School Board meeting tonight

The School Board meets at 797 Westminster tonight at 6:30.  The main item on the agenda is the West Broadway Elementary School closing.  There seems to have been a change in the proposal:
2-42-07 Recommendation for West Broadway Elementary
School
Resolved, the School Board approves the relocation of
the West Broadway Elementary School with the existing
students and faculty to [...]

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Concerns over the next steps for Nathan Bishop

(This post was just sent as part of our email update. If you got the email, skip the post. If you didn’t get the email, get on our mailing list by emailing me at tschmeling@ric.edu or espec@earthlink.net.)
Thanks to your support, we are getting much closer to reopening Nathan Bishop as a high quality [...]

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Post-Meeting Survey Responses

Following our Feb. 7th meeting at ML King, we solicited responses to an on-line survey of opinion regarding the future of Nathan Bishop.  We’ve now closed the survey.
112 people responded to the survey. 60 respondents said they attended the meeting, 29 said they did not, and 13 did not answer this question.  Nearly all of [...]

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Heads-up on Board of Regents Meetings

The Board of Regents will meet on Feb. 28 and March 22. The Feb. 28 meeting is a budget meeting. March 22 will see a decision about the proposal for Nathan Bishop. We have some reason to think that the Bishop proposal is in trouble. We’re not yet sure whether the [...]

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WBES on Citizenspeak

The West Broadway group has taken a page from ESPEC and opened up a citizenspeak email campaign at http://citizenspeak.org/node/999
Citizenspeak is how EPSEC got started last March.  It’s an effective organizing tool.  It’s also the creation of ESPEC steering commitee member Jo Lee, so consider this a plug for Jo.

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Survey Closed

We got 112 responses to our survey but, after 10 days, the responses stopped coming in, so we closed it down. Expect to see results here in a day or two.
If you didn’t get to put your 2 cents in on the survey, feel free do it in the comments of this or any [...]

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West Broadway Elementary News

WBES parents met with Mayor Cicilline on Thursday. He apparently said he would not second-guess Dr. Evans’ decision to close the school. The report is in a ProJo article here.
I talked to several east siders at the DeJong meeting who expressed interest in this, so here is how you can participate:
There will be [...]

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Smaller Schools

Nathan Bishop has a current capacity of about 850. The Nathan Bishop Committee recommended a middle school of about 450. The DeJong proposal puts the population of the new school at 600. Bill Mott has kindly sent along an article about how performance is improved by small school initiatives in New [...]

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24 More Survey Comments

Here’s another set of responses to an open-ended question on our on-line survey. Responses have been edited only to preserve anonymity.
For families with children currently in or who have attended public school, please tell us anything you’d like to share, particularly as it might relate to to Nathan Bishop Middle School’s reopening, East Side [...]

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Open Post- Speak your mind

Here is this week’s open post. Use the “comment” link below to say anything that’s on you mind about N.Bishop, The DeJong plan Providence Schools, public particpation, ESPEC’s direction and future, etc.
And don’t forget the DeJong meeting at 6pm this Thursday, Feb. 15, at Hope High!

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The Case for a new Nathan Bishop Building

At our Feb. 7th meeting, we took a straw poll of attendees to find out whether, given what they knew and heard at the meeting, they supported renovating Nathan Bishop or constructing a new building. While there are clearly arguments on both sides, the overwhelming majority supported new construction. After the meeting, we [...]

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Building a Better School Building

The following appeared in the January East Side Monthly.
Building a Better School Building- by Sam Zurier

When parents and students find reasons to praise the Providence Public Schools, the quality of our schools’ facilities is not mentioned. In fact, the City commissioned a comprehensive study of the public schools and committed to an extensive overhaul, [...]

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Reminder: DeJong meeting at Hope High Thursday 2/15

The final two public meetings about the DeJong Company’s proposals for renovating and rebuilding the City’s schools are this week:
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Bridgham Middle School – Cafetorium
1655 Westminster Street, Providence
6pm to 8pm
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Hope High School – Cafeteria
324 Hope Street, Providence
6pm to 8pm

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Survey Comments on New Construction vs. Renovation (33 comments)

The on-line survey is at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=30263267452. Thanks to Jill Davidson for putting it together. We have 96 respondents so far, and we’re going to tally up the results soon, so respond now if you haven’t.
We’ll post the results of the survey when we think we’ve gotten all the responses we’ll get. In the mean [...]

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Why East Siders should care about West Broadway

The ProJo has another story on West Broadway Elementary School this morning.
Why should East Siders care about this story? How does it affect us?
The issue for us is not the closing of the school itself. There is reason to be concerned when any school closes, but it is sometimes necessary. The West Broadway [...]

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Building a Better Nathan Bishop

People continue to join ESPEC with the hope of creating more vigorous public education. As they do, they may want an efficient way to find out what’s been happening and where we are headed.
Sam Zurier, of the ESPEC steering committee, has produced (with just a little help from the rest of us) a wonderful [...]

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Bishop Committee Recommendations

At last night’s meeting, we tried to keep the discussion tied to the future of the Bishop building.   However, there was some interest in the academic program, and I think a number of people are entering the discussion without having heard about the Bishop Committee and its recommendations.  Here, then, are some links to downloads:
The [...]

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Pics from last night

We’ve got some photos from last night’s meeting here

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Survey Responses and Email addresses

Survey responses are rolling in.  We’ll post the results and (anonymous) comments in a few days. We need your opinion too!
We collected dozens of email addresses last night, to add to the 330+ we already have on our list. Unfortunately, several of them unreadable or produced bounced emails. If you signed up but [...]

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Comments from the meeting

We’re still working on a summary of the meeting. Meanwhile, here are some comments from attendees. These are from the comment cards, and transcribed as written.
February 7 ESPEC Community Meeting Comment Cards
Votes for New Construction

1 Preferences for Nathan Bishop:
–new building
–environmentally friendly
–meet needs of middle-school education
–flexible space to allow for future needs – changing [...]

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