PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) - The Providence Public School district on Tuesday released its plan to turn around a system that in an independent report last year was described as one of the nation’s worst.
The 68-page report released by state Education Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green and new Providence schools Superintendent Harrison Peters calls for ending chronic absenteeism among students, boosting the number of eighth-graders meeting or exceeding expectations for math, and lifting the high school graduation rate to almost 90%.
The plan also calls for more English-as-a-second-language teachers to better serve the 34% of of the district’s roughly 24,000 students who are multilingual learners.
The district also plans to renegotiate the collective bargaining agreement with the teachers’ union to make it easier to fire low-performing teachers and require additional professional development days.
It’s expected to take at least five years to turn around the district.
The state took control of the city’s school system last November in response to a report by the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy last June that called the system among the nation’s worst. It found severe dysfunction, including rampant bullying and fighting among students, poor student achievement rates, crumbling facilities, and a tangled bureaucracy with no clear lines of authority.
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