Providence Mayor Brett Smiley unveiled the city’s plans to take back control of its public schools in a victorious-looking location: the basketball court at the Zuccolo Recreation Center on Federal Hill, where black and white championship banners adorned the walls.
“We were given an assignment. Today, we are submitting our homework,” Smiley told reporters at the release event Thursday morning for the 63-page strategy outlining how the city wants to reclaim governance of its public schools, which have been under state control since 2019.
“We were told to show how we’re ready. We’ve been working for well over a year to prepare to take our schools back. We know that we’re ready.”
The city began preparing the plan, “Providence’s Plan for Our Schools: Building a Brighter Future,” in fall 2023. The city’s Return to Local Control Cabinet— a committee made up of school board members, City Council staff and Mayor’s Office staff — were charged with investigating how the city’s schools could transition back to local control.
With the cabinet’s blessing, city officials began gathering community feedback last summer, hoping the final plan would satisfy not only community members but also the concerns of Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green, who extended the takeover last year for up to three years to 2027.
Infante-Green has said the takeover could end a year earlier, by next summer, if local stakeholders adequately fulfill a number of conditions outlined in a Feb. 18 letter. Smiley — plus the Providence School Board and Providence City Council — want change sooner. They’d like to see state control cease by the end of this school year.
“This report today is not meant to be an indictment of RIDE,” Smiley said, adding that the schools have made some progress under RIDE’s regime. The takeover was originally spurred by a 2019 Johns Hopkins University report, which found both the educational and structural qualities of Providence’s schools sorely lacking.
But, Smiley wrote in his introductory letter to the plan, “We are ready to build a thriving public school system so that this type of intervention never occurs again for our schools.”
More investment in school buildings, diversity among teachers
Smiley chose a recreation center to unveil the plan to highlight its call for rec centers to serve as sites for after-school programming like homework help and tutoring. In all, the report details eight major elements of a vision for how Providence schools will operate once local control resumes.
The eight elements include:
- Enhance community engagement with families, including prioritizing staffing in district offices who can address parents’ and caregivers’ concerns.
- Support learning by adhering to the Turnaround Action Plan, which has guided assessment of the takeover’s progress in terms of student outcomes and achievements.
- Retool the governance structure of schools and the district and place the superintendent on the mayor’s senior leadership team.
- Invest in school facilities, streamline the budget process, and reorganize more schools to serve students from pre-K through eighth grade,
- Strengthen professional development opportunities for educators
- Simplify purchasing and procurement of supplies easier for schools.
- Integrate information technology between city and district.
- Leverage the city’s Revolving Fund to subsidize modern school facilities.
The city would also like to implement a shared accountability model across the district. Among its stipulations are weakening seniority mandates to diversify the teacher workforce. The district’s “efforts to recruit and retain teachers whose backgrounds and cultures match that of students are compromised by seniority-based mandates for classroom assignments and layoffs,” the report reads.
We were given an assignment. Today, we are submitting our homework.
District administrators would also be held more accountable for their actions via additional evaluations, and individual school leaders would be granted more authority over staffing and budgets for their individual schools.
The commissioner now exercises control over the most crucial aspects of district governance, including budget and personnel. Once the schools are back under city control, Smiley said he promises “better services with less money.”
“The Providence school department and city of Providence were integrated for generations, and separation only happened six years ago,” he told reporters. “So this reintegration allows for an opportunity for a higher level of service for less cost.”
But the report notes the city “remains committed to honoring the court settlement with RIDE” from November 2024 that put Providence (and its taxpayers) on the hook for $15 million in additional school funding, plus additional investments in at least the next two fiscal years.
“When PPSD [Providence Public School District] returns to local management, the District will be fully integrated in the City’s budget development process,” the plan reads. “The Mayor and the District will finalize a proposed budget together to be submitted for the Providence City Council’s budget hearing and approval process.”
Too little, too soon for commissioner
The next step, the report notes, is to work with RIDE to formalize and finalize a plan in concert with Infante-Green. The commissioner will then present that plan for review and approval to the Council on Elementary and Secondary Education in June.
The K-12 council OKs Infante-Green’s recommendations and the appointed body affirmed her decision to extend the takeover last year without much fuss. So far, Smiley’s plan is not something Infante-Green wants to bring before the council, she wrote in a letter to council members Thursday.
“While we appreciate the City’s acknowledgment of improvements made possible with the support of RIDE, this report is incomplete and lacks sufficient detail and substance that will facilitate a successful transition to local control,” Infante-Green wrote.
“The report was created in a silo by City staff and meets neither the Council’s directions nor our collective expectations for a robust, collaborative plan that explains how local leaders will both sustain and continue the progress we have achieved,” the commissioner continued.
Infante-Green wrote that RIDE and the district “were not engaged in the design of the City’s latest report,” and were only asked to provide feedback once, “after the report had already been crafted.” Several elements of the plan conflicted with state law, the commissioner argued, dubbing it “an incomplete plan.”
“Frankly, many questions around how the City will better support the operations, structures, and systems of PPSD for long-term success remain unanswered or were not fully addressed,” Infante-Green wrote, adding that she has “real concerns that the City may implement redundant, burdensome processes and practices of the past that the Johns Hopkins report said stifled progress in PPSD for more than 30 years.”
While we appreciate the City’s acknowledgment of improvements made possible with the support of RIDE, this report is incomplete and lacks sufficient detail and substance that will facilitate a successful transition to local control.
Josh Estrella, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office, responded to the commissioner’s claims in a statement Thursday evening: “To be clear, this is the City’s report to outline the steps to successfully transition governance to local control and was drafted in response to RIDE’s specific feedback, concerns and areas of focus.”
Estrella said that the report incorporated “significant feedback…from community conversations which members of the RIDE and PPSD attended.” He added that there was “a high-level briefing and an in-depth meeting” with both RIDE and the district, after which the city modified the plan to accommodate RIDE’s suggestions.
Echoing the mayor and the report, Estrella said that the plan “is a step…but it is not the last step” in the city’s efforts to integrate systems and operations in the school district.
“The next step is to establish a comprehensive plan in collaboration with all stakeholders to be presented to the K-12 Council in June of this year,” Estrella wrote. “This comprehensive plan was requested well after the City embarked on this robust process over the last year.”
This story was originally published by the Rhode Island Current.
