Some systems get too complex. Providence Mayor Brett Smiley thinks that has happened with overlapping information technology (IT) and data systems across the city’s government and public schools, which have been under state control since 2019.
“We should all want the best resources, the best experts, working together,” Smiley said at the Zuccolo Recreation Center on Federal Hill during the April 10 release of “Providence’s Plan for Our Schools: Building a Brighter Future.”
The report is the city’s first concerted effort to describe how it will resume and maintain control of its schools when the state takeover ends sometime in the next two years. Five of its 63 pages are dedicated to recommendations on how the city thinks IT and data practices should be structured after local control returns.
Smiley wants to align the city and district more closely and to eliminate redundant software or data collection. “These are opportunities for both efficiency and higher quality services,” he said Thursday.
Among the more ambitious ideas is to broaden the kinds of student data shared between district, city and third parties to improve city offerings at recreation centers.
Schools and rec centers “serve the same youth and provide interconnected services, but they frequently use different data collection platforms to track student attendance,” the report notes. “The City will explore where it may merge Recreation Department and PPSD [Providence Public School District] platforms to reduce the number of duplicative systems and improve communication.”
Also on the city’s wish list for local control is a more streamlined model for IT management, with the report stating it wants to investigate which “roles and functions or contracts…may be duplicative” between city and district.
“All of us are vulnerable to cyberattacks. It’s a global trend, as you well know,” Smiley told reporters Thursday. “The city’s IT department will help the school department’s team and vice versa, so we can better protect our students’ data, our employees’ data.”
The mayor’s report notes that “PPSD’s IT department is currently understaffed…[and] no PPSD employee directly oversees the network, and the work has been outsourced to consultants.” An interim IT director has been in place since July 2024, according to a district contract. But the most recent PPSD organizational chart, created after that contract, still shows the top IT position as vacant.
The district also had IT troubles in September 2024, when a ransomware attack on PPSD’s internal systems exposed about 200 gigabytes of district files, including confidential and personal information of staff and students.
Now the city wants to “enhance long-term sustainability and data security,” according to its new report. “This reliance on external contractors presents risks, including reduced control over internal processes, potential delays in addressing technical issues, and a lack of institutional knowledge of IT systems within PPSD.”
Privacy concerns
Rhode Island Department of Education Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green expressed concern that the city’s plan as-is might violate state law. PPSD Superintendent Javier Montañez is concerned the data-sharing aspects may violate federal law, too.
“The report suggests sharing of student and family data with city structures that would conflict with federal privacy laws,” Montañez wrote in an April 10 letter to the Providence schools community.
The current plan needs “greater specificity, more detailed action steps, and accountable timelines and individuals,” Montañez wrote, and dubbed the report itself an exercise in redundancy, as it “proposes even more City control in day-to-day operations of the District, not less.”
Privacy concerns would fall under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which mandates that schools can’t usually share minor students’ personal information without written consent from parents or guardians.
The city’s proposal explicitly states that any new data-sharing efforts “will comply with relevant federal education data laws,” including FERPA and the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA).
A cheat sheet from the U.S. Department of Education notes the four most common exceptions to written consent for students’ personal data. It can be collected in a database if proper safeguards are in place, and researchers and auditors can access student data in certain contexts.
School officials can access students’ personal information as long as there is “legitimate educational interest” involved, FERPA dictates. And an outside party can be considered a “school official” if it “performs an institutional service or function for which the school would otherwise use employees.” PPSD uses similar language in its 2024 template for data-sharing contracts.
California is trying
Providence is not the first city or state to attempt to integrate select data between municipal and district powers. There’s much guidance on how to construct data-sharing agreements. Scale can complicate speed, as has been the case in California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom campaigned in 2019 and 2022 for a statewide educational data system that would track students’ progress from preschool through employment. CalMatters reported that as of March 2025, the system is still not ready for public consumption, with one expert citing “an abundance of caution regarding students’ privacy” as a major reason for the delay.
But Providence operates at a much smaller scale than the Golden State and the city’s local control report gives one case study of how the district and a third-party entity successfully cooperated to share necessary data. In 2024, the city received $200,000 from the state education department to team up with the Providence After School Alliance and deliver out-of-school programming at two underperforming PPSD middle schools, as part of Gov. Dan McKee’s Learn365 initiative.
The alliance entered into a data-sharing agreement with the district for information regarding demographics like multilingual learners and free and reduced lunch recipients who participate in the after-school programming. The idea is to “implement a targeted and responsive program that aligns with PPSD’s district-wide priorities…as well as help inform future after-school programming that integrates both academic learning and enrichment,” according to the city report.
It’s also not the first data agreement the alliance and the district have shared. According to a 2012 brief from The Wallace Foundation on “Data-Sharing Strategies That Work,” PPSD and the after-school alliance took seven years to forge a different agreement. The brief notes that by making the alliance “a quasi-district entity that’s providing a service…that the district would provide itself but can’t,” the arrangement was able to satisfy FERPA requirements.
The city and district already use the same public records request software, NextRequest. People seeking information on PPSD send a request through the city’s portal, and the city’s clerical staff satisfy the request.
Smiley and his office have stressed that the report is not final or prescriptive. Spokespeople for both PPSD and the Mayor’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment Friday.
This story was originally published by the Rhode Island Current.
