|
|
|
|
June 2002
Ore. post hanging in balance for Lam
Posted Wednesday, June 26, 2002
School Board members say they are anxious to conclude negotiations with Supt. Diana Lam, who is still mulling a proposal from Portland, Ore.
BY GINA MACRIS
Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE -- Despite being courted by the School Board in Portland, Ore., Schools Supt. Diana Lam is still undecided about traveling there and interviewing as a finalist for the superintendent's post.
Yesterday, she said she has "tremendous respect for educators and employees of this district." At the same time, she said, she is "weighing all options."
This much Lam would say: she has booked no flights to Oregon, where Portland officials would host her for two days of public interviews.
Meanwhile, the clock is running down here on her three-year contract, which expires July 31. School Board members say they want to conclude negotiations as soon as possible.
Providence School Board member Samuel L. Zurier said yesterday, "Of course we're concerned about any factor that is going to deter us from our goal of signing up the superintendent for three more years.
"If she ended up not signing with us . . . I would regret that," he said.
Zurier and the other board members interviewed yesterday all said they thought the board was of one mind in wanting to keep Lam in Providence.
Mary E. McClure, the board's vice president, said, "For everyone's sake, this needs to proceed with great dispatch.
"We need an answer," she said. "Everyone needs an answer."
School Board member Gene Burns said board members did not press Lam on her level of interest in Portland because "we are trying to get her to sign a contract here.
The board announced its intent to offer Lam a three-year contract at the end of January, but another two months elapsed before an actual proposal was submitted to her.
Until now, the matter has been in the hands of lawyers for the superintendent and the School Board, according to Zurier.
"I think it's fair to say that in the last month or two we had not made as much progress as we would like," he said, but he could not comment on reasons for the delay.
Burns said he was "amazed that it's dragged on so long. I thought we were so close it should have been settled by now."
Lam's compensation remains among the items to be finalized, Burns said.
She now makes $170,430.75, including a base salary of $164,430.75 and a $6,000 performance bonus. Her contract provides for a minimum 3-percent cost-of-living increase, along with a performance bonus linked to an annual evaluation.
Portland was offering $155,000 to $175,000 while it was wooing four other candidates during March and April, although there has been speculation in Providence that the Portland board might offer more money to lure Lam.
Lam came to Providence from San Antonio in 1999 for $150,000. She also serves as an adjunct professor of education at Brown University although her compensation has not been made public.
Interviewed shortly before she came here, Lam said she would prefer Providence to two other larger cities that had shown interest in her at the time -- Newark, N.J., and Denver, Colo. -- in part because of the opportunity to work with Brown University in the forefront of urban education reform.
She also cited the "manageable" size of the district, now about 27,000 pupils, about half the size of Portland.
Since Lam's arrival she has also forged a close working relationship with the state Department of Education and has won the confidence of key legislators.
Even though disappointing revenue projections have prevented Providence from attracting a significant increase in state aid to education for the next school year, it will still have a total of $262.2 million in combined state and local revenue -- a net increase of $7.7 million from the current year's budget.
In Portland, however, the schools face a net reduction in state and local revenues, from $367 million to $360 million, for an enrollment of about 54,000.
The fiscal crisis in Portland was a factor cited by one of four candidates who withdrew in April.
The Portland superintendency has been vacant since last June, when the board forced out Ben Canada, an outsider who had been at the job less than three years.
Lam acknowleges problems at Hope
Posted Monday, June 24, 2002
Hope High had attempted to break the school into small learning communities last year, but it was a mistake to try to do everything at once, the superintendent says.
BY GINA MACRIS
Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE -- For all the finger-pointing at last week's special City Council meeting, much of it blaming Schools Supt. Diana Lam for failing to head off state intervention at Hope High School, Lam had a chance to explain her perspective.
She began by anticipating a question from her audience, nine council members whose phones ran off the hook the first week of June with rumors of a state "takeover" at Hope.
What caused the state to intervene, Lam asked rhetorically, if, as the School Department claims, Hope has come up with sound plans for improving education?
"That's a legitimate question," Lam said, beginning a quick outline of what went wrong at Hope during this school year.
Lam said "they really had a very ambitious plan" to break Hope down into small learning communities intended to make students feel at least one adult cares about their education and to prevent youngsters from feeling lost in a large building.
"Hope really insisted they wanted to do everything" to put all parts of the plan in place at once, Lam said, and "we didn't want to discourage them."
"But they were not mindful of the details," she said.
For small learning communities to work, each needs a separate staff, and Hope didn't have enough teachers to go around, Lam said.
The scheduling of teachers who were available also posed a problem, Lam said. Some were assigned to work in different learning communities during different hours of the day, a move that compromised the cohesiveness of the four groups.
Finally, she said, the long time it took the city and the Providence Teachers Union to negotiate a contract diminished professional development in a school that needed it, Lam said.
From mid-October, when members of the teachers' union first rejected an offer from the city, until the end of April, when they ratified a three-year pact, their union adopted a "work-to-rule" posture in which it encouraged them to restrict their work to required activities.
That hurt Hope, which had depended on voluntary professional development after school to train teachers in new methods.
Councilman Joseph DeLuca asked why teachers needed so much professional development.
To his way of thinking, DeLuca said, the employer hires the candidate who already has the skills to do the job.
Lam said that "if people came to us ready we wouldn't need to do professional development."
In fact, urban districts all over the country are turning to professional development to retrain teachers and administrators to work effectively with students whose needs are not met by traditional methods.
The intervention of Peter McWalters, commissioner of elementary and secondary education, encourages teachers to volunteer for at least 20 hours of professional development during the next school year to improve teaching.
At the same time, the intervention triggers another planning process to take the idea of small learning communities one step further. According to McWalters, they will become small, independent schools with the right to hire their own staff.
According to McWalters's orders, Hope High School will close as a large comprehensive high school next June.
When the doors to Hope reopen in September 2003, it will house three to four small schools, each with a director responsible for improving academic performance, and a teaching staff selected for its ability and commitment to improve the quality of education.
The independent schools will be able to bypass the union seniority system, which allows teachers with the longest tenure to pick their classrooms.
Four other public schools in the city have already moved to autonomous status, with authority over hiring and many budgetary matters, without intervention from McWalters.
When Councilman Joseph DeLuca asked for evidence of the problem at Hope, he and the other council members got a long list of numbers.
They include plummeting scores on statewide tests, a dropout rate that rose to 56.3 for the 2000-2001 school year, and an increase in the number of suspensions, from 268 in the fall semester of 2000 to 303 in the fall semester of 2001.
Deputy Schools Supt. Melody A. Johnson pointed out that Hope didn't have a plan to address high rates of failure in core courses. Several examples of failure rates from the first semester of the current school year: 35 percent in freshman social studies, about 45 percent in freshman algebra, about 47 percent in freshman English and nearly 48 percent in biology.
