Providence Special Committee on (HOPE) -Wednesday May 28, 2025-5:30PM

It was my mother to myself. I just went to sleep.

One hour.

Good evening, everyone. We'd like to call the special committee on health, opportunity, prosperity, and education. Madam clerk,

would you please call roll call? Chair Picharro?

Present.

Vice chairwoman Peterson? Present. Consular Andaluam is absent. Consular Ruyas is absent. Consular Sanchez?

Present. Three present. Two absent. You have a good one.

Thank you. We'll that for you. Before us, the agenda that was publicized today, first item that we're going to be hearing is the resolution endorsing and urging passes by the general assembly of hospital twenty twenty five h fifty three thirty five and back related to education of Laura Domingo Brownlee, the Rhode Island student investment initiative. So before we call the first speaker to present us, I'd like to also recognize our attorney, Adia Sperry. Welcome.

Thank you for being here. And also our staff, Megan Young, and Aaron, and CEO, Steve Steve Smith. The first person that we have to present, we have from the right, the Department of Education, is is the board. We also have in our presence

Thank

you.

Welcome. You may begin, Drew, please. And if you could just speak

up Yes. Former first grade teacher in. I have a presentation. I'll have it go over pretty quickly. Have a copy of it.

We have something in front of you. I'm on slide two. This one right here?

Yeah. Correct. So we're going to the mid first item. That's number one.

So

What's that? May the second. In favor? Aye. Nays out.

Great. Four major points that I wanna hit this evening, and, obviously, we'll move through this very quickly, but I'm happy to answer any questions that you all might have. The the first point that is important, at least from my perspective and from Brian and the commissioner's perspective, is that PTSD has made significant. I acknowledge that there is significant work to do, particularly to deliver on the policy of excellence and equity for all students in the province. But I would also suggest that the evidence is irrefutable that significant progress has been made.

I wanna congratulate the superintendent and his team for that. Point two that is important from my perspective is that we are not currently ready for a 2025 transition. It is our position that we can be ready for accelerated return on local control and by this committee to go along our sleeves and to work in collaboration with the city, with PTSD, with the PTSD board, with the city council and its staff to accelerate return of local control. But the conditions are not being put in place right now in order for that to be successful. In October, in December, and in February, both formal written communication from the commissioner.

The commissioner has made very clear the the conditions that need to be put in place in order for us to consider accelerated returns of local control once it was clear to us that the city was. Those areas which we will explore this evening focus on governance, finances, facilities, legislation, and transition plan. Nothing has changed. We have not moved the benchmarks, and there has been a trick here. These are things that we think are foundational and that if put in place and done quickly, we can be well positioned to talk about accelerated return in both.

And then the final point that I hope to stress is that whether or not we are successful in accelerating the trip in the whole portfolio will depend on one thing. Adults rolling up their cities and doing hard work together will show that the conditions are in place. We have seen incredible momentum. There is still far more work to do, but we have seen evidence both here locally and nationally of things returning back to local control and then moving backward and fast up the trend. So my my sort of focus on most of this presentation this evening will will try to articulate, I think, where we have virtually agreement between all the parties, around, the conditions that need to be put in place, and I'll walk the team through that.

On slide three, I just want to to sort of show some receipts or show some evidence that suggests that PTSD is building a little long term. There was one district in the entire city who approved on broadcast ELA, broadcast map, SAT map, and SAT ELA. And that one school district was Pablo's public school. It's please go ahead. What?

Language. You know?

Cousin. I just Thank you.

What's LEA? Oh, sorry. English language arts.

LEA. LEA.

LEA. LEA is local education agency. So, like, essentially, the districts.

Okay. Thank you. Yep. Just take a moment. I would like to recognize that as president, Rachel Miller is with us and also committee member Suwan Moab is present.

Certainly. Thank

Second point, as advocating, that of all the districts in the state, Providence saw the largest decline in chronic absenteeism. I will tell you both on sort of academic data that we are tracking regularly and on attendance data. Providence is again poised to dramatically decrease chronic absenteeism and to improve ELA and math scores, based on what we've seen on the face of the drones and based on the data on the attendance data. There were nine schools in the entire state. That's a 5% increase on their literacy scores, a 5% increase in math, and a 5% reduction in chronic absenteeism.

