Edwatch by Julia Steiny: Providence schools need more
The Providence Journal,
Sunday, June 27, 2004

The governor and House Finance Committee say that they have "level-funded" education this year, but that certainly does not mean they're giving the same allocation to each kid as she got last year.

This year's state funding looks austerely equitable as it leaves the State House -- every district gets what it got last year -- but ceases to be anything like "level" when it hits the districts. Let's do the math.

Newport has a declining student population, which is true for other towns, some of which are quite wealthy and not responsible for especially challenged kids. Level-funding in Newport means that the per-pupil expenditure will increase just because fewer kids are consuming the same resources. (This is not to say that Newport schools don't have significant financial difficulties, but that level-funding does improve those difficulties somewhat, as compared with, say, Providence.)

The already cash-strapped city of Providence expects, on average, about 300 new kids each year. Under "level-funding," these 300 reduce the available money for all the kids.

Furthermore, a large proportion of the students entering the Providence system are kids everyone agrees are expensive to educate because of their special needs, their language challenges and the impact of the social issues that go along with being poor, in a new country or both.

So give me your tired, your poor and your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, but stick them in the urban areas -- not in my backyard -- under-fund their schools and leave the grownups entrusted to their care to fight amongst themselves about who gets the shrinking state resources. Life is hard in the burbs, but the state is making things harder.

Yes, I supported both the governor and the House Finance Committee's efforts to get the school spending under control. To the rage of my friends, neighbors and fellow public-school consumers, I sat silent while parents lobbied frantically to save much-needed teachers and programs from the state's decision to play hardball with the districts. But the ratification of the recent Providence teachers contract last week changes things.

The teachers will be paying for a portion of their health care as well as introducing competition to the health-care providers in the state, which is huge. Please understand that the Providence teachers contract is a standard-bearer among the public employee contracts in this state. For them to lead the way on these two concessions models the reasonable direction all district and municipal negotiations need to take.

Is the contract everything we'd want? Not remotely. But it does represent a change in the direction of Rhode Island's out-of-control public spending. For this alone, management throughout the state owes Providence its thanks. (It does not, however, excuse the state from creating a state-wide healthcare system that capitalizes on economies of scale as well as competition. More on this another day.)

Currently 280 Providence teachers have been laid off, and about 240 of those cuts are expected to hold. To give you a sense of scale, the entire district of Smithfield has 220 teachers. Providence, with its increasing population, can ill-afford to lose an entire district's worth of teachers.

The Providence School Department is organizing to absorb the damage. This column last week depicted merely one image of the up-coming damage -- the devastation of high-functioning faculty teams by 'bumping' large portions of their staff with more senior teachers from other schools. The newly bumped teachers will bump others even less senior until most of the recent hires and new teachers are gone. Nothing can be done about this stupid, destructive practice until the contracts change, but we could limit the widespread damage at this juncture by coming up with the money to hire back the laid-off teachers.

Please forgive my selfishness in offering as another image of destruction a school near and dear to my heart: Classical High. To reduce the number of teachers, the school district is stuffing every class in the system to its contractual maximum: 26 kids (more in some elementary schools) need to fill every class without exception.

But Classical has always offered many advanced placement (AP) classes, which sometimes run well under the maximum. AP physics, as you might guess, is only for the courageous and already well-prepared, since the odds of getting an 'A' are low, even assuming the kid has the prerequisites. Most such AP courses will now be gone. The entire Latin program, which is what makes Classical classical, is gone. Music, drama and lots of the sports are gone. One teacher from each department is gone, which includes, in a bitter irony, the beloved John Wemple, Providence's high school teacher-of-the-year.

The teaching staff has been down-sized to a degree that threatens the fledgling advisory program that we'd worked so hard on to have ready for implementation this fall. Letting this school crumble is nuts.

But in truth, every Providence school can enumerate its own grievous losses; many have written me to do so. So the whole situation is nuts.

These new cuts come on the heels of the 116 positions that were cut last year. Those positions were mainly in student support services and guidance, and included social workers, psychologists, librarians and so forth. Like the City's kids don't need these folks.

Enough, already! State government, as far as improving the outlook for taxpayers on this one issue you have done your duty. Now you need to turn around and do your duty toward the kids. Go back and find the money. Do not hide behind any political expediency. These cuts are hurting the lion's share of the state's most vulnerable public school population, and the cuts will further drive the middle class from the City, which is in no one's interest.

You are knowingly failing 28,000 school children. Go back and fix this.

Julia Steiny is a former member of the Providence School Board; she now consults and writes for a number of education, government and private enterprises. She welcomes your questions and comments on education. She can be reached by e-mail at juliasteinyatcox.net or c/o Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, R.I. 02902.