Drawing attention to the worst of the test scores, Lam told DeLuca there is alarming evidence of a problem if "only one student in a major comprehensive high school meets the standard" out of all the students tested.
That was the case in 2001, when only one student out of 265 eligible to take the math tests at Hope performed adequately in problem-solving.
In 2000, one student out of 290 eligible test-takers demonstrated acceptable problem-solving skills and an adequate understanding of math concepts.
Lam said the teaching of mathematics is inconsistent, and teachers haven't received the training and support they need in new, effective methods.
DeLuca interrupted her, saying he didn't think money was the answer.
"I think the heart is the answer," he said. "I think there's too much not caring."
"Obviously you have tolerated this [poor performance] for a long time," DeLuca told Lam, "because this didn't happen yesterday.
"Hope used to be considered a rival of Classical" High School in excellence, DeLuca said.
Lam agreed that "money alone" will not improve Hope.
"Caring and commitment" are also critical to turning around the school, but there are no guarantees, not even directives from her and the commissioner of education, Lam said.
Many elements of support for Hope must be in place, and everyone involved with the school must feel as if he or she shares responsibility for its success, Lam said.
Lam and McWalters portrayed the state intervention at Hope as more a matter of timing, with the commissioner saying that if his initial round of directives to schools had occurred two years ago, he would have intervened at Central and possibly Feinstein High Schools.
Instead, Lam conducted her own intervention, withstanding considerable political pressure in selecting new principals to work year-round in each building and to involve the faculty in reorganizing the schools and improving academics and discipline.
And Lam had already begun working on Hope, recommending Nancy Mullen to the School Board as the new principal only about two weeks before McWalters announced his intervention.
"At times, I have been amused by the word 'intervention,' " she told the council members, because McWalters simply told the school to do what she had on the drawing board anyway.
"McWalters's intervention has brought attention to the high schools, and rightly so," Lam said.
"It is saying to all of us," Lam said, educators and non-educators alike, "that that level of achievement is not going to be tolerated."
"We should all be showing our indignation about that," she said.
2 students charged in fake bomb at Hope
Posted Monday, June 24, 2002
The two boys, 15 and 17, will appear in court today after allegedly planting a metal pipe wrapped with nails in the school basement.
BY LISA BIANK FASIG
Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE -- Two Hope High School students were charged Friday with planting a fake pipe bomb in the high school that morning, the same day as graduation.
The two boys, 15 and 17, were ordered to home confinement and will appear in court today. They were charged with disruption of a public building, a felony.
Their names are being withheld because they are juveniles.
"It was very troubling to me Friday when I was sitting in the office and got a call that Hope High School was being evacuated," Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr. said yesterday at a news conference. Cianci said the two suspects "completely disrupted the life of the school" on the day seniors were looking forward to graduation.
A custodian found the metal pipe, about 14 inches long and wrapped with nails, in the basement at about 10 a.m.. The school was evacuated and the device, which wasn't explosive, was x-rayed and removed from the building. Students returned to school at 1:30 p.m.
The police were tipped off to the suspects through information from school officials and students. In a garage at the home of one of the suspects, the police found evidence of material related to the fake bomb.
The news conference was held during the second weekend in which Cianci awaited a jury verdict on corruption charges against him and codefendants Frank E. Corrente and Richard E. Autiello. The jury has been deliberating for eight days and continues this morning.
Asked how he felt, Cianci recited a busy schedule that included celebrity bartending for a cystic fibrosis fundraiser and attending the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities awards program.
"I feel good. The weather's good, it's not raining. You can enjoy the sun. You can go out and celebrity bartend.
"And tomorrow we start up again."
Portland district interested in Lam
Posted Monday, June 24, 2002
The chairwoman of the Portland, Ore., School Board says Providence Schools Supt. Diana Lam did not apply for the job.
BY GINA MACRIS
Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE -- It appears that the School Board in Portland, Ore., is wooing Schools Supt. Diana Lam, although both Lam and the chairwoman of the Portland board say the superintendent has not applied for the job.
Last week, Lam confirmed that representatives of the Portland school district had called her.
School Board chairwoman, Debbie Goldberg Menasche, confirmed that Lam has not applied for the job, but she declined further substantive comment.
Menasche said only that the screening process is confidential until the point when the public has a chance to interview candidates. And Menasche said the board hoped to make an announcement "soon" about public interviews.
Besides Lam, the Portland board also had recruited Vicki Phillips, school superintendent in Lancaster, Pa. Phillips issued a statement late last week saying that she was not a candidate.
In March and April, four candidates went to Portland for public interviews, but they all dropped out before the School Board made any offer.
Asked about the withdrawals, Menasce said yesterday that each candidate was pressured to stay in their own community.
At the time of the withdrawals, the board was criticized for taking too long to deliberate and appearing indecisive in the process.
The four candidates were Winston Brooks, of Wichita, Kan.; Anthony Amato, of Hartford, Conn.; Patricia Harvey, of St. Paul, Minn.; and Eric Smith, from Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C.
In backing out of the Portland job, Smith said he was concerned about budget problems in that district. He has since taken the superintendent's post in Anne Arundel County, Md.
DARE: School Department must give more students a lift
Posted Wednesday, June 19, 2002
BY AMANDA MILKOVITS
Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE -- Students living within three miles of the city's public high schools have to walk or find their own transportation to school.
A group of activists says the Providence School Department should either pick up the students or pick up the fare.
Yesterday afternoon, a small band of activists and students walked nearly three miles to draw attention to the walk some of the students make every school day. Seeds of Change, the youth group of the Direct Action for Rights and Equality, organized the walk from Central High School to Hope High School.
Sharmiee Turner, a 10th-grader at Central High School, lives only a seven-minute walk from home. She came out to demonstrate because she said she doesn't think it is fair that some students have long walks to school during bad weather.
Andrio Tavarez, who starts his freshman year at Classical High School in September, said he cannot afford to take the bus every day. According to the RIPTA Web site, it costs $10.60 a week for a pack of 10 student tokens.
"I don't think students should have to pay for the bus or walk to get to school when it's the school's responsibility to get students to school," Tavarez said.
Under the School Department's policy, students must live more than three miles from their school to receive a free bus pass. An urban study called the Providence Plan, cited by DARE, found that most high school students live within a mile and a half to two miles from their schools.
"Financially, we're just not able to issue bus passes to all the students," said Kevin M. Clement, spokesman for the Providence School Department. Free bus passes are issued to 2,900 students every month, according to DARE.
School officials met with members of the City Council's Finance Committee two weeks ago to discuss the proposed $276.8-million budget -- which has a $14.6-million gap in spending and revenue.
None of the school officials who were invited attended the rally, and only a handful of students showed up.
The activists walked anyway, carrying their signs along the busy streets.
"I think a lot of people didn't want to come out and walk," said Jon Mahone, the youth organizer for DARE. "I think a lot of people don't want to walk in the shoes of the students."
