First, Amistad is a very successful model, BUT it is still understood that the noncompliant students and parents will be removed from the school. Then they go to those schools that don’t have the advantage of being allowed to remove their noncompliant students. This is something like the private schools that get to pick their students. The excellent schools are those who make every reasonable effort to work with the noncompliant students.

Second, where is the responsibility of the superintendent, who should have seen the magnet school losing ground?

STAMFORD — Jerome Jones, Stamford’s only black superintendent of schools, died Friday, July 4, after having been struck by a car in Washington, D.C.

Jones, 71, served as school superintendent from 1981-1983. In that time, he presided over a contentious and comprehensive redistricting initiative which included the closure of Rippowam High School and made changes to the curriculum, including the creation of high school academies focused on the arts, science and technology and business.

“This was one of the most brilliant superintendents I ever knew,” said Ellen Camhi, who chaired the school board when Jones was hired.

“In that year and a half, he got more accomplished than two superintendents have since then,” she said.

Camhi said that Jones had a gift for planning; when Rippowam High School was closed as part of the redistricting plan, some members of the public wanted the city to take the building for use as a city hall. Jones told the board to keep the building, predicting a “baby boomlet” in the early 1990s.

“He said ‘you’re going to need that space,’” said Camhi. Time proved Jones’ theory correct. Women who had been putting off having children because of their careers, began having families in the early 1990s.

Rep. Pauline Rauh, D-6, head of the board of representatives’ education committee, was hired by Jones to be the director of curriculum and instruction.

“He was very forward-thinking,” she said. “He understood the whole teaching-learning process.”

She said that the high school academies, which were called the Career Cluster, were a way of providing smaller classes to students interested in specific areas of instruction. Sadly, she said, the academies remained open for only a few years.

“It was too forward-thinking for Stamford,” she said.

Jones, too was not long for Stamford. In 1983, he was hired away from the city by St. Louis, where he served as the first black superintendent of schools.

Jones, who obtained his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in urban planning, was most recently a professor in Howard University’s School of Education, where he helped to design the school’s EAGLE (Educational Administration Guidance and Leadership Experience) program. The program, according to educational administration and policy department chair Lois Harrison-Jones, Ed.D., was intended to train urban superintendents. Jones began work on EAGLE during the 1999-2000 school year. The program has since graduated 14 doctoral candidates.

Jones left Howard in May, and accepted a position at the University of St. Croix, according to Phyllis Brown, an assistant principal at Turn of River School, who kept in touch with Jones after his departure from Stamford. He was going to become the dean of the school of education. He was supposed to leave for St. Croix the week of the accident.

“He was leaving the following Tuesday,” she said.

According to a statement from the Washington Metropolitan Police, Jones was struck by a sports utility vehicle on Thursday, June 26, while reportedly attempting to cross against the light in the unit block of Massachusetts Avenue, NE. Jones was transported to the hospital, where he died of injuries a week later.

The driver of the vehicle, Carl Holshouser of Texas, has not been charged.

Police state that a pedestrian violation and alcohol may have been a contributing factor in the incident.