With schools statewide opening over the next several days, many students will find themselves in new or renovated facilities, and others in systems that are now under the direction of new, or interim school superintendents.
In the Newport County area, Tiverton welcomes a new superintendent, and high schoolers in Newport will be attending the recently completed Rogers High School, replacing what had once been characterized as the worst facility in Rhode Island.
That distinction was made in the Jacobs report a few years ago, a Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) assessment of the safety and conditions of every school building in the state. That report was the forerunner to a spate of school construction projects, one of which was the Rogers rebuild.
Meanwhile, a number of school projects are underway this year, with openings expected in 2026 or 2027. Among them, the $190 million Middletown Middle-High School building. Elsewhere, major projects are underway in places like Central Falls, Pawtucket and Warwick for hundreds of millions of dollars. These projects all slid in before certain RIDE reimbursement incentives expired.
And others, like Chariho’s elementary school replacements, fell outside the added reimbursement schedule, because voters rejected renovation or rebuild projects. Chariho is in the process of seeking another referendum on elementary school construction.
In what might be characterized as a game of musical chairs, superintendents (permanent or interim) were on the go … and arriving. Among them, Johnston, Warwick, Tiverton, East Greenwich, Pawtucket, Lincoln and Barrington.
Christopher J. Haskins, who had been serving as superintendent of the Paul Cuffee Charter School in Providence for more than a decade, is replacing Peter Sanchioni, who served as Tiverton’s school superintendent for eight years, a contentious relationship between the school committee and town council, mainly over finances.
Haskins, who won the Tiverton School Superintendent’s job on a 3 to 2 school committee vote, has a master’s in education from Bridgewater State University, and has taken coursework for his superintendent certificate at Providence College.
Haskins was an elementary school teacher at Seven Hills Charter School in Worcester and in Central Falls and Attleboro. He spent 11 years as a principal in Cranston and Westerly before his hiring as superintendent at the Cuffee School in 2014.
Schools open in Middletown on August 27, in Tiverton and Portsmouth on August 28, Jamestown on September 2, and Newport and Little Compton on September 3.
