By Steve Klamkin WPRO News and the Associated Press
Rhode Island’s education commissioner sees community involvement as key to state plans to remake Providence’s troubled public schools.
“This is something that we’re going to do with the community and not to the community,” said Angélica Infante-Green, in an interview ahead of the meeting of the Council on Elementary and Secondary Education, as she sought authorization to initiate plans to assume control of Providence schools.
“From day one that I came to Rhode Island, I have been very firm on that. It’s the only way I know how to work and it’s the only way I want to work,” she said.
“Right now, what exists is not functional,” Infante-Green said.
The 2013 Crowley Act, named for the late Newport Rep. Paul Crowley spells out procedures to enable the Rhode Island Department of Education to assume control of failing schools or school districts, to “reconstitute” schools, which could involve closing some schools.
She asked the Council to initiate a process that gives her two to three weeks to issue what is called a preliminary decision and order that the Providence schools are in need of state intervention. That is followed by a 30-day period in which any of four entities, either the mayor, school board, city council or superintendent of schools can object, or “show cause” why the Commissioner should not intervene.
The Rhode Island Council on Elementary and Secondary Education voted 7-0 Tuesday night to approve the state education commissioner’s request for authority to oversee the city’s beleaguered schools.
The takeover comes a month after a scathing report by the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy found severe dysfunction, including rampant bullying and fighting among students, crumbling facilities, and a tangled bureaucracy.
Commissioner Angelica-Infante Green says she is in the process of hiring a superintendent to oversee the system, and promised that parents, students and community members will have a seat at the table during the turnaround effort.
The Providence Teachers Union in a statement said it would “work together” with other stakeholders to improve the schools.
Infante-Green said it could be late October or early November before the operation of the schools could be handed to the Commissioner. She is hoping to avoid a legal fight, and said that the schools will not open this fall under state control, but under the current setup.
“We have failed at least a generation of kids. We have the 1993 report, and now we’re looking at a 2019 report that says the exact same thing. So, I would hope that this is not a drawn out process, because we have kids sitting in front of us.”
