Equity at forefront of discussion for proposed Newport-Middletown joint school district

MIDDLETOWN — With a high school construction project in Newport already underway and a $235 million school bond proposal that could go before Middletown voters in November, residents of the two municipalities want to know how a regional school district will be able to balance the school portfolio of two separate districts.

“This regionalization is really not a true regionalization. So it brings up a lot of things that may be more complicated than others, such as school segregation, because we’re not actually one unified school district,” Middletown resident Amy Rodrigues said Monday night during the second session of the first public input meetings on combining the districts. “We’re not actually running two separate school districts as one.”

Representatives from Woolpert Consulting, Jessica Goodall and David Sturtz, led back-to-back public engagement meetings at the Wyndham Newport Hotel to gather input on the desires and concerns Newport and Middletown residents have about potentially regionalizing their school districts.

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Questions about regionalizing school districts

The legislation allowing the two municipalities to create a regional school district has passed the state Senate, but still needs to be passed by the House of Representatives before the two communities can vote on the matter in November.

The consultants had attendees break into groups of six and brainstorm answers to three questions:

• What do you hope could be gained for students from this process?

• What additional academic and extracurricular programs are most important to you?

• What impacts on students’ education should be considered?

The latter question, which was described by the consultants as the “fears” residents have about regionalization, garnered the most responses from the groups, who wrote their thoughts on large sheets of paper and presented them to the room after an hour of discussion.

A little more than 40 people attended the first session, which began at 3:30 p.m., and about half that amount attended the latter session, which began at 6 p.m. Both sessions had Newport and Middletown officials in attendance, although the 6 p.m. session took place during a Middletown Town Council meeting, which meant fewer Middletown representatives attended.

Newport City Manager Joseph J. Nicholson Jr. said he was pleasantly surprised at the turnout, given the good weather and time of day.

“Whether you agree with the people’s points or not, it’s great that people show up and are interested in the issue,” Nicholson said. “The bottom line is I don’t think there’s one person in here who doesn’t have in their mind the welfare of the education for the kids.”

In general, the majority of groups from both sessions shared concerns about having a regional school district but still having separate schools in both communities, and expressed interest in increased staffing, resources, and programming in the arts, languages, STEM and career and technical courses.

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Equity between the districts

“A theme I heard (throughout the night was) ... being explicit and careful to not segregate or provide inequitable distribution of resources, but to do the opposite,” Strutz said at the end of the first public input session. “If we’re going to have a bigger pie, let’s use it for the benefit of all kids and let's have a plan to do it.”

During the first session, a group of Middletown teachers spoke at a table with Newport School Committee member James Dring and Newport resident Amy Machado. Gaudet Middle School teacher Caitlin Santos, who presented for the group, said they hope regionalization would be able to increase resources and staffing for the schools in both communities.

“We’re hoping that if it is regionalized, with a larger population, there will be more available to the kids. But I think the major consensus at our table was equity between the districts, making sure money is going where it’s supposed to be, making sure there’s no redlining,” Santos said. “We’ve seen a lot of back and forth, and I know it’s early in the process, but we do want the separate communities to maintain a sense of community, but we also would like a sense of unity between the two.”

A few minutes later, Newport City Councilor Lynn Underwood Ceglie, speaking on behalf of her table, shared a similar concern over the idea of maintaining a separation of both communities under one unified district.

Her table included Newport Mayor Jeanne Marie Napolitano, Middletown Town Councilor Barbara Vonvillas, and former Newport School Committee member Jo Eva Gains, who currently sits on the state Board of Education’s Council Elementary and Secondary Education.

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“We were thinking it’s a positive thing for students’ education to be together, that this could remove some parochialism between our municipalities,” Ceglie said. “One of the fears we said is that the culture of separation will get in the way of success. Another fear was the undermining of progress based on previous rejections.”

Many groups either included full regionalization — combining Newport and Middletown schools as well as districts — as a part of their hopes for the outcome of the regionalization process, or saw the regionalization of the district as the first step to combining the schools within the two communities, though that has not been an official effort on part of the consultants, nor the municipal administrations.

Still, groups like the one Middletown resident Vanessa Ellermann spoke with during the first session hoped students could benefit from combining student populations from both communities.

“We would hope all students would be able to appreciate greater diversity in the student body,” Ellermann said, speaking on behalf of her group. “We think the long-term goal should be integration of the student body, which would not happen right away, of course.”

The groups from the second session focused a lot more on the logistics of combining the districts, such as transportation between schools for students in different programs.

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Rodrigues, who sat at a table with Newport School Committee member Stephanie Winslow and other residents from the two communities, raised questions about managing student information between schools and combining different special education programs.

“We need more facts and less fluff,” Rodrigues said.

The papers from the meeting will be used in Woolpert’s final report on “good practices” for regionalizing school districts, and several of the questions will be answered in the Frequently Asked Questions section on the regionalization effort’s official website. Later community meetings will be held in July and August.

This article originally appeared on Newport Daily News: Newport, Middletown RI residents give input on joint school district