Johnston mayor speaks on town takeover of school department

JOHNSTON, R.I. (WLNE) — Johnston Mayor Joseph Polisena Jr. announced Friday that the town will takeover the Johnston School Department.

Polisena said the takeover is necessary as the school department ended last fiscal year with a nearly $1 million deficit and is projected to have a multi-million dollar deficit in the current fiscal year.

“I think it’s an aid issue, but I also think they have a lot of unfunded state mandates with out of district tuition, also with DCYF placement, so I think it’s a perfect storm,” the mayor said.

“While the Town recognizes the Department faces unprecedented mandates from the State, I believe we are at a critical point where the Town needs to intervene and take over the Department before the problem becomes irreversible,” he added.

Polisena said the takeover will entail consolidating the school department’s business office functions.

He said the first course of action will be loaning the school department funds to balance the past deficits and then appropriate more than $2 million to the school department in the upcoming budget.

“What the school department is working on is bringing in more pathway programs that fit the needs of the students, but another crucial thing for the town is to build new schools, a new high school, because as it stands right now we don’t have the facilities to bring back the crucial program that we need to keep the kids in district,” said Polisena.

The town will also hire a consulting firm to perform a fiscal and operational audit of the school department.

“That will really give us a baseline of decisions we have to make in the future,” said Polisena.

ABC 6 News has reached out to the Superintendent and School Committee Chair and are awaiting a response.