Of those nine schools in the state, five of them are PTSD schools. Since the start of the intervention, PTSD has reduced the number of seats in our lowest performing schools, our CSI schools. They're schools that are in the bottom 5% of schools in the state by 3,000 seats. For the first time, Providence Public School, elementary school won the prestigious national blue ribbon. ESA Messer was the only school in the entire state having two accountability rankings in the accountability system, so one star to three star.

And as a result of a $5,000,000 investment to ensure that our multilingual learners were receiving the services that they were entitled to and deserved. And based on a Department of Justice consent decree that started before the intervention, Providence has now exited that consent decree or agreement and did so at a faster speed than other neighboring school districts in the Northeast. I wanna turn our attention now to the conditions that need to be put in place for us to consider an accelerated loop on the local. To be very clear, there are no surprises here. This is the same message that I have been delivering in collaboration with my partners, Apple City, with my partners in PPSC.

In in all areas, we have agreement between city council staff, city of province leadership, PPSD leadership, Ride leadership, and PPSD board leadership. With one caveat, we have some additional negotiations to do in facilities, which I'll call out when we get to that. The first area that the commissioner has identified as a need to focus on strong governance. It is our position at Ride that when we return the local school district, PTSD, to local control, that that that the school district is returning to the local school. They are the governance body that will make decisions into the future of of of the of the direction of PTSD.

And so it is important to the commissioner that the the board is strong student outcomes focused governments. They're focused on student outcomes, that they listen to the voices of the community, and based on the vision and values of the community, that they set three to five goals that are student outcome focused goals, whether that's academic or SEL, social, emotional learning goals, that are important to them as a board because they reflect the vision and values of the community, and they articulate those those goals to the superintendent who then adopts those as as district wide goals and makes progress on those areas because they reflect the vision of the community. The commissioner expects, which we have talked about, that the board is spending a majority of its time or at least 40 to 50% of its time focused on agenda items and actions that are attached to those goals. Their job was to monitor and support and make sure that the district has the resources it needs to make progress toward those three to five goals. They need to do work to monitor themselves as a as a governance team to ensure that their core work becomes focused on making progress on those three to five goals that reflect the vision and values of the community, and they need to at least quarterly, in a formal way, evaluate their progress toward monitoring and progress toward those.

Those are these these conditions relative to governance are things that have the full support of the PPSC board leadership, of the city council staff of having the collaborative working group of the city of Providence, RIDE, and PPSC. I'll turn to finances next on, slide six, seven, and eight. I will say that the the commissioner and the mayor have had a dialogue on on this specific issue, and both parties have committed that they are will honor the settlement agreement. And so in this condition, Rod is looking for the city to commit in writing that it will honor the financial settlement agreement reached between PPSC and the city. There are two elements of this that are of interest to ride and probably the PPSD.

One, and I'll get to the agreement in one moment, but there's a section of it under FY '27 that promises and commits to increase the local contribution to PTSD from the city to match any increase in state aid. We're asking the city to put a writing letter that will honor that commitment, which I believe they they will. We're also looking for confirmation that should the city decide to partner with PPSD leadership and PPSD board leadership to pursue some sort of shared service model in their transition plan, which I believe you'll hear about this evening, in some aspects of it talks about shared service, some shared, like, HR services potentially, some shared operational services. And we're just looking for a commitment that if there are shared services, that will come with the expense reduction of resources to PTSD. The city has committed that that is that they will honor that, but it is something that also that will follow by.

In case you are new to the settlement of the details that I've always taken a look at in slide six or seven, we're gonna help you do the final close of that site. To be very clear, so the settlement agreement came out of legal action taken by the city of Providence against the commissioner. Basically, her request to withhold state funds to meet, it's what she perceived to be what the judge agreed was just it was the statutory obligation by the city of Providence. It came out of sort of two lawsuits, one connected to the f f y twenty four city contribution and then also the FY '25 contribution. And as part of our negotiations, we talked about the local contribution for FY '24, '25, '26 '27 so that the school district could, for the first time, have multiple years of understanding of the financial situation for the district.

