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October 2006
Communications Plan
Posted Wednesday, October 25, 2006
October 18, 2006
Dear Colleague:
Please be advised that the Providence Teachers Union has embarked upon an ambitious plan to increase communications directly with teachers in the most timely and efficient manner.
Our “Plan” includes the following initiatives.
1. E-mail: Presently our office has on file 1,120 teacher e-mail addresses (work and/or home). We plan on using this vehicle to share important information such as memos, letters, notices and announcements, etc.
2. Website: Our Website (www.proteun.org) will be upgraded to accommodate reports of meetings, status of negotiations, email postings, Joint Committee reports, School Board decisions, Commissioner and Board of Regents actions, etc.
3. PROTEUN: Published on a bi-monthly basis beginning this month, this popular internal document will include grievance decisions, arbitration awards, special offers to Providence teachers, updates on our various benefits (i.e. Health and Welfare, Sick Leave Bank, etc.) school intervention updates, critical dates, etc.
4. Update database: Our updated database will enable us to communicate directly with specific groups of teachers (i.e. Art teacher, 1st grade teachers, etc.) without having to communicate with the entire membership.
5. Providence Teachers Union Newsletter: To be published on a quarterly basis. This vehicle will include articles and information of interest to the general public.
6. Public Relations and Publicity: Dissemination of newsworthy information to parents, legislators, business community and the general public via op-ed articles, letters to the editor, radio, TV and cable interviews as well as Public Service Announcements.
The major goal of this “Plan” is to create interactive communications via the use of technology and the transition from hard copy to electronic communications will occur gradually during this academic year.
To assist in this conversion, please be certain that your email address is recorded at the Union office. You may check with Michelle at 421-4014 at the Union office or with your Building Delegate.
As we initiate the specific tasks listed above, please feel free to contact me or anyone at the Union office to provide important feed-back and suggestions.
As always, I thank you for your continued support and assistance.
Sincerely,
Steven F. Smith
President
Teacher, management collaboration a key lesson
Posted Thursday, October 19, 2006
Rather than viewing each other as adversaries, teachers' unions and school departments need to create a shared vision of improving student achievement, panelists at a Providence conference are told.
BY LINDA BORG
Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE -- Most teachers' contracts are like bad marriages: they reflect deep wounds that have festered for a long time.
Linda Kaboolian, a labor expert from Harvard University, said both union leadership and management have to acknowledge that they have inflicted damage on each other. If educators are serious about improving student achievement, then both sides have to move beyond the factory style of teacher contracts.
"Rather than fight about the workplace," Kaboolian said, "isn't it time we asked, 'What if our shared problem was improving student achievement?' "
Kaboolian was one of the key speakers at a day-long conference on labor management relations sponsored by Providence Mayor David N. Cicilline and Brown University's Urban Education Policy Program. The forum, held at the Providence Biltmore hotel, brought together the mayors of Hartford, Bridgeport and Stamford, Conn., along with superintendents from Boston and Buffalo, N.Y., and local leaders in education and business.
Cicilline challenged the nearly 200 people in attendance to answer the following question: How do we get union leaders and management to move beyond the adversarial approach to contract negotiations? How do we move from fighting to collaborating?
Adam Urbanski, executive director of the Teacher Union Reform Network, said that school districts are "dead in the water" if they don't learn to cooperate.
"The worse-case scenario is that all the adults got along and the kids are still failing," he told the crowd. "This is not a question of making the adults comfortable. When all hell breaks loose, then you're getting real reform."
Urbanski argued that you can't accomplish true reform unless you change what happens to children's lives before and after school. That means doing more in the areas of early childhhod education, after-school programs, health care and housing.
"Poor and minority children can learn," he said. "Poverty is not a determining factor."
If student achievement is so critical, then why don't school boards and unions include that language in their teacher contracts? In many cities and towns, unions and school boards do not have cooperative relationships and so accountability must be written into the contract, according to Dannel Malloy, the mayor of Stamford.
"I don't get along with my union president," said Buffalo Schools Supt. James A. Williams. "I don't even like him. But I'm on a mission to show that minority kids can learn."
During his first 15 months in office, Williams extended the school year, closed and reopened a high school and balanced the budget without laying off teachers. Then, Williams said the unthinkable: his district has enough money; it's simply spending it on the wrong things.
