Elorza proposes moving administrative city school staff

(Updated 2:09 p.m.)
PROVIDENCE – Mayor Jorge O. Elorza Tuesday announced a proposed restructuring of administrative city school staff, moving them into schools to better support students, parents and teachers.
The proposed changes to central administration positions are being submitted to the Providence City Council for consideration.
“We have answered the call to action and overhauled central administration to better support our students, parents and schools,” said Elorza. “These changes bring [the] central office into the 21st century and better enable the school department to meet the current and future needs of our public schools.”
The overhaul follows an audit from Mass Insight from May 2015 which showed that central offices were ill-equipped to meet the demands of the current school district.
The revenue-neutral restructuring is being done in collaboration with the clerical workers’ union, which voted last week to move members out of central administration and into schools.
Changes include creating a multilingual call center to provide a central point of contact for parents and the community and allowing academic policy experts to spend the majority of their time in schools instead of central offices, so they can better understand problems in context, provide site-specific solutions, and increase equity for all students.
Changes also include dedicating a human resources officer to diversity expansion and creating a chief transformation officer and performance management unit with the Office of Transformation and Innovation. The CTO, coupled with an academic innovation specialist and operational innovation specialist, will increase tracking of student performance.
New administrative staff and those whose job descriptions are being rewritten will continue to work out of the central office at 797 Westminster St. part of the time, but will also actively work at the schools. No staff are losing jobs, a mayoral spokesman said.
Thirteen 13 clerical workers are also being moved into schools, where they will be able to more directly support the work of principals and other school administrators.

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