McGowan Off the Mark on Mt. Pleasant
An Update on Mt. Pleasant High School
For the background on this, please see the article posted here on my Substack entitled “Why You Should Care about Mt. Pleasant High School.”
It is now September 25. And still no word from the Providence School District on the future of Mt. Pleasant High School.
There is word, however, from Boston Globe reporter and columnist Dan McGowan. Just a few days ago, he published a column titled “Putting bricks before kids in Providence” (see https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/09/22/metro/putting-bricks-before-kids-providence/). I can only hope that he is not acting as an unofficial spokesman—or propagandist—for the Providence School District and Commissioner Infante-Green.
Why? Because he seems to be promoting “talk of building a brand new Mt. Pleasant High School on the other side of town” (emphasis mine). Unfortunately, McGowan fails to ask even basic questions about such a proposal. For example, how would this displacement affect the kids that currently attend Mt. Pleasant, particularly those students from the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood? Where would the new building be? And most imporantly, why would it be necessary to move these students all the way to the other side of town?
Mr. McGowan couples this failure with criticism of the supposedly “tone-deaf” Providence Preservation Society. According to him, their desire to preserve a historically significant landmark is akin to a “meltdown” that completely disregards “the students who learn in that deathtrap of a building” (emphasis mine).
So much to unpack here. “Deathtrap of a building?” If Mt. Pleasant is a deathtrap, then so are almost all the other Providence public school buildings. In fact, like I said in my previous article, Classical High School was much worse than Mt. Pleasant when I went there.
Mr. McGowan at one point asks whether those in the “bricks-before-kids movement” “would be caught dead sending their children to Mt. Pleasant High School.” “[B]ut, boy,” he says, “it sure would make a great location for the preservation society’s annual winter bash, amirite?”
What is this? Dan McGowan’s practice run for his new lounge club act? Alright, would they rather send their kids to Classical, where a whole ceiling tile fell and almost hit students on the head? Where students sweat like pigs on 80 degree days, never mind 90 degree ones? And where the lovely basement-level cafeteria leaked water that looked like diarrhea whenever it rained? Yes, Mt. Pleasant has “black fencing” surrounding the front of the school on the “chance of bricks [falling] on children and teachers before they make it to first period” (emphasis mine). But at Classical, we did not deal in chances; we dealt in realities.
Without minimizing Mt. Pleasant’s brick problem, it does not warrant wholesale demolition. Instead, it should compel education officials to fix solveable structural problems that they have failed to correct for years. So why are we only talking about a new Mt. Pleasant High School building? By McGowan’s logic, why not take a wrecking ball to almost every single Providence public school building?
Mr. McGowan does seemingly try to offer up an answer to that question. He notes that “a report released by Providence school officials last year found that Mount Pleasant needs $151 million in basic repairs, more than every other high school in the city combined.” Again, so much to unpack here. McGowan is referring to the 2022 Downes Construction Report, a report from the same company set to have a huge financial stake in demolishing the old school and building a new one. An earlier report, the 2017 Jacobs’ Report, pegged the costs at $31 million, not $151 million. Quite a difference.
Now, those in charge of the Mt. Pleasant community meetings hosted in the leadup to the September 15 deadline did attempt to explain away the difference. But their claim was that it was to ensure the building met “21st century learning standards,” a vague term that nevertheless clearly went beyond “basic repairs.” At any rate, Mr. McGowan is incorrect, even by the less than transparent standards of the PSD.
Speaking of that, why Mr. McGowan did not even address the PSD’s consistent history of obfuscation and lack of transparency is beyond me. As my previous article on Mt. Pleasant observes, this is the central thread of entire controversy. What happened to reporters seeking out “the whole story?” Wouldn’t the PSD have made a better and more appropriate target than the Providence Preservation Society?
If Mr. McGowan really wants to complain about organizations that harm the interests of taxpayers, why doesn’t he go after the people who hold the purse strings? Why doesn’t he direct his ire at people like Councilwoman Ryan? Can’t he see of the hypocrisy of a woman who has said and done nothing substantive about improving our public schools suddenly enlisting to become an over-enthusiastic cheerleader for the PSD and Commissioner Infante-Green? Or what about the Public Records Unit of the Providence School District, which failed to properly respond to my public records request for any and all documents relating to Mt. Pleasant school facilities policy from 2016 to the present?
Yet McGowan chooses to criticize preservationists more than self-serving entrenched local politicians and education officials.
But I digress. Mr. McGowan finally points to a lack of Mt. Pleasant pride. He notes the “heartbreaking student outcomes”: low test scores, chronical absenteeism, and many others. Those are all systemic problems. The District’s neglect of the buildings is part of a greater neglect, a neglect that stretches back decades. One could trace it to the disparagement of public education dating back to the Reagan era, the moneyed interest’s promotion of charter schools with questionable outcomes and little to no public accountability, the consequent failure to pay public school teachers properly for the work they do, the consequent neglect of our public school buildings, and the prioritization of magnet public schools with higher test scores (like Classical) over other public schools (like Mt. Pleasant).
That Mt. Pleasant is the target of demolition rumors and not Classical is no coincidence. It is the product of these systemic problems, not the solution to them. It is a product of its disregard for low-income public school students, much like the District’s decision to close Alan Shawn Feinstein Elementary School without any community input or even basic transparency was—and much like the decision to convert Fortes Elementary into a charter school was. But why should our local politicians and educational leadership do the hard work of transforming our educational priorities when they can simply wash their hands of the matter altogether?
It’s worked before. And with people like Mr. McGowan helping them, it might work again.