Elorza calls for state takeover of Providence Schools

July 19, 2019 12:34 pm

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PROVIDENCE, R.I, (WLNE) – An emotional scene outside Hope High School Friday morning as Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza petitioned the state to help the school system, and parents and teachers wondered why their concerns have fallen on deaf ears for so long.

Elorza held the press conference Friday to ask the state intervene and take over the troubled Providence public school system after a grim report from Johns Hopkins found academics, discipline, and the condition of schools to be nothing short of a disaster.

“The status quo has failed our kids,” said Elorza. “At the local level, we know that we don’t have the power, the tools and the authority to bring out the transformational change that we need.”

Education Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green wants to see a state takeover too, under the so-called “Crowley Act”—something many parents and students, who are at their wits end, also hope to see.

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One Hope High School teacher pleaded with the Mayor Friday, saying change can’t come soon enough.

“I’ve already been in meetings, advocating for my students, trying to get smaller class sizes, getting the curriculum we need,” the teacher said. “And I’m told ‘sorry it’s not going to happen this year’”.

Now, she says, Elorza and others promise that change is coming.

“I’m told by you and other people that it’s going to happen,” she said. “What is it? Which is it?”

The state intervened at Hope specifically in 2005, working to restructure the school.

“Hope High School is both a model for how intervention can work and also how it can ultimately revert back to the problems that it had before”, said Providence School Board President Nick Hemond.

Commissioner Infante-Green is set to formally make the case for a state takeover at Tuesday’s meeting of the Council on Elementary and Secondary Education.