“Teachers Village” Grows In The Heights

For financial reasons, Justin Cross lives with his mom and Ubers, an expense he can ill afford, all the way across town from the Hill to his early childhood education job in Fair Haven Heights.

Eric Gill commutes from Waterbury, where he shares a single room with a brother and a cousin in an uncle’s house, traveling 50 stressed round-trip miles, often arriving very late or very early, depending on traffic.

Both idealistic young men are about to receive a huge financial relief package: They will be moving into a pioneering ​“teachers village,” free rental housing in a verdant compound a five-minute walk from the Friends Center for Children’s school (no more commute!) on East Grand Avenue.

Gill and Cross were on hand Monday morning, with Friends Center staff, officials like U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal, and the 60 Yale School of Architecture students in the Jim Vlock First Year Building Program, to preview the homes in-progress.

This salaried benefit and teacher housing program is the brain child of Friends Center’s director Allyx Schiavone, and is a new affordability model, said Blumenthal, ​“breaking ground literally and figuratively for the state and the country.”

The house in question is a one-story, two-unit, multi-doored, three-skylighted confection — it will have a roof garden of sedum and be energy efficient. Its long porch will face out to two future houses and the arboreal surroundings, so teachers can have privacy but also community in what Schiavone calls a ​“teaching village.”

“The true cost of high-quality care far exceeds what most parents can afford,” she said in the event’s opening remarks, ​“and the state and federal government do not adequately invest in early childhood education.”

So Schiavone’s temporary solution is this creative financial workaround where the center becomes a humanistic developer in the service of its teachers, kids, and families.

It makes one-time infrastructure investments (instead of chasing after annual funding grants, etc.) for its teaching staff by providing free housing as a salaried benefit.

With Gill and Cross, there will be three of the 29-member teaching staff in the village, with two more houses on the compound to come (and other sites in the works), all to be built through the Yale School of Architecture’s Jim Vlock First Year Building program, in a five-year arrangement.

Schiavone says the hope is that the expanding center’s initiative will be providing free housing (not including utilities) to 24 of its teachers by 2028.

That translates, she went on, speaking as an educator also wearing a developer’s cap, to an annualized salaried benefit of over half a million dollars.

“With that benefit of $550,000 on our $3.75 million total investment in teacher housing, we capture a 14.7 percent rate of return and are able to recoup our original investment in less than seven years.”

True, the land (with one existing structure) was donated by supporters and much of the labor of construction is being performed by the architecture students.

Still the numbers, Schiavone said, bear out that this huge stress-reducer on teachers is also a sound financial model.

The Teacher Housing Initiative, she said, is nothing short of a gauntlet, a challenge being thrown down ​“to the way our country funds the early care and education system.”

“This is a huge relief of a burden,” said Justin. ​“They [the Center and the housing program] are helping me grow to the future, as an educator.”

And Gill added, ​”Living close to work and not having to worry about rent will enable me to do my job better. Thank you for seeing me not just as an employee, but as a friend.”

“We’ve been working to get more support for this project and for Flint Street,” the center’s new expanded campus on the site of the old Cinema 4 off Route 80, said Blumenthal.

“It’s impossible to exaggerate the importance of rent-free housing to early childhood education,” he said. And he termed what was unfolding in a quiet, bucolic corner of the Heights as a ​“transformative” new model.

So far, said Schiavone, the investments are permitting the center to ​“increase our average salaries across the board so that we now pay over $17,500 more per year than the average salary for early care and education teachers in Connecticut.

“And we’re just getting started.”