Council debates Hope High's past, future
Posted Tuesday, June 18, 2002
One councilwoman is upset that the City Council was left out of the loop during state intervention talks; another concedes two other city high schools are making progress.
BY GINA MACRIS
Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE -- Nine members of the City Council questioned school officials about the state intervention at Hope High School last night, with some trying to blame Schools Supt. Diana Lam and others defending her.
In the course of the discussion, council members acknowledged that some of the approaches to be used at Hope have shown promise in two other schools, Feinstein High School and Central High School.
Only a few years ago, Central was considered the worst high school in the district.
Despite signs that Feinstein and Central are poised to turn around, Councilwoman Balbina A. Young, D-Dist. 11, cut Lam no slack.
She said she was "outraged" both at the intervention and the School Department's failure to notify the City Council of the action in a timely fashion. And she said she didn't understand what Lam had planned for Hope or why she should believe it would improve education.
Later in the discussion, without mentioning Young by name, the commissioner of elementary and secondary education told council members that "you could be outraged anytime in the last four years about this, and many of you are."
Peter McWalters alluded to statistics released by the School Department that showed the actual number of students meeting standards declined dramatically at Hope in various reading, writing and math skills over the last four years.
For example, 3 out of 242 students enrolled in the 10th grade met standards in mathematical problem-solving in 1998, and in 2001, only one student out of 265 made the grade.
And the failure rates for most core academic areas crept up from about one in three in the fall of 2000 to nearly one in two in the fall of 2001.
McWalters has ordered that the administration of Hope be reorganized immediately and that the school submit plans to him by January to break itself down into three or four smaller independent schools.
He expects the plans for small schools to become a reality by September 2003.
At the same time, McWalters said teachers should be encouraged to volunteer for at least 20 hours of professional development during the coming academic year.
Teachers who do not want to teach in one of the smaller, independent schools will have a chance to leave Hope before September 2003.
The intervention puts teeth behind plans Lam had already made to reorganize Hope, the superintendent said.
Councilwoman Patricia K. Nolan, D-Ward 9, said she has seen some of Lam's ideas work.
For example, the experience of Feinstein High School in the last year shows that a small, independent school benefits students, Nolan said.
She said she fought against closing Feinstein and reopening it with a new principal last year "and I would like to say publicly that I was wrong."
"I am very, very pleased with what's going on," Nolan said.
"The principal there [Nancy Owen] is outstanding," Nolan said, and "the teachers that are there today . . . bought into the program. They want to be there. That is the difference."
Both Feinstein and Central have year-round principals, as Hope will have in Nancy Mullen. At Central, principal Debra DeCarlo has brought discipline under control.
Suspensions have been cut in half, the dropout rate has fallen 15 percentage points, and attendance has jumped 5 percentage points after one year of intervention, according to statistics released by the School Department.
Lam placid as contract with schools nears end
Posted Monday, June 17, 2002
The school superintendent and the city's lawyer don't sound worried that no new deal has been reached -- despite interest an Oregon school system has shown in Diana Lam.
BY GINA MACRIS
Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE -- The School Board in Portland, Ore., has called Schools Supt. Diana Lam asking her to interview for the superintendent's post in that city, which has an enrollment of about 54,100 students -- double the 27,000 in Providence.
But Lam isn't saying or hinting anything, except that she doesn't have a flight to Portland on her calendar right now.
And she said it's not wise to read anything into the fact that she has not yet signed a new three-year contract with the School Board.
"They have had a vacancy for over a year, so of course they have called every superintendent in the country," Lam said of Portland earlier this week. She declined to answer additional questions.
Portland's last superintendent was forced out by the School Board there a year ago, and its initial search for a successor ended with all four finalists withdrawing before an offer was made.
Meanwhile, the lawyer representing the Providence School Board in negotiations on Lam's new contract, said neither he nor the School Board has any indication that Lam is interested in a job elsewhere.
Jeffrey W. Kasle said that he is in touch with Lam's lawyer and negotiations on the details of the proposed contract are "proceeding apace."
Lam's contract expires July 31. According to its terms, the School Board was to make an offer to Lam by the end of January and negotiations on that proposal were to last no more than 60 days.
Both sides waived those deadlines in light of protracted mediation with the Providence Teachers Union.
The School Board voted last December to rehire Lam and voted a month later to offer her a three-year contract.
But it took at least two more months before the School Board submitted an actual proposal to the superintendent.
Kasle, reached earlier this week, said no one should make any assumptions about the duration of the negotiations or the approaching expiration of Lam's contract at the end of July.
State: Hope's woes aren't Lam's fault
Posted Friday, June 14, 2002
The state education commissioner says it is not realistic to expect dramatic improvement in the school system during Supt. Diana Lam's three-year tenure.
BY GINA MACRIS
Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE -- State intervention at Hope High School does not detract from gains Schools Supt. Diana Lam has made elsewhere in the state's largest and most troubled school system, according to the commissioner of elementary and secondary education.
On Monday, Peter McWalters gave Hope a year to break itself down into three or four small, independent schools and ordered it to begin training teachers to improve classroom instruction.
In a subsequent interview, he rejected the notion that the intervention represents a failure on Lam's part, saying Lam is using sound, nationally recognized strategies for improving the quality of education.
McWalters said there have been some positive results, particularly at the elementary level, in the three years Lam has been in Providence.
But it is unrealistic to expect dramatic improvements throughout the school system in that amount of time, he said.
Lam, meanwhile, said she has been "more than willing to accept that there are tremendous problems in this system."
While educators generally know what kinds of approaches can work and which ones haven't, Lam said, the very best plans can fail if the political will is lacking to ensure broad-based support for improved student achievement, at Hope or any other school.
"I don't think we can single out any one group to be responsible" for the success or failure of the schools, Lam said.
"There has to be joint accountability by everybody" in the community, she said, including students and their families.
Lam said she was not necessarily speaking about financial support, although money is an issue, but a community commitment to high academic achievement.
The isolated nature of the intervention at Hope confirms "that there really is a district plan [for improvement], that there is leadership and that it is moving in the right direction," McWalters said.
Among low-performing elementary schools in the state, he said, Providence has the highest concentration of those showing improved scores on state assessments.
Only four elementary schools in Rhode Island have shown gains in every area tested, McWalters said, and three of them are in Providence.
And at the secondary level, there is "real energy and leadership" at both Mount Pleasant and Central, the other two large low-performing high schools in the city, McWalters said.
Classical High School, in Providence, which accepts students by application, is one of only four high-performing high schools in the state.
The intervention at Hope was one facet of a 12-page report similar to 20 others McWalters has issued since he began meeting with representatives of low-performing schools in May.
Hope and the other two large low-performing high schools have similar plans that address their internal organization and what teachers do in the classroom.
One difference between Hope and the others is that it has failed to address the quality of classroom instruction.
