Parents Allege Contractor Offered Items From School
Posted on: Friday, 16 May 2008, 15:00 CDT
By Linda Borg
A School Department spokeswoman says the items were out of date or did not have value to the district.
PROVIDENCE -- A couple of parents said last night that the contractor hired to renovate Nathan Bishop Middle School contacted the Catholic Diocese of Providence and allowed its teachers to cart away books, supplies and equipment that the school district had left behind.
Christine Wilford, whose child attends Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School, raised the issue at a meeting of the District Parent Advisory Council, whose mission is to improve communication between families and central administration. Supt. Donnie Evans formed the committee last year to reach out to parents in the wake of several decisions, including the closing of a popular elementary school, that left parents feeling powerless.
"We heard that the contractor at Nathan Bishop allowed parochial school teachers to take whatever they wanted," Wilford said. "I'm told they took science supplies, books in their wrappers, tables and chairs."
School spokeswoman Christina O'Reilly said she received two e- mails this week from City Councilman Cliff Wood and Tom Schmeling, an East Side parent, asking for information about the allegations.
She said that the district took multiple steps to ensure that any useful items were removed from Bishop, which is about to undergo a $35-million renovation as part of the first stage of a projected $792-million overhaul of the district's aging school buildings.
According to O'Reilly, two high-level school administrators made an exhaustive inventory of the East Side middle school in November, tagging everything that was supposed to be kept and labeling where it should go. Some materials were placed in storage while other supplies were shipped to schools or the central office.
Follett Books was brought in to assess the remaining items for resale or trade value and it determined that the remaining items were too outdated to have value to the district or to the company.
In an e-mail to Wood and Schmeling, O'Reilly wrote that "there may have been some 'new condition' textbooks but they were not recent publications."
However, an article in yesterday's Providence Journal reported that many of the textbooks at Classical High School, the district's flagship high school, are 12 to 15 years old. A half-dozen department heads said that they don't have enough money to replace books, much less buy new ones. And school administrators said it would cost millions of dollars to replace textbooks for an entire subject.
According to O'Reilly, School Department staff also visited Bishop and stripped doorknobs, light fixtures and any other useful hardware that could be salvaged. Tables and chairs were removed and Hope High School, because of its proximity to Bishop, was offered a chance to claim anything it wanted.
The contractor, Agostini Construction of East Providence, apparently had permission to dispose of whatever materials were left over, according to Alan Sepe, the city's acting director of public property.
"This was in accordance with the job requirements that specified that the contractor was to dispose of materials left behind after a through inspection by the district," O'Reilly wrote in her e-mail to Wood and Schmeling.
But several members of the parents' advisory group were not satisfied with those answers.
"Who made the decision to allow the diocese to go in there?" said Lorraine Lalli, whose child attends King.
Another parent asked why the two East Side elementary schools, King and Vartan Gregorian, weren't given a chance to take supplies out of the building.
Wilford said she raised the issue because no one from central administration responded to her e-mail on Wednesday, despite the fact that she forwarded it to several school administrators. She said the latest incident is an example of the lack of communication between the district and parents, a breakdown that the advisory committee is meant to address. lborg@projo.com / (401) 277-7823
Originally published by Linda Borg, Journal Staff Writer.
(c) 2008 Providence Journal. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.
Source: Providence Journal
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