Taxpayers and children should come before powerful special interests. But that has not been the case recently in Warwick.
There, the City Council, under President Joseph Solomon, has blocked a Pawtucket-based charter school’s efforts to buy a vacant school in the city. The deal was opposed by the politically powerful Warwick Teachers Union, which does not favor competition from charter schools.
As Linda Borg reported on Jan. 27 (“Bid to buy vacant school fails to get hearing”), the International Charter School offered to buy the closed Aldrich Junior High School for $2.5 million, even more than its appraised value of $2.4 million. The school also offered the city $70,000 a year in lieu of taxes.
It would clearly be a good deal for taxpayers to get an abandoned property off their hands and let someone breathe new life into it instead of letting it rot. In a city the size of Warwick, $2.5 million is a lot of money — money that could significantly lighten the burden of its taxpayers.
And it would be good to give students, many of them poor and minorities, a lift. The International Charter School, a creative and well-regarded charter, offers instruction in Spanish, Portuguese and English. Currently running an elementary school of 362 students, it wants to add a middle school with a total enrollment of 800.
The school’s director, Julie Nora, repeatedly bettered the offer since July, but she said the City Council never put the proposal on the docket for a vote or a public hearing.
“The union doesn’t support it,” said Warwick Teachers Union President Darlene Netcoh. She cited the usual argument that state aid in Rhode Island follows the student, and that any Warwick students going to the school might thus drain some money from traditional schools.
Of course, when the students leave, traditional schools no longer bear the cost of educating them. Further, administrators can always make adjustments to deal with a shrinking student population. The charter even offered to reimburse the city 60 percent of the amount in aid to educate each child — money that would be drained from the charter students and go back to the traditional schools for not educating them.
Let’s not kid ourselves about what is really going on. The union does not want to lose any jobs, and to retain them it will fight to block families from choosing schools that better suit their children's needs. It is shameful that this happening in Rhode Island, where a national survey last fall found that Latinos have worse prospects for success than in any state in the country. Surely, better educating poor and minority students is the civil rights challenge of our time.
The city’s popular mayor, Scott Avedisian, is a strong supporter of the proposed sale. “It’s a great use for Aldrich,” he said. “I am disappointed.”
He called the International Charter School’s proposal “well-thought-out” and noted that the neighbors and the local City Council member, Jeremy Rix, are in favor of it. “I think it would have been a great opportunity for us to reuse a building that I now worry will start to deteriorate,” Mayor Avedisian said.
We hope President Solomon reconsiders his stubborn refusal to take this matter up, and that the offer might be renewed. Voters will rightly regard this as a test of whether he and his Council support children and taxpayers, or are more oriented toward special interests.