Part of McWalters's intervention encourages teachers to participate in at least 20 hours of professional development during the next school year.
Hope also showed a pattern of sinking test scores, while Mount Pleasant and Central had modest improvements in student performance.
Over the last four years, Mount Pleasant has met five targets for improvement in language arts and one in mathematics, according to McWalters.
Central has met two targets for improvement in language arts and one in writing, out of 8 tested.
Mount Pleasant and Central each have given some attention to professional development, but McWalters suggests they have a long way to go.
All three schools have attempted to divide themselves into smaller units so students have a personal connection with an adult who cares about their education.
Hope, where the planning began four years ago, tried to accomplish the entire reorganization in one year, while the other schools focused their efforts on the ninth grade.
"The thing at Hope was too big, too fast," McWalters said, explaining that the state wants to "go in there and push it to where it wants to go."
Even though McWalters did not intervene at Mount Pleasant and Central, his report directs them to make the smaller units work on all grade levels.
McWalters's report noted that Mount Pleasant and Central each have taken steps to give high quality remedial instruction to students who lack the basic literacy and mathematics skills necessary to succeed in high school.
The two also have begun programs enabling failing students to make up work for course credit so they do not continue to fall behind.
McWalters said he was heartened by the respectful reception he received at Hope on Monday when he outlined the intervention to the faculty and other school officials.
And he noted that at the end of the meeting, the president of the Providence Teachers Union stood in support of the intervention.
"There's not a better omen for state intervention with collaboration" from labor as well as management, McWalters said.
Hope ordered to meet goals
Posted Tuesday, June 11, 2002
The directive comes in response to Hope High School's decline in test scores and increase in disciplinary problems and dropouts.
BY LINDA BORG and GINA MACRIS
Journal Staff Writers
PROVIDENCE -- The education commissioner yesterday ordered the Providence school district to replace all four assistant principals at Hope High School as the first step in a larger plan to improve the failing school.
This marks the first time that the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has intervened so directly in a public school, Commissioner Peter McWalters said yesterday.
The state stepped in because Hope, unlike the other two large, low-performing high schools in Providence, was getting worse on several fronts: test scores, disciplinary problems, and the number of dropouts.
McWalters endorsed the recent appointment of a highly regarded principal, Nancy Mullen, who has led Mount Pleasant High School in Providence for the past seven years.
In a meeting yesterday with Hope faculty, McWalters described the other directives or goals that Hope must meet:
The school must be broken into three or four smaller schools-within-a-school. A reorganization plan must be submitted to McWalters by Jan. 31 and must be in place by September 2003.
The smaller schools will be allowed to do their own hiring and have much more control over their budgets and curriculum. Each unit will be run by one of the new administrators who will work for Mullen.
Teachers are strongly urged to participate in at least 20 hours of professional development a year, but will not be required to do so.
Faculty members will be allowed to transfer out of the school, if, in a year, they do not support the school's new vision.
One of the biggest critics of the plan was Stephen Kane, a spokesman for the administrators' association. He said that the four assistant principals are "the only ones taking a hit," although he said that everyone should be held accountable for a school's performance.
All four assistant principals have been informally notified that they will be transferred, a move, Kane said, that casts a cloud over their reputations.
However, Schools Supt. Diana Lam said that "school improvement is never about a single person."
Meanwhile, Hope Principal Harry Potter has accepted a job with the Providence school administration.
Before yesterday's meeting, McWalters told reporters that Hope is on the right track. For the past four years, the school has been planning to divide the high school into four smaller units that would give students much more individual attention.
But the plans have fallen short on implementation, McWalters said.
Except for the ninth grade, teachers have been unable to work as teams within their units. And, he said, the plans have not addressed changes in classroom instruction necessary to improve test scores -- and the quality of education.
In a brief interview yesterday, Lam said she was pleased that McWalters's directives build on the work already done.
At the same time, she acknowledged that the "data on Hope requires some intervention and support."
Lam said, in a statement, that she supported McWalters's action but worried that it sets a precedent by failing to provide additional money to implement the state directives.
Joseph A. Almagno, executive director of the Providence Teachers Union, raised concerns about staffing and other costs associated with moving to four smaller schools. Such costs, he said, can be a "major stumbling block" to McWalters's otherwise excellent plans.
McWalters said the redesign will not cost more than $70,000 for professional training this year, whereas the new school leaders will require very little extra money.
But Lam said that the state should not assume that the district will be able to absorb future costs on its own.
Although the tone of yesterday's meeting was respectful, it was clear that a number of teachers wondered if this was just another dream of reform that would wind up in the dustbin.
"I've been here 18 years," said Marianne West. "We've done this many times. Every time, we put in a good faith effort and it doesn't work."
Some teachers were upset by what they heard yesterday and did not want to comment. Others were cautiously optimistic:
"We all want this," said Lucille Bishop, a special-education teacher. "He listened to us. I'll put my faith in him."
Phil DeCecco, president of the Providence Teachers' Union, stood next to McWalters and strongly encouraged union members to participate in the professional development that will be offered during the coming year.
Although McWalters stressed that he wants the school to make these changes on its own, if Hope High School continues to flounder, he said he has the authority to intervene more directly.
"I'm saying, 'Enough,' " McWalters told The Journal, "I want this and I want this a year from September."
Almagno put it even more bluntly: "If they don't get it done by 2003, [McWalters] will do it for them."
Council scolds school officials over budget plan
Posted Monday, June 10, 2002
Council members gripe about what they call bad planning by the School Board and overly generous salaries paid to school administrators.
BY GREGORY SMITH
Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE --
City Council members last week scolded school officials about the practicality of their budgeting, the size of the salaries that school administrators are paid and a variety of alleged shortcomings.
What the council members left unclear is whether the School Board can expect additional taxpayer dollars to help the board close a $14.6-million gap in its proposed budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1.
The council Finance Committee and other council members sat down with school officials Thursday in the cramped city clerk's office at City Hall.
In what has become an annual ritual attached to the budget adoption process, council members aired their gripes about the schools and school officials were obliged to listen and answer questions that were occasionally sarcastic.
The board submitted to the mayor a $285.9-million budget that he pared to $279.5 million and passed along to the council. Both budgets relied heavily on a substantial increase in state aid that did not materialize.
The school budget for the current year, ending June 30, is $253.6 million.
Since the mayor made his submission, school officials told the council, they have found ways to reduce the budget by another $2.8 million. Those ways include trimming some expenses and reallocating state aid to cover other expenses.
That leaves the budget for the time being at $276.8 million, bringing the gap between spending and revenue down to $14.6 million.
"You better get the $14 million," snapped Councilman Terrence M. Hassett, D-Ward 12.
However, Mark V. Dunham, the schools' finance director, told the School Board two weeks ago that unnamed city officials have promised that the board would not be expected to close the gap entirely with spending cuts.
