Natty Light cans litter the playground situated beside Wesleyan’s Red & Black Café on William Street in Middletown, Connecticut. The playground’s perpetually empty swings squeak in the breeze while children play on their front porches across the street, where sits the Traverse Square subsidized family housing units. The playground belongs to what was once the Idella W. Howell Head Start Center.
Born in South Carolina in 1926, Idella W. Howell moved to Middletown, Connecticut at 21, finding work in a parachute factory and establishing herself as an active community member. Occupying a unique perspective as an underpaid factory worker, Howell started the first community action group of its kind in her predominantly Black neighborhood. She knocked on doors hoping to gather support for workers’ rights, expanded childcare services, and elderly assistance programs. Howell practiced community action so effectively that groups across the country would go on to appropriate her methods in order to raise funding for resources in resource-deprived communities—she pioneered the concept of locally-based poverty alleviation initiatives in the United States just before similar programs began to spread across the country during the Great Society Program.
Door-knocking taught Howell how important access to childcare was to Middletown’s working-class families, and with the encouragement of Martin Luther King Jr. himself, she ultimately founded Idella W. Howell Head Start Center in 1981. The center provided free and low-cost education and childcare to families of all creeds, from the undocumented to the homeless to the poor. It provided thousands with nutritionally dense meals and snacks, vision and dental screening, job training, rent assistance, and special education catered to various academic abilities. Children ages 6 months to 5 years were welcome.
Today, Idella W. Howell Head Start Center’s broken windows and wilted garden remind passersby what Wesleyan’s ongoing history of educational disinvestment within Middletown looks like. My interviews with administrators on campus and extensive research into land records of approximately 350 Wesleyan properties revealed that, in 2022, Wesleyan purchased the former childcare and preschool facility in order to convert the building into extra art studio space for the University’s predominantly white, upper-class students. While the center had temporarily discontinued its Head Start program due to staffing issues, its leaders were engaged in a process of locating donors or other community organizations who would maintain the building’s other operations, such as energy assistance, and reopen childcare services, when Wesleyan University stepped in to purchase the property. Public record indicates that Wesleyan purchased the Idella W. Howell building for $350,940 below its fair market value. When confronted with this fact, a Wesleyan spokesperson denied to me that the University paid below fair market value, yet provided no evidence contradicting the public land deed indicating the building’s 2022 appraised value or sale price. Wesleyan’s development plan creates urgency in responding to the crisis that is the highly objectionable acquisition of a center meant to serve poor children and children of color, who have historically faced barriers to quality education.
Then, by the end of 2022, Wesleyan had relocated the Neighborhood Preschool, another local childcare center, which stood in the way of the University’s plans to expand its science facilities. Wesleyan purchased the preschool and moved it to 60 Long Lane, a piece of land on which the Connecticut Industrial School for Friendless Girls once housed and “reformed” young women marked by the state as delinquents, 76% of whom were women of color, and the remainder were poor white women. Wesleyan bought the Long Lane property, which spans over 100 acres, during an acquisition effort spanning from 2000 to 2005. Then, from 2021–2022, Wesleyan’s construction team built a new childcare facility on the plot, which now provides childcare to approximately 40 of Middletown’s young children. Full-time care costs approximately $41,821 annually at The Neighborhood Preschool. It currently offers sliding-scale tuition with minimal discounts and no tuition-free spots. When Wesleyan purchased the Idella W. Howell Center and built its own preschool facility, indicated on public records as a for-profit institution, it not only effaced the historical advances spearheaded by Middletown’s Black activists, but it also educationally displaced families who benefited from the Idella W. Howell Center’s services.
After analyzing hundreds of property acquisitions and development projects initiated by Wesleyan University since its founding in 1831, it has become clear to me that Wesleyan University has continuously engaged in assertive property extraction from Middletown’s businesses, residents, and nonprofit organizations since its conception. Notable purchases include the 1922 buyout of Misses Patten’s School for girls, the first school in Middletown to serve young women, and the A.M.E. Church and houses located in The Beman Triangle, a neighborhood that was a former stop on the Underground Railroad and hub for Black activism since its development.
Meanwhile, Students for Fair Admissions, INC. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College has threatened access to higher education for those who have been systematically denied the resources to achieve it by outlawing affirmative action in college admissions, a practice defined by the Cornell Legal Information Institute as “a set of procedures designed to eliminate unlawful discrimination among applicants, remedy the results of such prior discrimination, and prevent such discrimination in the future.” In light of the Supreme Court decision, Wesleyan University’s property holdings and acquisition patterns reveal not only a troubling past, but potential for future solutions to educational inequalities that begin as soon as preschool.
The United States’ early education shortage affects the poor most harshly (Dana Goldstien, 2022), who have few free childcare options to turn to, as is clear in Middletown, Connecticut today. Without specialized education during the formative years of one’s life, the subsequent path of one’s education will invariably look different than the educational track of a child granted access to learning facilities like the Neighborhood Preschool, which boasts small classroom sizes and an ideal balance of work and play for its students. Racial disparities stemming from institutional barriers to resources such as healthcare, nutritious food, and fair employment opportunities can influence access to early childhood education, and such barriers disproportionately affect the educational opportunities of people of color (Friedman-Krauss and Barnett, 2020).
Head Start Programs have played an important role in alleviating the statistical gap in preschool enrollment between children of color and white children. Princeton University researchers Katherine Magnuson and Jane Waldfogel find that Black and Hispanic children are more likely than white children to attend Head Start, and that funding Head Start programs reduces ethnic and racial gaps in both preschool access and academic performance down the road (Magnuson and Waldfogel, 2005). Furthermore, attending high-quality early childcare programs has been proven to reduce racial gaps in academic performance down the road (Friedman-Krauss and Barnett, 2020). Without accessible Head Start Programs like the Idella W. Howell Center, racial minorities are hit the hardest, and denied access to the early education needed to succeed later in life. For this reason, the defunding of Middletown’s Head Start Center, paired with the Supreme Court’s abolition of a policy meant to alleviate racial disparities in education, deeply threatens the educational opportunities of the thousands of Middletown children affected by Wesleyan’s decisions.
However, Wesleyan has long taken a progressive stance on affirmative action. Digging through Wesleyan University’s archives in search of land records led me to one of the earliest proposals for a comprehensive affirmative action hiring policy at Wesleyan. The University committed to affirmative action policies in the 1970s even though it did not receive the minimum level of funding that required affirmative action to be put into place. Then, in 2023, Wesleyan acted as a leader among higher education institutions when it ended its practice of legacy admissions, which have historically benefited the wealthy and white. Wesleyan donates hundreds of thousands of dollars to early educational programs across the country aimed at providing services to historically disenfranchised groups, demonstrating a clear commitment to educational equity.
Today, it is once again up to Wesleyan to act as a leader in order to foster the racial equity to which its mission statement commits. Donating to national early education programs, while admirable, cannot undo the damage inflicted upon Middletown families resulting from Wesleyan’s role in reducing already scarce preschool options. Affirmative action extends from a need to alleviate the inequalities applicants faced throughout their academic careers. Why perpetuate the early educational inequalities affirmative action seeks to remedy by stripping a community of its historic public resource and childcare center? Wesleyan must stick to its promise of prioritizing racial diversity in admissions, but in the meantime, the University must also attack a root cause of racial inequality by restoring affordable early education to the citizens of Middletown. Wesleyan must therefore return Idella W. Howell Head Start Center to the residents of Middletown so that they can provide their children with the food, care, and education that all children in their formative years require and deserve.
Chloe Goorman can be reached at cgoorman@wesleyan.edu.