Newport’s formal designation as one of Rhode Island’s five core cities for child poverty, announced at Monday’s Kids Count breakfast in Providence, is a long-overdue recognition of data Newport has been “bumping” the state’s traditional urban districts on for years and could help the city tap new state grant funding, Superintendent Colleen Burns Jermain said.
Jermain previewed the change in a monthly conversation with What’sUpNewp on April 28. Because the 2026 Rhode Island Kids Count Factbook was embargoed until Monday morning, What’sUpNewp held her comments on the designation until after the release.
The Factbook, reported Monday by What’sUpNewp’s Frank Prosnitz, formally added Newport to the list of communities — alongside Central Falls, Pawtucket, Providence and Woonsocket — where 69% of Rhode Island children living in poverty are concentrated.
The Factbook said Newport’s inclusion “reflects a shift in where child poverty is concentrated, as its child poverty rate has been similar to — or higher than — Pawtucket’s in recent years.” From 2020 to 2024, Newport had the second-highest rate of childhood poverty in Rhode Island, with 32% of children living in poverty. Only Central Falls, at 33%, had a higher rate.
Some 1,053 Newport children were living in poverty over that period.
Jermain said the designation reflects a conversation she has been having with state education officials going back more than a decade.
“Newport always bumped the other one out,” Jermain said, referring to the four traditionally designated urban districts. “We were never noted as one. But if you always looked at the data, we always pushed the other urban — if we weren’t part of the four urbans that were in the data for whether it was for poverty, whether it was for children under a certain age with healthcare or without, Newport always bumped the other one out.”
She said the work began under former state Education Commissioner Deborah Gist, with Jermain raising Newport’s status repeatedly. Jermain has led Newport schools since January 2014.
“On Monday at the Kids Count breakfast, they’re going to actually be sharing that Newport is an urban district, which will, in the long run, help the state to better understand our challenges, even though we are the beautiful city by the sea,” Jermain said. “And it will also help us in automatically receiving some possible grant funding in the future.”
The designation lands at a difficult moment for Newport schools. The district is facing a roughly $2 million budget shortfall heading into the 2026-2027 school year, with the school committee scheduled to discuss options at a 5:30 p.m. budget workshop Tuesday at Pell Elementary School and to consider layoffs at its May 12 meeting.
It also surfaces in the middle of a broader debate over how Rhode Island funds public education. Jermain has been a vocal critic of the state’s school funding formula, which she argues distributes money based on enrollment rather than student need. She has pointed to the Blue Ribbon Commission convened by the Rhode Island Foundation and led by former Congressman David Cicilline as the most promising avenue for change. The commission held its first hearing on April 28.
Jermain said Newport, Middletown and Chariho were among four districts cited in commission discussions as examples of communities the new formula is being designed to serve. She said she has invited Cicilline to address the school committee’s Tuesday workshop to explain the commission’s work.
“Reliance on the property tax is not cutting it,” Jermain said.
The Factbook noted that estimates for Newport, like Central Falls, carry a larger margin of error due to the city’s smaller population, but said the data points to “important changes in the distribution of economic hardship across the state.”
The Factbook also reported that 16.3% of Rhode Island children lived in poverty in 2024, up from 13.3% in 2023 and higher than the national rate of 15.5%.
Newport’s median family income from 2020 to 2024 was $51,216, the Factbook said — among the lowest in the state and a sharp contrast with neighboring Portsmouth’s $192,926.
The school committee’s next budget workshop is set for 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 5, at Pell Elementary School.