Ralph Salvatore, school budget officer, said at the council budget meeting that an additional $1.5 million in spending cuts probably can be identified without hurting the educational effort. That would reduce the gap to $13.1 million.
After that, Salvatore warned, any further spending cuts will become painful.
Some council members said they cannot understand why the School Board adopted a budget that was so heavily dependent on a large-scale increase in state aid that, even months ago, was clearly not in the offing.
Councilwoman Patricia K. Nolan, D-Ward 11, called that "mind-boggling."
Susan Lusi, chief of staff for Schools Supt. Diana Lam, said only that the board had had to adopt a budget in the dark, not knowing what aid would be forthcoming.
Among decisions for which some council members have repeatedly called the School Board to task are the salaries that it doles out to school administrators. Last week, Hassett called those salaries "very hefty" and Councilman John J. Igliozzi, D-Ward 7, branded them "exorbitant."
"Our salaries are competitive but they are not excessive in terms of the market" for administrators in urban school systems, Deputy Schools Supt. Melody Johnson responded. "It's an investment in leadership and in our students."
Councilman Kevin Jackson, the Finance Committee chairman, urged school officials to pull together information about all their property leases so that the council can consider having some operations consolidated in buildings owned or controlled by the city and the Providence Redevelopment Agency, such as the Fogarty Building, on Fountain Street. Consolidation can save money, he suggested.
School property leases are a sensitive subject, given that a couple of them are the subject of corruption charges against Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr. in his federal court trial.
If some council members covet the Fogarty Building for permanent city or school use, that could set up a clash with other council members and with the mayor, who has said he would let developer Vincent J. Mesolella Jr. have that property as the site for a new hotel.
School officials also were pressed about why transportation costs continue to increase sharply, even though the council has been told over the years that schools would be constructed in central locations in order to minimize busing.
Some council members continue to chafe over the school system's practice of busing some students away from their neighborhood schools. Lusi promised to schedule another meeting to deal, in depth, with transportation issues.
The only board member who attended the meeting was Samuel Zurier, who left before it was over. Some council members feel that the board slights them from time to time, and the absence of board members at the meeting irritated Jackson.
This is where you must come to get your money, he reminded school officials.
Principal leaving Hope High after 5 years
Posted Monday, June 10, 2002
BY GINA MACRIS
Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE -- When Harry Potter walks through the halls of Hope High School, walkie-talkie in hand, he sees himself in the youth who pass him.
"Having grown up in South Providence, it's an honor to come back and be an administrator from the same system I graduated from and struggled through," said Potter.
Potter, Hope's principal for nearly five years, has abundant energy and a singular skill in working with people, particularly youth, according to one former boss and long-time friend.
But his ability to relate to people apparently hasn't been enough to prevent a free fall in state test scores at the school over the last three years, prompting the state to intervene.
Peter McWalters, Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education, plans to meet with Potter and Hope's faculty at the end of the school day today to outline several directives.
"I have given this school every drop of effort," Potter said, and "it does hurt when you think about all of the time you put in and still there are other entities that have ideas on wanting to change it."
"I've got to live with the fact that the state wants to make recommendations based on some of the work we did," Potter said. "I wish we had more time."
Potter, however, had already decided months ago to leave Hope. He was designated in March to assume a new administrative post in Providence that focuses on the dropout phenomenon.
Potter said he sought the position because of his particular interest in dropouts. A former dropout himself, Potter now holds two master's degrees and is working on a doctorate.
He said he has been unable to work on his dissertation -- the effectiveness of truancy courts in keeping children in school -- while meeting the demands of running a school, and he hopes the new job will allow him enough free time to make some headway.
If he had it to do over again, Potter said Friday, "I'm not too sure I would change the effort, but maybe the focus."
While Potter shines one-on-one, there is evidence that he does less well with the kinds of grinding managerial and administrative details that are invisible when they are in place but can result in major gaffes when they are missing.
Potter admits he did not give enough attention to test preparation until after scores on state assessments had tumbled to embarrassing lows a year ago, with 4 percent or less of students showing they met state standards.
"If I had known there was a major emphasis on that a year ago, I would have tweaked on that," Potter said.
This year, after a campaign to convince students of the importance of the tests, the participation rate shot up from 28 percent to at least 70 percent.
There is no information available yet on this year's scores.
Last year, Hope's dropout rate spiked from 22.65 percent to 56.3 percent. The figures are a projection of the likelihood that a freshman will leave school before graduating. At least part of the jump probably stemmed from steps taken at the district level to improve the accuracy of statistics reported to the state.
But Potter could offer no explanation. He simply said he hadn't been aware of the higher figure.
Potter says the relationships he has built with faculty, students and alumni has been part of his effort to change Hope and contends it has "paid off to some degree."
It was undoubtedly his ability to relate to people that enabled Potter to mend deep divisions in the faculty well enough to gain approval from two-thirds of teachers for a reorganization that had been stalled for years. The new structure breaks the school into four smaller "houses" and extends class time for literacy and math.
But moving the faculty to the point of voting took Potter the first three years of his tenure at Hope, as well as a change in administration that brought in Schools Supt. Diana Lam, who mandated a reorganization in all the city's high schools. And the initial results of the implementation, begun last September, have not yet showed up in test scores.
THE PRINCIPAL'S
desk at Hope High School is a long way from the streets of South Providence, where Potter grew up.
As a freshman at Mount Pleasant High School, Potter was enough of a discipline problem to get thrown out.
He returned to school at the Alternate Learning Project, where he received encouragement from the first in a series of mentors who have guided him over the years.
Returning to Mount Pleasant in his junior year, he was taken under the wing of Theodore Haig, a black assistant principal in a school that was then nearly all white.
Haig got Potter out of a low academic track -- one that never would have allowed him to go to college.
Potter did well enough to enroll in the Talent Development program at the University of Rhode Island in the fall of 1976. And as a junior at URI, Potter met Agnes Doody, a communications professor who did not mince her words.
Potter recalled Doody handing him back his first writing assisgnment.
"She said, 'Mr. Potter, this is illiterate. And you know what? You've been ripped off by your education in Providence, and we need to correct that.' "
Doody tutored him in writing two hours a week for a year. He still talks to Agnes Doody about once a month and calls her his "second mom."
Potter majored in history and discovered he liked teaching. But after working at Central High School for about three years, he said, he quit to pursue his dream of becoming a lawyer.
He lasted one year in law school, hating it, and came back to public education, adding to his résumé a master's degree in counseling, a master's in education, and a school administrator's certificate.
1993, Potter walked into Mount Pleasant High School as an assistant principal, coming full circle on a journey of two decades that started with failure.
Potter said he enjoys being in a position to have a positive impact on the lives of children who "look like me and have the same experiences like me."
His old boss at Mount Pleasant, Nancy Mullen, was tapped to become Hope's new principal after Potter accepted the dropout post.