"The world is flat," Williams said, referring to Thomas Friedman's global economy, "but we have the same school system that we did in 1950. I hope the unions wake up. We're losing knowledge. Our children are dying intellectually."
Several panelists said improving low-performing schools will require radical solutions. Urbanski suggested something that's been tried in Harlem: pick the most depressed neighborhood in the city and plug all of the gaps -- childcare, education, after-school care, health care and housing. Kaboolian offered a less dramatic strategy. Devote more resources, including the best teachers, to the lowest performing schools.
"Kids' lives are short," she said. "Let's lift some of the contract requirements to fix under-performing schools."
Ultimately, schools need a lot more authority over everything from hiring and firing to the length of the school day, said Boston Mayor Thomas Menino.
"It takes an enormous amount of trust," he said. "If we don't have it, the only option is closing the schools."
A force for change
Posted Tuesday, October 17, 2006
By Linda Borg
Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE — Six months into his new job, Schools Supt. Donnie Evans faced his first crisis. Two-hundred high school students had walked out of class and staged a sit-in, demanding the return of their beloved principal.
The students at Del Sesto High School, off Hartford Avenue, agreed to go inside only after teachers promised that Evans would speak to them. A student jumped on the public address system and said, “Evans is coming to us!”
Standing in front of a noisy crowd, Evans tried to explain that principal John Craig had asked for the transfer and then changed his mind. But the teenagers would not be swayed. Craig was a father figure, a leader who was tough but fair.
Evans left to mull over what the students had shared. Then he returned to Del Sesto that afternoon and asked Craig to come back.
Later, Evans said that it was the students’ passion and perseverance that changed his mind.
“Sometimes,” he said, “you have to go with your gut.”
The superintendent’s friends and former colleagues say that describes Evans to a T: a man who listens to all sides of a story before making up his mind.
“Donnie Evans is the kind of leader who never loses sight of the fact that the students are the center of the school, not the adults,” said Larry Kobel, the former superintendent in Durham, N.C., where Evans began his career as a middle middle-school math teacher.
“He is driven, optimistic, visionary, fair, too-much-work and not-enough-play,” Kobel said. “He is a grinding-it-out type of leader who will produce sustainable results rather than a lot of flash."
FOR YEARS, ALL Donnie Evans had ever wanted was to be superintendent of a school system. In September of last year, he got his wish.
Evans was hired to turn around Providence, the state’s most troubled school district, where 80 percent of the approximate 26,000 students are poor, where 50 percent don’t speak English at home and where the dropout rate hovers around 30 percent.
To Evans, the first black superintendent in more than 25 years, neither poverty nor race should be excuses for poor performance.
“Education is the great equalizer,” he said. “And I’m living proof of that.”
By the time Evans arrived from Tampa, Fla., Providence was a district in dire need of stability. Diana Lam, who was hailed a national education reform leader, arrived amid much fanfare in 1999, shook up the system, then left three years later for a top job in New York City. Her deputy, Melody Johnson, continued Lam’s bold changes, only to decamp to Texas in February last year.
Evans promised to not only stay in Providence, but to retire from the district. He also promised to be a hands-on administrator, someone who regularly spends time visiting the classroom.
When Evans arrived, Providence School Board Chairman Mary McClure said, “We weren’t looking for a superstar. We wanted someone who felt he didn’t have to be the sun who would block out the other stars.”
After two strong personalities, Evans is formal, almost reticent. His staff still calls him Dr. Evans 13 months into his tenure. Standing 6-foot-3, Evans is a formidable presence, but when he enters the classroom, he kneels when he talks with children.
“There is no ego there,” said Sally Longacre, who worked for Evans in Durham. “He is so quiet, but five years from now, you’ll know that your tree was shaken.”
BORN ON A TOBACCO farm in the segregated South, Evans was destined to spend his life within shouting distance of the three-room schoolhouse that anchored his tiny crossroads town.
Then, Miss Young came and shook his tree. When Evans, a sophomore in high school, finished a math test in 15 minutes, she pulled him aside. “You’re going to college,” she said.
Young tutored him in higher math and asked him to be her teaching assistant. But mostly, she encouraged him to dream.
“She fed the fire in me that another teacher, Mrs. Armenta Gore, had lit earlier.”
