BY JIM BARON

CUMBERLAND — With only a few dissenting exceptions, local parents, educators and community leaders turned out to support the establishment of a mayoral academy charter school as an alternative to the education public schools are currently offering.

After hearing Seth Andrew describe the Democracy Prep school he runs in the Harlem section of New York City, and hearing several of the students who go there declare their love for the school and their teachers, Tracy Dann, who described herself as a Cumberland resident and taxpayer, said, “That’s where I want to send my kids.”
Dann said her comments were “selfish” because she has a son who will begin kindergarten in September and twins who will start the following year.
“Instead of looking at this as a totally parallel school system, look at it as a microcosm of 80 students and take what works there and apply it to the public schools.”
“The system we currently have is failing our kids,” asserted Ramon Martinez, executive director of Progreso Latino in Central Falls. “We have to get over our provincialism in Rhode Island. We’re the smallest state and we are talking about regionalization. We are only part of a region.
“We ought to have Democracy Prep come in, because mayoral academies are a hell of an innovation,” he said.
Nearly two dozen people spoke at a public hearing on the proposal for a Democracy Prep mayoral academy at the former Our Lady of Fatima school in Valley Falls. If approved and funded, the school would accept students from Cumberland, Lincoln, Central Falls and Pawtucket and operate under rules different from public schools or even other charter schools.
Under a scheme passed in principle by the General Assembly last year, the schools would not have to pay prevailing union wages, employees would not be part of the state pension system and teacher tenure and other work rules would not apply. Gov. Donald Carcieri, an advocate of charter schools in general and mayoral academies in particular, has proposed extending the lifting of the work rules for all charter schools.
The Cumberland mayoral academy, which has been championed by Cumberland Mayor Daniel McKee, is seeking approval from the Board of Regents for Elementary and Secondary Education and funding from the General Assembly to supplement the $4 million McKee said the plan has attracted in private contributions.
Andrew’s Democracy Prep has been chosen to operate the Cumberland school if it gets approval and funding.
Monday’s public hearing was before a subcommittee of the Board of Regents. A second hearing has been scheduled next Monday at 7 p.m. at the Blackstone River Theater on Broad Street. The state Department of Education has given a recommendation of approval for four new charter schools and the Cumberland proposal is one of three more seeking a recommendation. From those seven hopefuls, the regents have to choose which ones will be approved for the limited amount of funding likely to be available to charter schools in next year’s state budget. Tight budget restraints will probably only allow one or two of the schools to open in September, and it will likely be late June or July before the regents know how many schools can get the go-ahead.
Former Cumberland School Committee Chairman Robert Thibodeau, while defending the public school system as “a really good deal,” said a mayoral academy is “another way to get rid of all the mandates and all the rules, throw that all away.”
He said the schools add “something called competition, and we need it.
In a brief presentation, Andrew touted Democracy Prep as an intimate educational experience where “I know every parent and I know every grandparent.” Parents have the cell phone numbers of their children’s teachers, he said.
“All the factors are here for tremendous success,” Andrew said, noting that the school would start with elementary grades and add a middle school before becoming a K-12 institution. At Democracy Prep, he boasted, “every single student goes to college, no exceptions, no excuses.”
Madeline Robinson, a retired Providence school teacher, was one of the naysayers.
“I see this as an attempt to regionalize schools,” she said, “this is what the legislature is indicating, this is what the governor has been talking about. In my mind, this is a disguise for that. With regionalization you are going to lose your school committee and you are going to lose input right in the town and you are going to have the legislature in your face all the time.
Jim Scullin said charter schools are private schools and “not one cent of taxpayer dollars” should go to fund them. He said the state should fund catholic schools and other existing private schools before creating charter sahcools.