Gov. Dan McKee joined Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education Angélica Infante-Green Monday at an award-winning elementary school on Providence’s East Side Monday to outline the steps the state is willing to take with Providence leaders to return control of public schools to the city.
They just didn’t invite Providence Mayor Brett Smiley or anyone from the City Council to share the news.
If all nine conditions are met, the state could relinquish control as soon as summer 2026, about one year earlier than expected, Infante-Green said. The state took over the schools in 2019 after years of underperformance and poor learning conditions, concerns crystallized in a revealing Johns Hopkins University report published that year. In 2024, the takeover was extended for a maximum of three years, up through 2027.
The Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) sent out a press release to news media around 8:30 a.m., five-and-a-half hours before the event, billed as a celebration for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary School receiving a prestigious National Blue Ribbon Award from the U.S. Department of Education, the first ever in the city. The award recognizes the Camp Street school’s success in closing achievement gaps. MLK was one of 356 schools nationwide that received the national honor.
“Essentially, it signifies that this school is among the top-performing schools in the nation — not in Providence, not in Rhode Island — in the nation,” Javier Montañez, the superintendent of Providence Public Schools and an alum of the district himself, told the audience of reporters and community members.
The celebration also served as the backdrop for the release of the so-called “Path to Local Control” framework to guide the transfer of control of the Providence Public School Department back to the city.
Montañez and Rhode Island Board of Education Chair Michael Grey extolled the achievements of the MLK school in their prepared remarks at the start of the event. But after the accolades, it was mostly McKee, followed by Infante-Green, who had to navigate a thicket of reporters’ questions prompted by the conspicuous absence of city officials.
Given the framework’s stated emphasis on collaboration among the district’s many stakeholders, it was hard to ignore that only two Providence officials were seen at the event: Roxie Richner, a City Council spokesperson, and Corey Jones, a Providence School Board member.
Missing from the event were the other nine members of the half-elected, half-appointed Providence School Board, which was sworn in last week and will meet for the first time on Wednesday night. Smiley’s office had confirmed earlier in the day that the mayor was not invited and didn’t know about the press event.
“City Council wasn’t briefed on this framework, nor was the mayor’s administration,” Providence City Council President Rachel Miller said in a statement Monday evening. “Instead, we learned about it from the press.”
McKee explained the missing officials as a means of getting ahead of the narrative. “I think that we were very, very specific about that question because I knew that was going to come up, that we have said that we’re going to open up conversations with the new school board,” he said. “We needed to get out in front of this issue…We needed to kind of lay out the storyline that you heard today that shows a great deal of success in the Providence schools.”
Smiley suggested last month that the schools should return to local control by July 1. McKee shot down that idea. “When the mayor asked me that in my office, I said, ‘Well, I can’t support that,’” McKee said.
McKee also pointed out school board member Jones in the audience.
But Jones wasn’t invited either.
“I saw a tweet with the location and showed up,” Jones, one of the board’s elected members, said in an email.
“I believe preparation is key for our new board, and there’s a lot of work ahead in building stronger connections with the community to ensure we properly represent their interests,” Jones added. “I’m ready to take on that work, and from my experience working with my colleagues so far, I sense they are just as committed.”
New framework not so new, mayor’s office says
Among the “Path to Local Control” stipulations is an agreement from school board members to commit to two years of training with a “Student Outcomes Focused Governance coach.” The school board would also be required to spend half or more of their meeting time discussing their progress on goals made in tandem with the Superintendent and his team.
The framework wants the city to uphold financial transparency about school funding through 2030. The city would also still be on the hook for the $15 million it was court-ordered to pay the school system as a deficit-plugging measure in November 2024. There are also stipulations regarding the ongoing construction of school buildings, and performance-based outcomes for all contracted district employees, including janitors.
According to the mayor’s office, these requirements are not new.
“Most of the conditions that RIDE unveiled at today’s announcement were sent to the City in September, and we responded on November 1 and again on December 11 as we made progress to meet those metrics,” Josh Estrella, a spokesperson for Mayor Smiley, said in an email Monday evening.
“The Smiley Administration has continued to implement proactive measures to ensure this transition will be well-informed and aligned with community needs and has shared the City’s progress repeatedly with RIDE. The City is well on track to begin this transition and Mayor Smiley believes that the District should return to municipal management on July 1.”
Since 2023, Estrella said that the city has diligently worked on fulfilling the conditions of the Turnaround Action Plan, which has guided the takeover since it began in 2019. But whether the schools have shown demonstrable improvement under the state seizure proved a contentious point for the typically calm Infante-Green.
Asked by a reporter as to what metrics have improved in Providence’s schools since the takeover began, Infante-Green replied, “I’m really disappointed in your question because we have been talking about this for a very long time. So I can rattle off 100 things.”
Infante-Green proceeded to rattle off — food pantries in schools, students hired by Electric Boat, more technical education enrollment, underperforming schools undergoing the redesign process, enhanced professional development and vastly improved building conditions — and then concluded at the end of her list: “I will remind everyone we were one of the few urban districts that were able to open in a pandemic. OK? That is a fact.”
Another reporter asked what specifically — like test scores or graduation rates — from the Turnaround Plan had been satisfied. Krystafer Redden, RIDE’s chief of staff, was sitting across the room and moved closer to chime in: “Chronic absenteeism!” he noted as one factor that’s improved under state control.
The turnaround plan’s goal is 10% chronic absenteeism. While the city’s schools saw a 12% improvement in the chronic absenteeism rate in the 2023-2024 school year, it was still over 36%.
“Some of them have been hit,” Infante-Green said. “The one where we get feedback from parents — that has been hit. There have been other ones…Providence has surpassed in many other goals…I don’t have it all in front of me. We’ll get you all of that.”
Time for questions
The press conference took place before the end of the school day and started about 10 minutes late. The speakers and Q&A took up about 30 minutes. That provided a natural endpoint for the event, as buses would be arriving around 3 p.m. to pick up kids from school.
McKee left the press conference before Infante-Green, and a press gaggle formed around the commissioner. Reporters asked about a bill by Providence Democratic Rep. Scott Slater that would return the schools to city control on Smiley’s timeline and “nullify” the commissioner’s 2024 extension of the takeover.
“The city has been kind of adamant, and you’ve heard the city say they want it to be June 2025,” Infante-Green said. “That is too soon. It just doesn’t — there’s no way, even if there’s a plan today, it is very last minute.”
When reporters’ questions about the revised takeover plans began to outlast the event’s allotted time, Redden emerged and reminded Victor Morente, RIDE’s spokesperson, that the students’ school buses were soon coming, and everyone must leave.
Morente allowed for one more question directed at Infante-Green, while education board chair Grey continued to field questions from Pat Ford of Coalition Radio Network about what changes at the federal level could mean for local education policy and funding.
Redden eventually moved in to confront Ford.
“You’re being asked by the superintendent of schools and the principal of this building to leave the school so the children can get picked up,” Redden told Ford. “You’re being incredibly disrespectful.”
Ford left after that without any further incident, and most of the media attendees had also exited the building onto Camp Street, which remained lined with parked cars.
This article was originally published by the Rhode Island Current.