Evans, now 56, was born in Bolivia, N.C., a town of 200 so isolated that its residents didn’t get indoor plumbing until 1959. There wasn’t much to the hamlet: a school, a car dealership, a gas station and a couple of churches, one Baptist, the other Methodist.
Blacks and whites lived parallel lives, attending separate churches and separate schools.
The oldest of four, Evans was raised on his family’s 50-acre farm in a county where tobacco was the only cash crop.
“We raised everything we needed to survive,” he said. “We were poor but absence wasn’t a challenge for us. It gave me a foundation that I only came to appreciate later in life.”
Once the tobacco was pulled and cured, Evans’ parents, Calvin and Mable, expected him to attend school. As Evans put it, “It was nonnegotiable.”
Elementary school consisted of a three-room schoolhouse, and the first student to arrive shoveled coal to light the heater. At the school, the middle school teacher was also the principal, and you didn’t dare misbehave because any foolishness would reflect poorly on your parents.
When Evans left Bolivia for Brunswick County High School, he had to drive 10 miles from his home — past two all-white high schools — before he arrived at his 400-pupil school. The first two years, he took the bus; the last two, he drove it — earning a handsome sum of $80 a month.
When Evans was about 13, his father, who was working as a longshoreman one winter, sustained a severe back injury that confined him to his bed. Evans had no choice: he became the man of the house, rising at 4 a.m. to do the farm work.
“After 13,” he said, “I didn’t have a childhood.”
But nothing was going to stop Evans from moving off the farm. After winning a full scholarship to North Carolina Central University, he went on to become a math teacher, a principal, a university professor, a deputy superintendent, and, in Providence, the head of a school system.
FROM THE START, Evans made it clear that he didn’t want to dismantle the work of his predecessors in Providence. He said the most important pieces were in place when he arrived: teacher training, a strong central office and a scientific way of measuring and analyzing student progress.
But Evans wasted no time making his philosophy known. By midyear, he announced that he wanted to change the middle schools from a grade six-through-eight configuration to a kindergarten-through-eight one, a model popular in Tampa, where he worked as the district’s chief academic officer. Evans hopes to introduce the model on a pilot basis next year.
The closing of Nathan Bishop Middle School on the city’s affluent East Side has been Evans’ greatest challenge, and, some would say, it was his first misstep.
Evans originally wanted to close the middle-school program at Nathan Bishop and move 9th and 10th graders there to ease crowding until a new high school was built.
But his announcement caught everyone off-guard. Nathan Bishop faculty and staff didn’t learn of his proposal until late on a Friday afternoon, just three days before the Providence School Board was to vote on the recommendation.
By Monday’s meeting, a standing-room-only crowd had mobilized to fight the closing. Every possible constituency was outraged: the school’s parents and teachers felt blind-sided, many East Side neighbors were worried that the 9th and 10th graders would upend their bucolic community and a handful of East Side parents wanted to keep the school open.
After listening, Evans postponed his recommendation to hold a series of forums, something that many observers said he should have done in the first place.
At the forums, Evans insisted on taking the heat for the decision. It was Evans who stood in front of the sometimes raucous crowd, who remained calm while a couple of overwrought East Siders made ugly, racist comments.
“Dr. Evans said, ‘I want to be the one present,’ ” said Brian Baldizar, his special assistant. “He said, ‘This isn’t something we want to do behind closed doors.’ He wanted to consult with as many people as he could.”
Then Evans changed his mind.
Nathan Bishop would close, but only for one year. Evans appointed a committee of teachers, elected officials and community leaders, which has recommended how the new Nathan Bishop should look.
Some observers felt Evans had caved to the demands of Mayor David N. Cicilline and the politically powerful East Side, but Evans said no one pressured him to reorganize the school. With the lowest test scores in the district and a declining school population, Nathan Bishop was failing its students.
“I did what was needed,” he said, “and that was to start from scratch.”
McClure, the School Board’s president, said the board has complete confidence in Evans. “He listens but he is not distracted,” she said. “He is not afraid of rocking the boat and he will keep rocking it.”
While Evans has ruffled a few feathers here, he is remembered with nothing but fondness in Tampa and Durham. In nearly a dozen interviews, former employees described Evans as a remarkable leader, a visionary with a firm grasp of the particulars, a manager more comfortable with putting his subordinates in the limelight.
