Board OKs middle school split
Woonsocket Middle School will separate into two, with separate administrations
WOONSOCKET – Students arriving at the middle school for the new school year in the fall will notice quite a few changes when they do.
The biggest will be a restructuring of what was once a single middle school program spread across two new buildings built side by side off Hamlet Avenue nearly nine years ago, and guided by a single principal and two assistant principals since that time.
The School Committee on Wednesday approved the restructuring plan prepared by School Superintendent Patrick McGee that will divide the now single-entity administered middle school into two independently-structured schools, with their own principals and also a new feeder program from the elementary schools.
The new assignment of elementary school fifth graders to the grade 6 through grade 8 middle schools will, for the most part, direct students to the Hamlet and Villa Nova buildings from the same three elementary schools respectively of the six with fifth grades in the district.
The plan unveiled by McGee would have fifth graders from the Bernon Heights Elementary, Globe Park Elementary and Kevin K. Coleman Elementary schools direct- ed to one of the two buildings and fifth graders from Leo A. Savoie Elementary, Harris Elementary and the Citizens Elementary schools to the other.
Each of the two separated schools would also be granted their own principal, an assistant principal and a dean of students for discipline under the newly-approved plan which will require the hiring of one new principal.
The principals would be full year employees of the district and the assistant principals 10-month administrators working through the school year.
While addressing the committee on his proposal, McGee said several aspects of restructuring the middle school were weighed before the final proposal was made.
“The proposal will take the Woonsocket Middle School as it
currently exists and basically divide it into two middle schools, a Hamlet middle school, if you will, and a Villa Nova middle school,” McGee, himself a former principal of the school, explained.
The middle school had originally operated as a single large middle school of nearly 1,600 students when it occupied the old high school and junior high complex just up the hill at Park Place, according to McGee.
The structure of the administration was kept even though the school was moved into two identical 850-student modern buildings at Hamlet Avenue and Villa Nova Street in 2010, a plan that had been approved by the state as part of the $80 million project and viewed as a cost savings feature by the city.
“When we moved to the new site we moved as one building,” McGee said, “the administrative structure within the buildings did not change.” The schools, now with a population of about 1,300 students, ended up each with an assistant principal and a single middle school principal in charge of both buildings.
Over time, members of the school administration have talked about a change of the administrative structure but it was only brought before the committee as a possibility more recently given its potential impacts on the efficient application of federal Title I grant funding and the potential for improving student performance and the academic climate in the buildings, according to McGee.
“I believe with having two separate schools, as does my administration, the instructional oversight, the curriculum oversight, will be much greater,” he said.
“As we exist now, having one principal responsible for both is a difficult task,” McGee said. The superintendent noted his past role at the schools and said it supports his belief that an “autonomous school with an autonomous administration,” is a better format for each building.
The schools will still need “collaboration and communication” between them and even host similar rules since they will continue to share the same campus, he added.
How the schools receive their new students each year is also an important aspect of the change and McGee detailed the new enrollment process that aims to equalize the number of disadvantaged and better performing students between the schools.
“We are dividing the elementaries into groups of three so three schools feed into Hamlet and three schools feed into Villa Nova and the criteria that we would look at would be poverty,” he said. “We would not want our two elementary schools that are highest in poverty coming into the same middle school. And that’s one item we are going to be looking at,” he said.
There will be considerations for English as a Second Language instruction which is to a large degree already focused in programs at Villa Nova but that could be equalized over time in the future as well, according to McGee.
Student proficiency scores will be weighed but McGee said that it might be less of a defining factor given that in elementary reading all of the districts schools are at near 40 percent proficiency or less.
“So I think that we are going to do our due diligence to make sure we are splitting up the elementary schools as best we can based on the proficiency levels, however, having said that, they are all very low,” McGee said. “38 percent is the highest that we have across the district at Bernon Heights and we go down to 10 percent,” he said. “28 percent is a pretty large gap, however, 38 percent isn’t exactly 85 percent or 80 so those are things we are going to be taking into consideration as well,” McGee said.
School Committee Chairman Soren Seale said he had also reviewed that aspect of the restructuring while working with the administration and also believes that the number of students in poverty or with lower student achievement will be addressed.
“Students with the highest level of poverty are generally the lowest performers and students with the lowest levels of poverty tend to be the highest performers,” he said. “So when we looked at these schools we wanted to make sure that the two lowest schools, in terms of highest poverty, lowest performance were not paired to the same middle school and the two highest performing or lowest poverty schools were not linked to the same middle school to try to avoid the situation, in the best way that we can, of having the good school and not so good one,” Seale said.
School Committeewoman Valerie Gonzalez said she supported the change while offering a principal at each school would provide strong leadership in each of the two school buildings. School Committeeman Edward Burke said he sees the change as addressing the discipline issues that have been cropping up at the schools under a single principal and member Paul Bourget also pointed to the need for change.
“Over a year ago, I was appointed to the school committee and I spent a lot of time going to the middle school, both buildings with Dr. McGee, and visiting with the principal and visiting with the assistant principals and seeing the situation that was current. They really needed some help in the discipline area and needed some help in the teaching area where the principal and the assistant principal were working so much with discipline there was no time, and there were a lot of things that needed to be done,” he said. “Maybe things have changed over the years and we really need a strong leader in Hamlet and we need a strong leader in Nova,” he said.
“You have got to have principals, they are the people who drive leadership, they are the ones that motivate the staff, they are the ones who motivate the teachers and frankly kids pick it up and they will be motivated accordingly,” he said.
The four members of the committee present voted in favor of the changes. School Committeewoman Susan Pawlina was not present.
Layoff notices OK’d; two administrators on the chopping block?
The committee also approved sending layoff notices to 19 certified teachers as recommended by McGee for staffing change leeway and position reassignments.
After meeting in closed session at the end of the evening, the four members returned to open session and voted unanimously to begin “preliminary” non-renewal processes for two district administrators currently with the system.
The administrators were identified only as “administrator 1” and “administrator B” as the committee members voted on both actions.