On December 8, the judge ruled in favor of PPSD confirming that the city had failed to meet its funding obligation to get this leave and that the commissioner had authority to withhold state funds. The judge's decision confirmed PPSD's calculation for maintenance of effort and scheduled a hearing to discuss and finalize the exact amount of funds owed to the city. At this point, the parties are engaged in silent discussions, and that then leads us to slide seven, which outlines the the FY '24, FY '25, FY '26, and FY '27 somewhat. I would say that, like, any good settlement agreement, there are probably concerns that both parties have relative to the societal agreement, but it was reached in good faith. And the positive of this, at least from my perspective to my earlier point, is it gives a multiyear sort of confidence for the for the PTSD team to deeply understand what can find by any population that is disabled due to the.

I'll now turn to slide nine to talk about what's conditioned order to put the. To be very clear, we are very out of the the progress that has been made in facilities. We've put up more schools in the last few years than I think has been done in Japanese in the city of Providence. And we also acknowledge that many of these, projects are multi years off track. That, of course, comes at a cost, particularly given the escalating cost of construction to to the Providence taxpayer and also sort of threaten the ability for us to deliver on a goal of of life or brand new schools for all PPSC students by 2030.

So you'll see here a set of conditions that we hope that we hope we can all commit to that will help ensure that we get more of these build projects back on track for at least moving in another direction and also mitigate future delays so that we can maximize the dollars that are that are allocated towards these projects. This is the one area where I think we have agreement between a collaborative working group on everything here in spirit. We're about probably 97 90% agreement relative to the language, but there's some sort of more discussions that we need to we need to engage in in order to sort of find a lot of system and have 100% agreement between all classes. I'll just quickly end with the last two, and then I'll just turn it over back in the chair with the superintendent for his. There are two other areas which the commissioner has just called out that she would like us to partner on to demonstrate our readiness for return to local control.

The second is relative to legislation. There is interesting and really important from our perspective, legislation that's currently in front of the general assembly from the general general assembly and anything in the future. And the commissioner is looking for ride, PTSD in the city of Providence, and PTSD board to be unified and advocate with the legislation that removes barriers from public assistance. Well, some of this legislation that we think I think we all agree to as sort of a governance team are the three zero bills are connected specifically to province. There are also bills relative to school funding that we think are in the best interest of of province's children.

And particularly as we head into the next legislative cycle, we're looking for all parties to come together to be unified and to use our influence and voice and get the resources and support for problems. The transition plan, we would expect and acknowledge that the city did publish a plan, which I assume you would hear out this evening. We appreciate that there are, I think, a real significant and intentional effort from the city to highlight some of the success that PTSD has while we were very clear on that there's significant work to do. We we join with them in in sort of celebrating and and agreeing with that those of the transition plan. We also have a significant number of concerns about it, which we have shared very publicly and privately with the city.

And what the commissioner is looking for is for there to be joint efforts of all the parties, the city of Providence, PTSD, PTSD board, tribe, city council leadership working together to publish a joint transition plan that has the support of all parties and include the most of the students, families, teachers, community, educators, and community members to make actual design of that. That's important to the commissioner and to the to to city leadership, and it's something that we should continue to. So my final points on this is that there is significant progress in PTSD. We are encouraged by what we see happening in the district. We're also clear eyed that there's significant work to do.

We have far more work to do to deliver on cost of an excellent and ethical education for all children in the city. We know that, and we're committed to doing the hard work. And we need to work together, city officials, city council officials, leadership. And if we do this in collaboration, we can get them. Happy to either take questions or.

Thank you

for that presentation. Before I open it up to, like to recognize Justin Royes. He will join us in the full committee. Thank you.

I can't find my message. I'm sorry.

Never mind if I'll ask you if I'm just

I I I had to remember. I apologize. Can I have bend it? Yes. And perhaps the the question directly for you, but maybe, yes, so for PSD I'm sorry.

The school committee people that might be here. Just wanted to know, I one of the things that you had mentioned was some of the deliverables being of strong governance for the committee, and I just wanted to kind of follow-up. I know the committee just kind of established itself, but I just wanted to see what progress you've made on that.