“He is by far the best person that I’ve ever worked with,” said Cindy Bagwell, who worked for Evans for nearly 10 years while he ran Durham’s special-education department. “He brings out the best in people. There wasn’t anything he asked me to do that he wouldn’t do with me.”
“He changed my life,” said Eleanor Herr, who worked for Evans in Durham. “He helped me see myself in a completely different way. He made me feel like I had something important to contribute.”
THE BIGGEST CHANGE that Evans is determined to usher into Providence schools has barely been felt — yet. It’s called “whole school effectiveness” and it was a huge success in the Tampa area. Five years after the model was introduced there, Evans said that the number of high-performing schools in Hillsborough County, a district of 195,000 students, jumped from 7 to 87.
What Evans is proposing is nothing short of a radical remaking of school culture. Evans calls it the customer-service approach to public education. In six months, he said, the city’s schools would feel much more welcoming.
As Evans said, “We are not very kind to each other.”
Parents will be treated with courtesy when they enter the building. Teachers will feel responsible for every child in the building, not just the ones in their classroom. Principals will be visible, walking the hallways, popping into classes, running training sessions for faculty and staff. They will no longer be disciplinarians but instructional leaders.
“Children will feel at home,” he said. “They will feel that someone cares. If you are an adult, you will want to work in this school. If you are a child, you will look forward to going to school.”
Evans has also pledged to replace education jargon with commonplace English: IEPs will become individual learning plans; ELL will become English Language Learners. “We will demystify the language,” he said.
If changing the school culture is Evans’ top priority, putting a strong instructional leader in charge of every school is his second.
In June, Evans announced that he was reshuffling nearly every middle school principal and assistant principal in the district — an effort, he said, to find a better fit between schools and their leaders. One move — the transfer of Roseclaire Bulgin from Roger Williams Middle School — created a furor, with irate parents shutting down a School Board meeting when the board refused to let parents speak.
Parents had credited Bulgin with imposing order on a sometimes chaotic middle-school environment. In moving her, Evans also butted heads with a powerful leader in the black community, Dennis Langley, executive director of the Urban League of Rhode Island.
The two met privately, but Evans refused to back down, and Bulgin was transferred. She divides her time between two other schools.
“I went beyond what the staff would have done,” Evans said of the middle-school shakeup. “There were some folk in the district who didn’t want us to take the lead.”
Instead of waiting for the state Department of Education to intervene in the middle schools, Evans decided to take charge. “I want to be out in front.”
EVANS DESCRIBES HIMSELF as “as introverted as you can get.” In his 40s, he developed a serious kidney disease. While he was receiving thrice-weekly dialysis during a yearlong wait for a kidney transplant, Evans kept his illness to himself.
“People fear the unknown,” he said. “Right away, they see it as a weakness.”
When a donor organ finally became available, Evans saw it as “a sign from God that there is more he wants me to do.”
For Evans, for whom education was the only road out of poverty, teaching isn’t a career, it isn’t a ladder to something else, it’s a calling. A deeply religious man, Evans said he wanted to become superintendent because he could influence the greatest number of children in that role.
“I am not convinced that there are enough people in senior leadership roles who will fight for what these kids really need. Who is going to care for the poor children here? Who will speak for their interests? Too often, nobody.”
In the 1990s, Evans met his second wife, Deborah Harris. Evans had moved to Florida in 1990 to become an associate professor of special education at the University of Southern Florida. Harris was an assistant professor.
Six months later, Harris asked Evans to mentor her 10-year-old son, Eugene Fewell. Evans immediately said yes and began taking her son to ball games. Before long, Evans began taking Eugene’s 6-year-old sister, Tonya, along as well.
One day, Harris asked Evans for a ride home from campus. Eventually, he asked her out. On their first date, the couple went to dinner in St. Petersburg, and Evans, always the Southern gentleman, asked if he could hold her hand.
Two years later, they married on July 18, 1993.
When Eugene earned his paratrooper wings, he framed them and gave them away as tradition dictates. But instead of handing them to his mother, he gave them to Evans.
“If it had been anybody else,” Harris said, “I would have been upset.”
With the wings, Eugene also wrote his stepfather a note:
“Wings are not given to those who jump; they belong to those who give you the courage to jump. Thank you for giving me the courage.”
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