Will city’s schools chart new course?
Charter school hearing draws heated debate from both sides
WOONSOCKET – The Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) heard plenty of local opposition to plans for another charter school in the city Wednesday night, but will continue to collect feedback regarding the pending application through Nov. 1.
The public hearing on the proposed Nuestro Mundo Public Charter School was guided by Steve Osborne, chief of innovation at RIDE. A second hearing will be held on Oct. 24, again in the Woonsocket Public Library’s community room on Clinton Street.
The proposed Nuestro Mundo, or “New World,” school would open for the 2020-21 school year at a yet-undetermined location in the city.
Joseph P. Maruszczak, superintendent of the
Mendon-Upton Regional School District, and a co-founder of the proposed charter school, told those filling the packed meeting room the new charter school would serve a “vibrant and diverse city.”
Students, Maruszczak said, “require a solid foundation in literary and numeracy, but equally important is instilling a sense of global citizenship, one that can be gained in a dual-language immersion program that at its center, is about bi-literacy and cultural proficiency.”
The new school would also provide city families with additional options of school choice, according to Maruszczak.
“The data points are very clear, our parents are eager to have different options for their children other than the traditional paradigms,” he said.
RIDE data shows that in the past school year, 16,924 applications were submitted for a total of 1,711 available charter school seats, Maruszczak noted. And in Woonsocket, 677 applications were submitted to charter schools for 62 available seats, he said.
“In both cases, about 10 percent of parents are being able to access alternative public school options for their children,” he said.
The city now hosts the RISE Prep Mayoral Academy at 30 Cumberland St., the Beacon Charter High School for the Arts at 320 Main St., and Beacon’s Founders Academy charter school at 1 Social St. But Maruszczak noted that RISE Prep currently has 330 students on its wait list for admission.
“It is evident that parents want additional choices,” Maruszczak said.
Many at the hearing voiced alarm over the potential for the city’s public schools to bear a significant funding loss from the new charter school proposal.
Four members of the Woonsocket City Council, Chairman Daniel Gendron, James Cournoyer, Alex Kithes and John Ward all took the microphone to question details of the Nuestro Mundo proposal or argue against its potential negative financial impact on the local school department.
Woonsocket School Superintendent Patrick McGee and members of the school committee voiced additional concerns.
Those speaking in favor of the plan included Maruszczak’s co-founders, such as Olga Grau, who explained the Nuestro Mundo plan to have students participate in English instruction for half of their school day and Spanish the other half, and Carmen Boucher, a former local PTO member, who related her family’s experiences with a charter school.
Nuestro Mundo would start out with about 138 students in grades K-2 when it opens and by the 2026-2027 school year and host 413 students in grades K-8, the proponents explained.
The school’s site has not been determined since the application has not yet been approved, but locations in local recently closed parochial school have been considered, they indicated.
Boucher those in attendance how her daughter had experienced bullying by other students on the second day she spent at Woonsocket High School needed to go to another school to escape the harassment.
Mount St. Charles Academy was an option at the time but Boucher said her family could not afford Mount’s tuition.
“We didn’t know what to do. The Woonsocket school department tried but it was difficult for my daughter and for our family,” Boucher said. Things got better when Boucher’s family learned about the Beacon Charter High School for the Arts, she explained.
“My daughter completed her high school and went there for three years,” Boucher said while noting she went on to college and now works in education.
Boucher commended the city’s school department for the work does, but also noted that “sometimes the public schools might not be the right for your child,” in support of the Nuestro Mundo proposal.
In contrast, Barbara Ozanian, a special education paraprofessional with the school department for 24 years, voiced her concern that Nuestro Mundo’s creation would drawn needed funding away from local special needs students.
“If this charter school comes in, it’s going to take money away these children who are not going to be educated like they should be,” Ozanian said.
“I just wanted to say, keep the money here and join with public education so that we can better educate all the children, not just Spanish bilingual coalitions,” she said.
Claire O’Hara, a town councilwoman in North Smithfield, also questioned the efficacy of Nuestro Mundo’s plan for bilingual immersion, suggesting full immersion in a regular school
“Do I feel its the best way economically or realistically, no I do not,” O’Hara said while relating her own experiences over the years as a veteran elementary school teacher.
“I’m going to talk about two things,” McGee told the gathering. “I’m going to talk about money and I’m going to talk the impact of lost revenue and tuitions on the Woonsocket Education Department with respect to charters,” he said.
McGee said that in Fiscal Year ‘21, the first year the Nuestro Mundo Charter School would operate, the Woonsocket Education Department will lose $1.8 million of its current revenue.
“Yes, $1.8 million. In Fiscal Year ‘27, we are going to lose $5.6 million,” McGee said.
McGee said losing $5.6 million in Fiscal ‘27 would affect the department’s ability to meet the contracts it just signed with its teachers, paraprofessionals and support staff.
Woonsocket wants to “attract the best and the brightest teachers and staff,” he said. “I don’t know how we are going to do that when we are $5.6 million less than we normally would be,” McGee said.
City Councilman James Cournoyer said he would withhold his position on the proposal for now but did point to state law guiding the charter school process while suggesting not all of its requirements have been met.
Cournoyer said he has a niece in Mendon that has attended the Mendon-Upton school district’s Spanish immersion program and noted her family “raved” about program.
“So it’s not an issue of whether what you doing is good work or not, I’m sure it is. It’s what we can afford No. 1 and No.2, I was very disappointed to learn that you folks that are setting this up never approached the Woonsocket Education Department to see if there was something you could do on a collaborative basis much like you did in the Mendon-Upton school district as opposed to a charter school,” Cournoyer said.
City Councilman John F. Ward noted that the fact RIDE was holding the hearing on the proposed charter school indicated it had deemed the application complete and yet, as Cournoyer had pointed out, the proposal has not yet identified a building as it is required to do.
“Clearly this application violates the law by not identifying the building and not getting a city council resolution and approval so I don’t know how we can continue to consider this application until that is satisfied,” Ward said.
Ward also noted that the proposal must meet the city’s zoning requirements and depending on the location could be required to obtain a city council approval under a recent zoning amendment.
From RIDE data he reviewed, Ward said city teachers are currently the lowest paid teachers in the state by a margin of approximately11 percent.
“This city more than any other community in the state does more with less. This proposal will suck more resource out of this system and cripple it as each day goes by worse and worse,” Ward said. “The state and RIDE have refused to deal with what’s necessary to correct this flawed funding formula that should be providing this city with equitable resources,” Ward argued.
Councilman Alexander Kithes offered that he was born and raised in the city and noted he went to school in the city “and we had a lot good opportunities in the public education system.”
Council President Daniel Gendron pointed to the city’s experiences with the approval of the RISE Mayoral Academy while saying he is opposed to the addition of another charter school in the city.
“Several years ago I went to a hearing in Providence and voiced my opposition to the RISE Mayoral Academy. The people at RIDE at the time thought they knew better than the leaders of this city and they forced RISE Mayoral Academy into our city,” Gendron said.
“And we as the city council have been fighting with that decision. And I am asking RIDE before you go and make another mistake, please listen to the people of Woonsocket and listen to the people who are going to have to deal with your decision going forward and deny this fraudulent application,” he said.
Maintaining the application has not been properly presented due to the lack of a resolution from the city council, Gendron asked RIDE to deny the application “and let Woonsocket, the education system, move our kids forward in the best way they can without hindering them any further.”