After 5 years of state management of the city’s schools, Mayor Brett Smiley has released his plan for taking back control from the RI Dept of Education (RIDE). The plan seeks to provide a roadmap for building a better public school system under city control. While the Mayor has been, and is still, calling for a June 2025 return to city control, by the time his plan came out in April, the prospects for that timeline had dimmed.
And, Rhode Island Commissioner of Education Angelica Infante-Green, who has the authority to decide whether and when to end the state takeover of Providence Schools, had already shot that idea down at a February press conference. However, the Commissioner did hold out the possibility of return a year from now, in June of 2026.
The Mayor’s plan could offer a starting point for working toward that goal, but only if the other parties involved, the School Board, the City Council, Providence Public School District leadership and RIDE are willing to accept it as a start.
What’s in the Mayor’s plan?
As plans go, Providence’s Plan for Our Schools: Building a Better Future should get at least a B+. It provides a comprehensive review of the past and present state of our schools and school system across eight key areas, ranging from community engagement and supporting learning, to governance and finance. For each, it outlines an anticipated future under local control and specifies steps the city will take before and after the return to local control. It’s worth reading if only to better understand some key challenges facing the Providence Public School District (PPSD).
The Mayor’s plan takes its metrics for success from RIDE’s 2020 Turnaround Action Plan (TAP) and generally commits to continuing the major educational and school construction programs that RIDE has focused on during its tenure. These include focused support for special education students and multilingual learners, high-quality curricula and teaching materials, expanded career and technical education opportunities and transition from separate middle schools for grades 6 through 8 to unified K-8 school buildings.
The plan adds its own ideas about streamlining PPSD’s financial, data and purchasing systems and even combining some now-separate PPSD and City systems. The most transformative idea in the Mayor’s plan would make “individual schools serve as the agents of change” by elevating teachers in Teacher Leadership Teams to shared authority with principals to manage each school within goals and parameters set by the district.
Pushback in Providence
Skeptics within Providence’s political establishment don’t focus on what’s in the plan, so much as what isn’t. They object to the lack of implementation details. They complain that they had little input before the plan was written and only 48 hours to submit comments on the draft before the plan was released.
School Board President Ty’relle Stephens says the new School Board members felt excluded from the Mayor’s plan, in part because most of the current members only took their seats for the first time in February. Stephens said that he would call the Mayor’s document a “roadmap” for more detailed planning rather than a plan. Stephens personally supports most of the goals of the plan, but he has real concerns about how they will be implemented.
For instance, K-8 schools are fine in principle. But he worries about new K-8 schools that have fewer seats than the elementary and middle schools they are combining. He’s very worried by the persistent drop in PPSD enrollment. The total number of students enrolled in PPSD schools has fallen by 15% since the takeover began, from 23,836 in 2019, to 20,250 as of last October, as RIDE has approved more charter school seats in Providence. The current school construction project aims to provide seats for just 17,000 students in 2030.
“We should not be pushing our constituents out,” Stephens says. “PPSD should always be the first destination for Providence students.”
“Educators were not meaningfully included in developing this plan, and it shows,” said Cindy Robles, President of the Providence Teachers Union (PTU) in a press release issued on Monday.” “It’s vague where it needs to be specific and silent where it needs to speak boldly—especially when it comes to how we’ll fund the schools our students deserve.” Still, Robles said that “The PTU stands ready to work with city and district leaders to ensure this transition delivers real change, not just rhetoric.”
Some question whether the Mayor even has the right to make such a plan, since the School Board will be the authorized body governing schools once state oversight ends. As one City Council source said, “His plan should be finance and procurement and get out of the way,” leaving educational policy to the School Board.
Whatever doubts or questions they have, most of the officials interviewed off the record conceded that the Mayor’s plan at least provided a framework and a first draft of a plan that should have more specifics and more participation from outside the Mayor’s office.
So, does this plan move us closer to local control of schools?
As it stands, the only way to get them back is to make Commissioner Infante-Green satisfied with Providence. She has full control of our schools as well as authority to extend that control, as she did last year. And she’s not satisfied yet.
Preempted by the Commissioner
On February 11, before the Mayor could produce his plan, Commissioner Infante-Green and Governor Dan McKee called a press conference at Martin Luther King Elementary School to say that Providence would not get schools back this year. The Commissioner said Providence might get its schools back in 2026 – but only if the City satisfied her conditions for return. The Mayor was not there, and City officials who were in regular discussions with RIDE on the process for return of the schools felt blindsided.
A week later, the Commissioner released a letter restating that return would not happen this year, but that “it is possible and responsible to return PPSD to local control on or around June 30, 2026.” This letter laid out a detailed list of conditions for the return of the schools under five headings:
The Commissioner’s letter begins with the most difficult problem, the role and readiness of the School Board to resume its responsibilities as governing authority over Providence Schools. The tone of her requirements for Governance is very directive. It says the new School Board must commit to a specific school board training course (in which the Board has since enrolled). The letter says the School Board must demonstrate a series of behaviors such as “maintain the focus of a meeting,” and “remain calm during conflicts or crisis.” It called for the City to “work with the Board to select a leadership team.”
