long been a tough sell. Yet despite area-based companies’ individual efforts, no serious, unified and strategic plan had been launched until about seven years ago when a human resources task force of staffing and recruiting leaders organized monthly meetings.

?We recognized that for the corridor between Hartford and Springfield to be seen as economically viable to all of us, it was to our benefit collectively that we address this issue together,? recalls John Madigan, vice president of staffing within The Hartford’s human resources department.

Among the key strategies were those that business leaders believed would attract 20- and 30-somethings: meaningful work new hires as well as interns; competitive pay that in effect made dollars in Hartford stretch father than the same dollars in places like Boston and New York; and an array of social events that cater to different tastes of young professionals and encourage peers from other companies to network.

Bingham McCutchen, for example, recently raised its starting lawyers’ and associates’ salaries at its Hartford office, making the pay equal to salaries at its other offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, London, Tokyo, Boston and New York. “It puts us at an advantage given the cost of living in Hartford,” says Frank Appicelli, hiring partner in the firm’s Hartford office.

And though Appicelli acknowledges that his office can’t attract some bright young lawyers who are set on practicing in bigger cities, he says the firm succeeds with lawyers in their early 30s who have young families. ?They’re very surprised and impressed,? says Appicelli, especially when they find housing affordable and close to downtown, which in turn means no hour-plus commutes and more time with their families.

Human resource officials say to lure future young workers here, they’re making college internships more attractive as well. Ann Young, head of Aetna Inc.’s professional development services, a part of the company’s 3,000-person information technology division, says she’s found interns no longer want to settle for busy work. “They want very substantive positions,” she says.

And because top college graduates can attract multiple job offers, Hartford area companies are discovering they not only need to offer challenging work and the possibility for meaningful careers here, but also a variety of ways to sustain a vibrant entertainment and cultural life after hours. That’s why The Hartford, for example, is so interested in funding events like the Collage evenings at the Wadsworth or the summer jazz series in Bushnell Park. Or why many companies buy groups of concert tickets to offer at discounted rates to their summer interns for shows like Dave Matthews at The Meadows or sponsor special nights at New Britain Rock Cats minor league baseball games, or why they promote their company softball teams and encourage community volunteering.

“It’s a total package,” says Barbara Malm, director of staffing at ESPN in Bristol. “It’s the job, the company culture and certainly, it’s the community,” says Malm, whose prospective young hires often are weighing metro Hartford against jobs in New York, Los Angeles or Atlanta.

East Hartford-based Pratt & Whitney, a division of Hartford-based United Technologies Corp., says it has no trouble attracting talented young engineers to the region from some of the top engineering schools around the country, according to Beth Pendleton, Pratt's director of human resources for engineering. One reason is because of the aerospace maker's reputation as an industry leader. And, like at other Hartford-area companies, many of the young engineers hired come from Pratt's pool of interns and college students who work under college co-op programs, half of whom aren't from Connecticut.

Nevertheless, a small percentage does leave, largely for warmer climates or to be closer to families outside New England, says Pendleton. "We try to compensate for that with very robust career paths," she says, noting Pratt's extensive career development programs as well as the number of veteran engineering experts who are willing to train talented new engineers.

Of course, if the region hopes to continue to attract young professionals, it will have to find a way to create more jobs, particularly since forecasts call for no more than 1 percent job growth in Connecticut this year. That’s a critical weakness in the state and regional economy, if only because young professionals who don’t see significant job opportunities will look elsewhere, says Peter Gioia, an economist with the Connecticut Business & Industry Association. “If a job doesn’t work out, they want to know there are other opportunities in the area, otherwise they’re not going to move here,” says Gioia.

Still, few economists or regional leaders would disagree: Constructive steps are being taken. In the end, says Fred Carstensen, director of the Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis, a region’s reputation goes a long way. ?You want to be known as a city that is vibrant, healthy and that has strong leadership.? As metro Hartford builds on those strengths, regional leaders – young and old – are counting on continued success to transform this New England city into one known as a happening place for young professionals to live, work and play.

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