By VINAYA SAKSENA

CUMBERLAND — Mayor Daniel  J. McKee has unveiled a plan to establish a new network of “high-performing” regional schools in the Blackstone Valley that could offer parents and students school choice and give taxpayers more bang for their buck.

Under plans announced last week, McKee said that the first step toward that vision would be establishing a new type of regional academy that could serve several communities, including Cumberland, Woonsocket, Central Falls, Pawtucket and Lincoln.
“The thing is to create, from the ground up, high-performing regional schools that (serve) both suburban and urban districts,” McKee said. “They’re designed to contain costs and improve performance.”
McKee said that the plan, advocated by a coalition of Rhode Island mayors and town administrators, could be implemented in one of two ways. Under one version of the plan, a law would need to be enacted allowing this new type of school, while the other version would require lifting the moratorium on charter schools in the state. McKee said he felt the second option may prove more viable, but did not express a strong preference for one or the other.
“We think we’ll pursue each one equally,” the mayor said. “I think they are both viable options.
McKee said both options would involve working with the Rhode Island Department of Education. If state law is changed to allow this new type of school, he said, the Department of Education would most likely be a collaborative effort between the aforementioned communities and the Department of Education. If the charter school option is used, McKee said, the Department of Education would still be involved, but a non-governmental organization may also contribute to the endeavor.
Peter McWalters, Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education with the Department of Education, said in a statement that he had met with the mayor, and that he supported lifting the charter school moratorium.
“The Board of Regents and the Education Department strongly support school-choice options, and we welcome community support in our efforts to lift the moratorium on new charter schools,” McWalters said in his statement. “We will work with the mayor and his staff to explore the feasibility of developing his proposal within the Regents’ charter-school authority.”
Also supporting the effort is Bryan Hassel, co-director of the firm Public Impact. Having worked on a similar proposal in Indiana, Hassel is now working with McKee and other public officials on these efforts to start a regional school.
According to Michael Magee, director of Cumberland’s Office of Children and Learning, the visioning part of the plan began in June, when the Coalition of Communities Improving Rhode Island commissioned Hassel to direct a study and action plan. They asked Hassel two questions: “what would our public education system look like if we built it today from scratch with the goal of both controlling cost and improving the performance of our students? And how do we begin to move in the direction of that goal?”
The questions that still need to be answered, McKee said, are how big the regional school operation should be, how to fund it reliably and how to do so without hurting the traditional public school systems, which would still be needed by most students.
“The amount of money that’s going into our systems now is short,” McKee said. “So you’ve got to make sure the first few years (don’t) have a negative impact on local funds.”
McKee said that the regional school would likely start with a limited number of students at the K-2 levels, though he added that a Web-based school was also a possibility.