She said Potter is also a friend. "The thing I respect the most about Harry is his commitment to the community," she said.
A much less charitable view of Potter emerged at a City Council Finance Committee meeting last week, when two city councilmen mused aloud, without mentioning him by name, why someone in charge of a school with a skyrocketing dropout rate would be "promoted" to a dropout prevention post. In fact, Potter will make a few thousand dollars less in his new position.
On Friday, Potter said the comments reflect a "very narrow assessment of me" and a show no understanding of the complexities of an urban high school.
Added Mullen, "All of us are working very hard, trying to figure out what needs to happen to make kids perform better."
She said there aren't "that many percentage points" that separate one urban high school from another
"We're all figuring it out together, the whole state. It's not just Hope High School."
Assessment reports replace letter grades
Posted Friday, June 7, 2002
At Feinstein High School, meeting standards is the prerequisite for graduation, rather than traditional course credits.
By GINA MACRIS
Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE -- John Pannozzi, a freshman at Feinstein High School, can tell at a glance that he meets his teachers' expectations for interpreting drama.
That fact is clearly marked on his latest progress report by a number -- 4 -- along with the context in which he demonstrated competence, a performance of Othello.
There is also commentary from the teacher: "John was the leader of the class when it came to understanding and interpeting Othello . . ."
Panozzi's first-semester progress report, or report card, goes on for six pages as a running box score. Nowhere is there a grade that attempts to average performance on various standards into a single letter.
"It's interesting when you think about what this means," said K.C. Perry, the dean of teaching and learning at Feinstein.
"When you start averaging standards, conceptually it doesn't work," said. "To do standards you have to get away from the grades."
The new "report card" is emerging as a concrete way of explaining what it means to teach according to standards -- the cornerstone of the model academic program that opened in September at Feinstein High.
After a transitional period to accommodate upperclassmen, meeting standards will be the prerequisite for graduation rather than traditional course credits, which critics say measure "seat time" more accurately than what students have learned.
Unlike many alternative ungraded assessments, the method Feinstein has adopted will give "people more info about any individual student than they've ever seen before," Perry said.
He said he knows of no other school that is "so focused on the standards."
Deputy Schools Supt. Melody A. Johnson said many schools around the country have adopted assessments that tell students whether they meet standards, but Feinstein is the only one that signals exactly what each student must do to improve.
All schools should be moving in the direction of Feinstein, teaching youngsters knowledge and skills in a way that is relevant to their lives, Johnson said.
"You can't even repair a car without a solid foundation in algebra and geometry," she said.
For teachers, the necessity of rating a youngster's ability to do specific things -- show a linear relationship in mathematics, for example -- has helped define their day-to-day work.
They are making more frequent use of projects that require students to apply knowledge and skills and are relying less on traditional quizzes and tests that simply ask youngsters to give back information.
"By moving into this assessment, we're changing classroom practice," said Feinstein's principal, Nancy Owen.
"The teaching has improved greatly," she said, more so than she had anticipated in one year.
Perry said, "We've seen tremendous growth here as a school."
Several Feinstein students interviewed recently said they get more out of the new assessments.
Olivia Nam, a senior headed for the University of Rhode Island in the fall, said the new assessments are easier to read even though they are more voluminous, with every student receiving two pages of tables for each subject.
Each project or activity correlates to one or more standards. Progress is defined by numbers that range from zero -- "no evidence of work" to 6 -- "exceeds the standard with distinction," similar to the rankings that appear on state exams.
"One page is telling us what is good or not, and the second page is the comment section," Nam said.
And there are mid-semester progress reports that give students an idea how their effort is perceived regarding homework, classwork, knowledge of content, and progress on projects.
The progress reports are good snapshots of "what I'm doing now," Nam said, and serve as reminders of work yet to be done, like a "final project coming up."
Feinstein, always known as an alternative school, experimented with letter grades briefly when Nam was a junior and then reverted to its credit/no credit evaluations.
"When we did A, B, C, D," said Jheraldy Goris, her mother, who primarily speaks Spanish, "didn't understand the grades."
"Now she sees I'm doing good in this," said Goris, a senior who will attend Rhode Island College in the fall.
Samantha Perez, a junior, said all the changes in assessment sometimes get frustrating. She said she hopes Feinstein sticks with the latest evaluation, which explains "what you need and what you need to do."
In the past , Perez said, sometimes teachers got "lazy" with comments and simply said students were "doing good."
"But they wouldn't say what you're doing good at," Nam added.
One teacher, Jennifer Geller, said she feels "better about the scores I'm giving" this year.
When she worked with traditional grades in other schools, Geller said, she gave out As and Bs to students who worked hard but didn't produce better results than some other youngsters.
She said she also gave As and Bs to students who she knew were capable of doing better than the work they turned in.
The new assessment indicates there is always room for improvement, making everyone work harder, including the students who might otherwise rest on their laurels, said Geller, a social studies teacher.
Meanwhile, John Pannozzi's mother, Kathleen, pointed out that the new assessment would not have been possible unless Feinstein were a small school.
"The the size of the school is directly related to quality of relationships between teachers and students," she said. "That knowledge of the student translates into the accuracy of this assessment."
John Pannozzi has Asperger's syndrome, which his mother says affects his ability to communicate with others more than anything else.
Because of his limited ability to interact with others -- he wouldn't talk directly with a reporter who was a stranger, for example -- the personal attention John receives at Feinstein is especially important.
"I don't think I ever have seen an adult speak to a younger person without knowing their names," his mother said of the school.
Jennifer DeLaCruz, a ninth grader, agrees that Feinstein's size is a critical element in its approach to students.
"You get to know people better," she said.
"Small schools are better."
McWalters gives some signs for Hope
Posted Friday, June 7, 2002
A meeting with legislators and city officials allays fears that the state was about to take over the low-performing Providence high school.
BY GINA MACRIS and LINDA BORG
Journal Staff Writers
PROVIDENCE -- The state will give Hope High School four or five directives for improvement and will not take over the school or close it down and reopen it, said Peter McWalters, the Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education, yesterday.
Nor will the demands put on Hope be a "budget-buster," McWalters said.
Emerging from a closed-door meeting with the city's General Assembly delegation and city officials, McWalters refused to spell out the directives, sticking to a plan to share the details with the Hope faculty before making any substantive public statements.
Although Providence legislators had been miffed that they were not fully briefed until yesterday, Rep. Thomas Slater, D-Providence, said he and others who attended the meeting were satisfied with the direction McWalters was headed at Hope.
"They are comfortable with what's going on Monday," when McWalters plans to meet with the faculty at Hope, Slater said.
McWalters said that on Monday, he also plans to send letters to the School Board, the administration of Supt. Diana Lam, and the Providence Teachers Union, explaining his orders and attaching deadlines for completion.
Under state law, McWalters has broad authority to intervene in schools, such as Hope, which were categorized for the first time in February as low-performing.
