I am not at the school board meeting but according to reports from those who are: the Providence School Board has voted to close all schools per city's recommendations. Plenty more will be said about this decision and its implications - for now, all I want to do is share the news. Update: ProJo report here.
Wait, that's not quite all. I also want to say that I am deeply angry that saving our city from financial peril requires reducing the quality of our city's schools and devaluing their teachers. Tomorrow, I'll wake up and stand with many others working to find the good in our situation, which will mean gathering the energy and anger of our city's parents, students, and educators and finding ways to improve our schools in the years and decades to come. We must do this. The alternative is throwing up our hands and turning our backs to our young people, and we cannot do that. I won't do it and I am proud to stand with hundreds and thousands of others who also refuse to give up on our ability as a society to prepare our young people for the challenges in their lives. The challenges we face are much bigger than the immediate budget crisis and the regrettable choice that the school board had to make.
Our real goal: to create and sustain schools that support all kids in all neighborhoods to use their minds well as they gain the skills they need to succeed in life as citizens, community and family members, and productive workers and leaders. I look forward to working with adults and young people across the city to identify the specific steps that will move us to that goal. We can and must do this because the alternative is unconscionable.
Thank you from a tax payer, parent of a son at NB, and an educator at one of the closed schools.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your service. I wish you the best - this must be very upsetting and nerveracking for you and your colleagues (and your students and their families). So many of us appreciate your work.
ReplyDeleteThank you. I have been reading your take on this disaster for the past few weeks. Actually on Sunday night it was from your blog that I found out how Ms. Crain canceled the vote on Monday-through Facebook - disgraceful. I then in turn texted my faculty and relieved them from an anxious night of tossing and turning. I left the meeting tonight with tears rolling down my face walking through Classical HS parking lot and thinking I have taught for twenty years at the school that just closed.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your blog and your equitable support to all neighborhoods in this city. Respectfully, though, I must disagree with your comment "the regrettable choice that the school board had to make." The School Board did not have to make that choice. They should have stood up for the public school children of Providence and demanded a more researched and considered plan.
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