The Providence City Council voted Thursday night to defeat a proposal crafted by its own president and the mayor that would have leased a vacant building to charter school Excel Academy.
But on Friday morning, the former Carl G. Lauro Elementary School was not exactly vacant. Workers went in and out of wide open doors on both sides of the 140,000-square foot building. The hum of several of the approximately 35 air conditioners could be heard from the sidewalk, as could the occasional power tool.
The building at 99 Kenyon St. costs Providence about $300,000 annually, said Josh Estrella, a spokesperson for Mayor Brett Smiley. The building needs to be preserved because the state-run Providence Public School District (PPSD) still has plans to use it. Estrella said the city’s current costs include utilities, general maintenance, roof work, fire alarms, and labor.
“The City spends approximately $300,000 a year to maintain this vacant, dormant building, which will have an active school presence connected to it, adding to the building’s security risk,” Estrella said.
Going forward, the costs for renovating and maintaining the building to PPSD’s liking will fall upon the district itself. PPSD spokesperson Suzanne Ouellette said in a Friday email the district is reassessing construction timelines and costs in the aftermath of the lease’s rejection, as it will use the building in the upcoming academic year as a temporary swing space for students of Asa Messer Elementary School before they can attend classes in a facility that’s still being built.
“In the short-term, PPSD will be responsible for bearing the full cost of utilities, custodial, and maintenance for the Lauro building versus sharing them with Excel,” Ouellette wrote — bad news amid a potential $5 million drop in federal funding, she added.
In the longer term, Ouellette said the district is now without lease revenue it meant to use in support of school facility upgrades across the city.
The old elementary school once accommodated up to 1,050 students, but expensive essential upgrades led the state-run district to close the Lauro School in 2023. Since then, the unoccupied building has become a testing ground for sparring ideas about education in not just the capital city but the state itself.
“This was a chance to say yes to students, to families, and to a smarter future for Providence,” Victor Capellan, founder and CEO of Rhode Island Education Collective and a former senior adviser to the state education department’s commissioner, said in a Friday morning statement. “Instead, we are left with a building that continues to drain public resources while children are denied better options.”
Excel Academy, which has four existing locations in Massachusetts and one in North Providence, would have occupied the building through 2035 under the lease agreement that councilors rejected Thursday. It would have shared the space with Asa Messer students for the first five years of the lease.
“Despite this disappointing outcome, our families and our community remain undeterred,” Owen Stearns, superintendent of Excel Academy, said in a statement Thursday night.
According to the Rhode Island Education Collective, the lease would have generated more than $80 million in local investment over time from Excel’s rent payments, capital improvements, philanthropy, and neighborhood beautification.
The City Council has twice shot down proposals to lease the building to a charter school, which are publicly-funded schools that limit enrollment via a lottery system. The Rhode Island General Assembly increased the number of charter school operators allowed in the state to 35 in 2010, and Excel already has approval to expand from the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE).
Capellan’s former boss at RIDE — state education Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green — has noted the big demand for charter schools among the city’s parents. Infante-Green cited in a 2024 interview with The 74 that 19,000 Providence children apply to charter schools out of 22,000 students in the district.
“As a mother and educator, the Commissioner believes in parents’ ability to choose the best educational experience that meets their needs and priorities,” Victor Morente, a RIDE spokesperson, wrote in a Friday email. “Both charters and traditional schools are public schools, and she represents all public schools.”
A U-turn on Kenyon Street deal
The school building is in the district represented by City Council President Rachel Miller, who negotiated the lease terms herself alongside Smiley, who also chairs the Excel Academy Rhode Island Board of Trustees. The upcoming agreement, Miller said in a July 17 statement, was carefully vetted and vastly improved upon the previous year’s proposal.
But Miller lost confidence in the lease on Wednesday evening and announced in a statement that she would vote against it.
“The city council will not hand the keys of a shuttered public school building to a charter school,” Miller wrote. “We need to ensure that our public spaces are utilized in ways that reflect the needs of surrounding communities.”
The next day, Thursday, the Council met and voted 8-4 on the lease approval, with two abstentions and one absence.
Miller’s change of heart provoked the ire of a number of charter proponents who had campaigned for months to see the lease approved, including the Providence Republican City Committee. In a press release issued shortly after midnight Friday, the Providence GOP noted busing Providence students to Excel’s North Providence location is costly, to the tune of an estimated $200,000 a year. Providence kids comprise 85% of the student body at the North Providence Excel, according to the group.
Miller’s maneuver also wounded and confused Smiley, who learned of her decision via her announcement, after hearing rumors earlier in the day. He described Miller’s reversal as “baffling” at a Thursday morning press conference ahead of the council’s vote.
“If she thinks that this is going to somehow provide additional resources for Providence Public Schools, it will not,” Smiley said. “This not only doesn’t move education forward in the city, it actually creates a bunch of new problems that PPSD is going to have to solve.”
High emotions over valuable real estate
Miller did not have any additional comment on the vote Friday morning. City Council spokesperson Marc Boyd said via email there was “nothing else to add right now beyond what was in Wednesday night’s statement.”
But Miller did have more to say online Wednesday, when Boston Globe political columnist Dan McGowan critiqued her second thoughts.
“This council can’t get out of its own way,” McGowan wrote.
Miller wrote back: “I don’t know Dan — it’s my job to put forward the best option I can and then listen. My neighbors opposed this — nearly 150 residents contacted me since — politicians don’t change their mind publicly because folks are unwilling to admit their way might not be the only way.”
More city councilors and Providence School Board members weighed in on social media, dissatisfied with McGowan’s assertion that Miller’s reneging was not the best look as the city works to take back its schools from state control.
“Well, if she reneged, she did it for the right reason,” Providence School Board President Ty’relle Stephens responded. “I’d call that an A+ reneging.”
Stephens had also scheduled a press conference outside City Hall earlier in the week to oppose the lease approval. The event was postponed because of “unforeseen circumstances,” according to an email from Stephens. But it would have included three school board members, one state representative, and two state senators from Providence, including Sen. Sam Bell, a Democrat who represents the district where the Lauro building resides.
“It’s no small thing to get the council president to reverse her position and oppose a lease agreement she negotiated,” Bell said via text Friday, praising the council’s decision.
The building is also in the district of Providence Democratic Rep. John J. Lombardi, who wrote via email Friday that he was still “trying to understand the backstory” of the building’s saga.
Still, Lombardi, a former city council president who temporarily served as the city’s mayor from 2002 to 2003, said a public school is his preference for the space. But he added that a “hybrid” public-private venture, like apartments with social service programs attached, would be even more “ideal” for the city.
The building, Lombardi said, is “too valuable a real estate footprint to remain vacant.”
This story was originally published by the Rhode Island Current.
