ESPEC is committed to improving public education for ALL Providence students. We believe that Providence public education as a whole is better off if East Side parents are inside the system where they will have an incentive to improve it, than if their children are educated separately from the rest of the population.

CHECK THE Facts:

FACT-CHECK #1: Why did Nathan Bishop Close?

The School Department justified closing Nathan Bishop because the school "had experienced steady decline in enrollments", had only 292 7^th and 8^th grade students, and only 57 students attended from "the neighborhood". (from School Board Agenda for March 13, 2006)

These figures appear to be misleading because:

A. They didn't count the incoming 6^th grade. They had already decided to close the school so they had not planned on having a 6^th grade next year. But the DeJong consulting group, which the School Dept. hired to do planning, gives the 2005 Bishop population as 434.

B. The figure also ignores the fact that the School Department had already given over part of the school to the "Newcomer High School."

C. There were 690 students at Bishop in 2002-2003. The subsequent decline is directly tracable to neglect and the lack of school leadership (see the 2002 SALT Report for details on the problems at Bishop). There is no evidence that East Side parents would not have sent their children to Bishop if it had been well-run. In fact, they used to do so.

D. As for the 57 "neighborhood" children, there are approximately 700 6^th-8^th graders on the East Side (see below). Nearly 400 of them already attend public schools. If only 57 attend Bishop, where do the rest go, and why? How did the school department define "neighborhood"? We've asked, but we haven't gotten an answer.

There may have been good reasons to temporarily close Bishop Middle School. Lack of students interested in good public education was not one of them.

FACT CHECK #2: Closing Nathan Bishop Leaves the East Side as the only area of the City without 6^th-8^th Grade Education.

Before Nathan Bishop MS closed, there were 9 middle schools in Providence. Bishop was the only middle school East of I-95.

CLICK HERE for a larger image

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FACT CHECK #3: Can The East Side really support 6^th-8^th Grade Education?

According to the 2000 census, there were 5,737 6^th-8^th graders for the 9 middle schools in the city. That's an average of 637 per school)

The table below is drawn from the 2000 Census for Tracts 31-37, which comprise the East Side. Students are grouped in grades 5-8 instead of 6-8, so we assume that ¾ of the total are in grades 6-8.

	EAST SIDE CHILDREN
	K	1-4	5-8
School Type
Public	74	528	523
Private	140	577	414
Total	214	1105	937

12% of the city's 6^th-8^th Graders live on East Side

There were approximately 703 6^th-8^th graders on east side. (937*3/4=703)

That's about how many kids would go to one of 9 equally-sized middle schools.

But East Siders Don't go to public schools, do they?

There were approximately 392 East side 6^th-8^th Graders enrolled in public school (523*3/4=392). This is when the neighborhood middle school was the worst-performing middle school in town! Think how many would enroll if it were a high-performing school.

FACT-CHECK #4: What do you mean by "East Side"? Isn't an East Side school really a school for rich, white people?

We define the "East Side" the same way the City does on the ProvPlan website: It is the neighborhoods of Hope, Mount Hope, Blackstone, Wayland, College Hill and Fox Point.

While this area is majority white, this area contains significant racial, ethnic and economic diversity. The Mount Hope neighborhood, for example, is majority non-white. Thus, a strong East school for grades 6-8 would serve a diverse population.

The East Side elementary schools that would feed an East Side middle school are already highly diverse:

Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School, is 48% African-American.

Vartan Gregorian Elementary is nearly evenly split between White, African-American, and Hispanic

Moreover, even if half the East Side private school 6^th-8^th graders returned to public schools, the building is large enough that there would still be two hundred seats available for students from around the city.

We should add that it seems inappropriate to ask a child's race, or even the wealth of their parents, before you agree they should have a good quality public education!

FACT-CHECK #5: Won't a great East Side school mean more benefits for the wealthiest part of town and less for the rest of the city?

ESPEC is not committed to any particular kind of school for the Bishop site, but assuming it remains a middle school, Nathanael Greene Middle School provides an excellent model of what could be done. Greene already has a strong advanced academic program that draws kids from around the city. Greene is a racially diverse school, it is the best performing middle school in the city, and it spends less per pupil than most of the city's other middle schools.

Providence Middle Schools- Per Pupil Expenses for General Education

R. Williams	$10,968
Bridgham	$9,697
Perry	$9,575
G. Stuart	$9,475
Bishop	$9,078
Greene	$8,743
Hopkins	$8,237
DelSesto	$8,179

Times2 (School is run by the state, not PPSD)

Certainly, Bishop needs to be heavily renovated or even rebuilt. That will require a substantial initial investment, of the same kind that the city is making in building a new Harrison Street High School on the South Side