Since then, he has required all 116 low-performing schools to submit plans for improvement and has followed up with face-to-face meetings with key educators in each school and each district.
Hope will be the first school in Providence to receive a report on the conclusions that McWalters has drawn from his face-to-face meeting.
After the meeting with McWalters, the Providence lawmakers decided to hold off discussing details of the Hope plan until after Monday afternoon's meeting with Hope teachers.
"The meeting was very cordial and informative," said Rep. Paul Moura, D-Providence. "From what we heard, we can be supportive."
Those thoughts were seconded by Rep. Edith H. Ajello, D-Providence, who said she supported the direction that the commissioner is heading.
Deputy Supt. Melody A. Johnson, who attended yesterday's session at the State House, said the problems at Hope are "not unique" but represent the difficulties faced by urban schools all over the country.
She said Hope's faculty has planned sound strategies to improve the quality of education for its students, but implementation, begun just last September, has been hampered by a number of factors.
For example, she said, the work-to-rule posture imposed by the teachers' union during much of the school year prevented teachers from meeting after school to give the reorganization the daily attention to detail it needed.
Meanwhile, Harry Potter, Hope's principal, said the school has been able to identify one reason scores have fallen during the last two years and to correct the problem.
State exams had been given at the start of the school day, by homeroom teachers with whom the students had no personal connection. This year, he said, the tests were administered to 10th graders by their English teachers.
And the test-taking was preceded by a student-led campaign to emphasize the importance of participating in the exams, Potter said.
As a result, the proportion of eligible students taking the exams jumped from 28 percent last year to at least 70 percent earlier this year, Potter said. He said he does not yet have access to any information about the scores.
The news of the impending state intervention first came to light Tuesday night, when an education official began informing members of the Providence delegation during final deliberations at the State House.
Providence lawmakers called for yesterday's session with McWalters to find out exactly what the Department of Education wants from Hope High School.
"To some degree, my questions were answered," said Sen. Maryellen Goodwin, chair of the delegation. "I still have concerns and part of my concerns revolve around funding."
Where, she asked, is the money for the Hope intervention coming from?
McWalters said the reforms can be achieved within the Providence budget.
Like the legislators, a spokesman for Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr. said he did not learn of the Hope intervention until Tuesday night.
"Obviously, he [Cianci] would like to have been informed," said Patricia McLaughlin, his director of administration, yesterday. "As soon as I called [Education Commissioner] Peter McWalters, he was very responsive in discussing this with us."
McLaughlin said that both Cianci and the Providence delegation have "carried the water," because they not only supported Supt. Diana Lam's controversial reform measures but have lobbied for more local aid to Providence schools.
"All we are saying is let us help you," she said. "The mayor has been working hard for this school system. Why not include him in the process?"
Providence's Hope High faces state intervention
Posted Thursday, June 6, 2002
The education commissioner denies that a state takeover is in the works, but a member of the Board of Regents for Elementary and Secondary Education says that is the case.
BY LINDA BORG and GINA MACRIS
Journal Staff Writers
PROVIDENCE -- After three years of plummeting test scores, Hope High School is now facing aggressive intervention from the state Department of Education.
Although Commissioner Peter McWalters denied that the state is taking over the school, a member of the Board of Regents for Elementary and Secondary Education described the proposed measures as just that.
"Maybe technically it's not, but as far as their day-to-day operation and the way they teach their kids, it's a takeover," said regent Jo Eva Gaines. "This is the ultimate intervention."
According to Gaines, McWalters told the regents at a workshop Monday night: "We're going in."
However, when asked if a takeover was contemplated, McWalters said, "Oh, God no."
However, he declined to describe exactly what kinds of actions the state plans for Hope, a 1,200-student high school on the East Side with a diverse student body and a history of divisions among faculty members and student discipline problems.
"I'm not ready to share anything that we haven't shared with the administration," McWalters said.
McWalters had planned to meet with Hope teachers yesterday afternoon, but canceled the meeting at the last minute when he was told that Providence Schools Supt. Diana Lam was out of the country and Providence teachers' union officials had a scheduling conflict.
McWalters said he called for the meeting to quell rumors that have been circulating about the school's future. That meeting is now scheduled for Monday afternoon.
Yesterday, Rep. Paul W. Crowley, D-Newport, who also serves on the Board of Regents, provided what few details were available about the state's plans.
He said McWalters told him on Tuesday that a new principal had been appointed at Hope and that all teachers would have to participate in additional training around the state's new education standards for students.
According to Crowley, McWalters also said that faculty would be given the opportunity to transfer to other Providence schools during an upcoming job fair.
Crowley, who has long pushed for stronger state intervention, said he was pleased that McWalters was finally becoming more directive.
"The commissioner is responsible for improving performance," he said. "We've got to give him the leeway to do that. The emphasis here is on working with the faculty and doing a lot of professional development."
The message to teachers, Crowley said, is, "If you stay, be prepared for the fact that there is a lot of work involved."
But McWalters said this is "not about telling the faculty to get with us or get out."
Ten days ago, the School Board asked Nancy Mullen, highly regarded by Lam, to move to Hope from Mount Pleasant High School, where she has been principal for seven years.
In the process, the principal's job at Hope was changed from a 10-month position to a year-round one, and the pay was boosted from about $95,000 to almost $117,000.
During the appointment, Lam noted that "Hope has embarked on great ideas, and now they need a different level of leadership."
"Nancy will bring expertise and energy to the challenging role of principal at Hope High School," Lam told the School Board.
In the last nine months, Hope has begun implementing a highly ambitious plan to divide the school into four smaller learning communities, as a result of research that says youngsters need a personal connection with at least one adult to make a go of their high school years.
The other large comprehensive high schools began putting similar plans into place at the same time under a district-wide mandate to reorganize, but they limited their innovations to the ninth grade.
Hope was the only school that tried to reorganize all grade levels at once.
Several teachers and administrators contacted yesterday indicated that the reorganization is moving in the right direction, but still has a long way to go.
Among the most visible problems this year has been a lack of discipline among students, they said. Carole Marshall, a teacher coordinator in Hope's reorganization, said a lack of discipline has been a problem at the school during all eight years she has taught there.
The problem has gone "up and down, and this year has been a difficult year," she said. Among many factors contributing to student disciplinary problems were protracted wrangling over a teacher's contract, the midyear departure of an assistant principal who became ill, and the decision of the current principal, Harry Potter, to take an administrative job focusing on drop-out prevention, Marshall said.
"Every hope is that the new administrative team will start next year much stronger," Marshall said.
Veronica Rancourt, another teacher, said rumors that the school would be closed and reopened, or that the state would take it over, have run wild over the school.
If Lam wants to restructure Hope, she does not need the state to do it. Last year, she faced considerable political heat in closing Feinstein High School and reopening it under new leadership.