While officially deprived of its power over school administration during the takeover, the School Board has been a sounding board for public discontent with RIDE’s management of PPSD. Last year, hundreds of students and advocates turned out to protest the closure of 360 High School. Earlier this year, the Board hosted another overflow crowd seeking the reinstatement of three laid-off probationary teachers. Each of three teachers identifies as non-binary and all three were active members of a teacher advocacy group called PVD Core (Providence Caucus of Rank and File Educators). The fact that they also had excellent performance reviews raised an appearance of possible bias or retaliation. The Board voted to seek their reinstatement, angering the Commissioner. Infante-Green promptly denied their request.
One of the most outspoken Board members has been Ty’relle Stephens. The Commissioner cannot be pleased that the Board elected Stephens as its new President.
The Commissioner also required that the city “agree to honor” the settlement that the city had already agreed to in court guaranteeing its annual financial contributions to PPSD through 2027. She demanded that the City “detail and make public” the City’s intended school contribution through 2030, which is beyond the authority of the Mayor or City Council to do.
She further specified that the city must get all school construction projects “back on track,” claiming that projects are one or two years behind. Until now, this had seemed like the one area where the City and RIDE had been partnering effectively. The Commissioner has frequently cited the new buildings as a key achievement.
Under “State Legislation,” the Commissioner says the City must join RIDE and PPSD in calling for unspecified legislation to “remove legislative barriers” to student achievement.
Finally, she called for the Mayor to create a school transition plan in consultation with the community, PPSD, RIDE and the City Council. No mention of the School Board.
The Commissioner is dismissive of the Mayor’s plan now that it’s been released. In a letter to the State K-12 Council, the oversight body for RIDE, she said that, “this report is incomplete and lacks sufficient detail and substance…”
“This report was created in a silo,” she complains, telling the Council members that RIDE and PPSD were only consulted after the plan was created. I have real concerns that the City may implement redundant, burdensome processes and practices of the past that … stifled progress in Providence for more than 30 years.”
The Mayor persists
Despite the Commissioner’s refusal to consider a return to local control this year, the Mayor hasn’t conceded. In a written response to The Providence Eye, the Mayor’s Deputy Press Secretary Samara Pinto said that, “We continue to advocate at the General Assembly for the legislation we introduced earlier this year, which aims to return Providence Public Schools to local control by July. Providence is ready to take responsibility for our schools and align our resources with the goals outlined in the Turnaround Action Plan. It remains our top priority to have the Providence Public Schools under local control as soon as possible.”
Ms. Pinto defended the City’s record on school construction but did not say whether the projects are on schedule. She affirmed the City’s commitment to fulfilling the court-ordered contribution to PPSD’s budget “for the next several years,” but said that once schools return to local control, PPSD’s budget would be developed like all City Departments.
How do we move forward?
There seem to be two ways a return to local control can happen. First, all the Providence players, including the Teachers Union, get behind some vision and version of a plan. Then they work through all of RIDE’s concerns until both sides reach a plan on which they all agree.
Or, the General Assembly steps in and and passes a law returning PPSD to local control. Later today, the House Education Committee is scheduled to hear a bill that would end the takeover on July 1. Without RIDE’s cooperation, this is likely to be a very disruptive process that would do nothing to improve student outcomes. But, it’s beginning to seem like the only way out of state control.
Despite all the negative responses to the Mayor’s plan, it is possible to find broad areas of potential agreement among different leaders and active members of the public in Providence. But you have to look for it.
Everyone wants the schools back, but most would wait until we have a more detailed plan based on community input. We have broad agreement that we need to maintain higher levels of school funding. No one disputes the need for investments in services for multilingual learners and special education students. The transition to K-8 schools is accepted as literally “built in” to the school construction plan. We all want to be proud of our schools. And, at least in principle, most parties support some form of site-based autonomy and accountability that would treat teachers as professionals.
Even with the devil in the details, it seems that the Providence community has more of a shared vision for schools than it has ever had. Or at least we might have if we could break our habit of looking for differences and objections first, and areas of agreement second.
No matter how unified Providence might or might not be, the RI Commissioner of Education and the statewide K-12 Council she reports to hold most of the power. After last year’s fight with the Mayor over school funding and the challenges from the School Board, the Commissioner’s lingering distrust of the City is clear. The parties seem to be talking past each other rather than to each other.
RIDE has now convened a Collaborative Stakeholder Working Group with representatives from the Mayor’s Office, PPSD, RIDE, the School Board and the City Council under RIDE‘s Deputy Commissioner for Transformation, Drew Echelson,.The group is charged with working toward the return to local control. Let us hope they can live up to their “collaborative” name.
Editor’s Note: The Providence Eye has published several stories discussing the state’s control of the city’s schools. See here and here and here.
Jonathan Howard is Co-founder of Cause & Effect, Inc., a consulting company that provides strategic planning facilitation, fund development planning and board strengthening to mission-driven organizations. He is a long- time resident of Providence.
Want to comment? Click!