An open letter regarding the Renaissance and Esperanza Innovation schools

An open letter regarding the Renaissance and Esperanza Innovation schools

I write today to openly ask that the proponents of the Esperanza and Renaissance Community School for the Arts rescind their requests to operate Innovation Schools within our New Bedford Public Schools. Having read the prospectuses in great detail, I find troubling the fact that they are willing to provide questionably greater benefits to a precious few of our students, while turning backs on the vast majority of our city’s children and their own colleagues. Furthermore, it becomes blatantly obvious that they are seeking to install themselves as administrators of these schools, thereby circumventing the process by which we vet our administrators to determine if their qualifications and educational / work history are a proper fit for an administrative position with the NBPS.

As delineated in the prospectuses, dated July 15, 2012 (Esperanza) and July 13, 2012 (Renaissance), they request the ability to limit their class sizes to “approximately 15” (Renaissance) and 20 (Esperanza). As an educator with more than three decades of teaching experience, I can well appreciate the hope to educate students in class sizes far smaller than the current average enrollment in our school system, but I would be quick to point out that teachers, and therefore students, in our school system have no such guarantees. In the case of the Renaissance School, which seeks to occupy space within the Gomes Elementary school, it must be pointed out that in order to realize this Innovation model, students who are not enrolled at Renaissance, but schooled at Gomes by virtue of their neighborhood location, would be added to the already swollen numbers in other classrooms at the Gomes school. In other words, a questionable and unproven benefit to a few would be directly linked to the unquestionable detriment of others. The same design can be immediately mapped to the Esperanza school.

Next, the curricula and method of pedagogy trouble me greatly. The Renaissance school projects to allow for the study of arts-related and arts-supported subjects in alarming amounts. The prospectus of the Renaissance school suggests that students would receive, on average, four times as much arts-related instruction as the non-Renaissance student. At the Esperanza school, students would be engaged in the learning of language for one half of their school day. (This,at a time when the educational community agrees that a more streamlined, reading and writing-focused, tack is what’s called for.) Both schools’ expectations and requirements fly in the face of our agreement with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Schools (DESE) to lift our system from its present Level IV designation. Concerning me more, as an Arts Educator, is a statement on page 28 of the Renaissance proposal that states, and I quote, “Currently, the district does not provide in-depth, meaningful arts instruction, and certainly not objectives-based integration targeting parallel and intersecting standards…” I take high offense at this careless and ill-informed citation. The arts educators of the New Bedford Public Schools are second to none in their ceaseless preparation and integration of those concepts and standards contained in the Common Core of learning. In this one statement, they have shown themselves to be the type of people willing to throw present colleagues under a train to achieve self-serving interests.

If, indeed, it is the belief that these ideals, once made real within the walls of a school, will result in an instantly better student, I challenge them to do what has always been the watermark of great thinkers throughout history; those whose dissatisfactions with their current situation require them to create change. Within our city limits, by my count, lie no less than four serviceable, yet empty, school buildings. If indeed the belief, as stated in the prospectuses, is as strident as they wish the citizenry and civic / political leaders of New Bedford to accept; work hard, be creative, take this passion and seek out every conceivable source of private funding possible. Leave no stone unturned. Be diligent and supremely focused on this dream and open the doors to an Innovation School on the dime of the private investor in one of the locations I’ve noted. But know this, if there is continued request that our New Bedford Public School’s already meager resources be further stretched in order to achieve this goal, I will stand against these proposals and cast a bright light on any group, civic or political, who are willing to uniformly sell-out thousands of New Bedford students whose futures will be made just a little dimmer through the incorporation of these proposals.

Bill Lacey, New Bedford resident and teacher
Chair, NBEA Community Relations