Feinstein quickly won autonomous status from the school district, which allowed it to hire its own teachers. Ordinarily teachers are hired by the central administration with the approval of the School Board and the plum assignments go to the most senior teachers. Lam is on the record saying that she would like to see more schools go the way of Feinstein.
McWalters said that none of the state's plans for Hope High School should come as a surprise because the state has been meeting with top administrators since early April.
And none of what the state intends is occurring in a vacuum.
This winter, the state, for the first time, ranked all of Rhode Island's schools based on how they performed on statewide assessment tests. Schools were classified as high- , moderate- or low-performing.
For the past three months, the state has been meeting with superintendents, principals, union leaders and school board members from each of the state's 116 low-performing schools, including Hope High School.
The result? Each school is required to write a plan that addresses weaknesses in such things as leadership, curriculum and training that have been identified by the state.
Meanwhile, at least three members of the Board of Regents, including Chairman James DiPrete, were caught off guard by McWalters's supposed plans for the high school.
Only four members of the board were present at Monday's workshop when McWalters announced that he planned to intervene at Hope. Three members had already left the 31/2-hour meeting and two were not able to attend.
"No kidding," said regent Mario Mancieri, when contacted yesterday by The Providence Journal. "It's surprising that it would be done in this manner. I'm going to ask why it was brought up in this way."
Under the state's education reform law, McWalters has the authority to intervene at a school, but the commissioner has always said that a state takeover would be a last resort.
And McWalters does not have to get approval from the Board of Regents before undertaking this type of intervention, according to Crowley and the Department of Education.
Community input on schools concludes
Posted Monday, June 3, 2002
The recommendations of the twenty "study circles," which met for four weeks, will be presented at a forum next week.
BY GINA MACRIS
Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE -- About 240 people, half of them teenagers, have participated in a four-week series of conversations intended to lay the groundwork for community participation in the redesign of the city's high schools.
The conclusions of about 20 "study circles" -- groups of at least 10 people who met once a week for four weeks -- will be presented next week at an "action forum" that will aim to connect those results to a plan for community engagement during the next six months.
The study circles have focused on the various facets of maturation that must occur for youth to become responsible adults, according to Mary Sylvia Harrison, executive director of the Rhode Island Children's Crusade and the leader of an initiative to draw all segments of the community into high school redesign.
"In indigenous cultures, adults have very specific expectations of what youth need to know and do to be members of the adult community," Harrison said.
"We are trying to fashion this here" in a diverse urban setting where many cultures come together in a mosaic, she said.
"What besides a good education needs to be developed? What are those other things that round off a person as they pass from youth to adults?" Harrison asked rhetorically, framing some of the questions that have been asked of study circle participants.
Providence has a "wonderful mosaic of a community, and we should celebrate our differences, but we also want to discover what is common among us," Harrison said.
Harrison, who has participated in a study circle, said she found many similarities in thinking among the various members.
The 240 participants represented about 80 percent of the 300 Providence residents sought by the organizers for the study circles.
Although the breadth of participation fell short of the goal, Harrison and others said they were impressed by the strong response from teenagers.
The response also may be an indication that adults do not often ask teenagers their opinions, perhaps because they don't value what youth have to say, Harrison said.
Ann Clanton, another representative of the Children's Crusade, said she "found youth engaging, interested, very pleased to be there."
"They were very happy they had an audience," said Clanton, who participated in a study circle, and "they had clear suggestions of what they thought might work," Clanton said.
In her group at least, she said, the teenagers favored the small learning communities that the city's large high schools are attempting to create as part of the redesign effort, which is finishing its first year of implementation.
The overall five-year redesign project is financed with $8 million from the Carnegie Corporation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Of a total of $1.2 million allocated during the first year, one quarter, or $300,000, has been set aside to promote community involvement.
At the action forum, Harrison said, each study circle will be asked to prioritize the essential elements of youth development, the roles of various people in the community in fostering that development, and steps that can be taken in the next six months to begin working on those goals. The process will be repeated with wider circles of participants until the entire group has found common ground, Harrison said. She said the session will end with "things that cause us to make personal commitments."
School budget faces cuts
Posted Monday, June 3, 2002
05/31/2002
BY GINA MACRIS
Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE -- School officials and the city's finance department have been able to pare $6.4 million out of the built-in deficit of $23.7 million in the original budget proposal of $285.9 million the School Board sent to the mayor's office at the end of April.
But there remains a worrisome $17.3 million gap between expenses and revenues that still must be addressed, Mark V. Dunham, the schools' finance director, told the School Board Monday.
"This will certainly have a negative impact on teaching and learning," he said, but the district will try to "cut around the edges" in an effort to "stay true to [its] goals and objectives."
Dunham said he believes the schools could "weather $10 million in cuts" before the reform measures of Schools Supt. Diana Lam begin to lose focus.
The $6.4 million already taken out of the budget does not represent a loss of services or programs but has been accomplished by moving some costs out of the operating budget and finding unexpected savings.
For example, the cost of paying teachers during the next school year will be $2.5 million less than was originally anticipated, according to a table Dunham presented to the board.
And a reduction in the cost of health benefits will result in $150,000 in savings.
In a memo to the School Board, Dunham said city officials have indicated they do not expect the school department to cut expenses to take care of all the remaining $17 million revenue shortfall.
The value of the reductions they do anticipate is not clear, the memo said.
"But since the mayor has education as a major city initiative, the expectation is the cuts should not prohibit positive progress by the [school] department," Dunham wrote.
He gave the School Board a proposal for about $2.7 million in additional reductions, including $1.5 million that would come from an across-the-board cut of 20 percent in discretionary purchases by schools and the central administration.
Seven positions would be eliminated for a total savings of $289,710. The cuts would affect two special-education teachers, two speech and language therapists, one teacher from each of two new high schools and a guidance clerk.
The reductions still leave 53 new positions costing $1,756,980, including 30 in special education.
In addition to adding special education teachers, the district plans to hire 10 more certified nursing assistants to work with medically fragile children.
Ken Swanson, the executive director of special education, said some of the increase in staff results from expanding enrollment.
Other positions have been created for behavioral specialists with the hope that the need for placing children in costly private programs will be reduced, Swanson said.
He also acknowledged that the district is attempting to make up for the fact that it has been out of compliance with state and federal regulations in serving special-education students, particularly in the area of speech and language development.
Qualified therapists in speech and language development are in great demand and limited supply, Swanson said.
Other new positions include five teachers in each of the new high schools, the Health Science & Technology Academy and the Providence Academy for International Studies.
An assistant to the principal also will be added at the Alternate Learning Project.
Apart from proposed cuts in staffing, Dunham submitted a schedule of line-item reductions, ranging from $150,000 in computer training to $500 in reference books for his own office.
The proposed line-item cuts totaled $656,165.
Dunham and other school officials will take up the budget with the City Council Finance Committee in City Hall Thursday at 6 p.m.
|
|
