Teach for America Comes to Newport

The popular post-graduate program Teach for America has expanded to Rhode Island this year, and with its arrival comes a new faculty member at Sullivan School.

Superintendent John Ambrogi announced Tuesday night that the school has hired Teach for America's Amanda Paloian to serve as a first grade teacher at Sullivan School. A native of Connecticut and a 2010 graduate of Boston University, Ambrogi noted Paloian has done some work with inner-city schools in Philadelphia in the past.

"I was really impressed with this young woman," he told the School Committee. "There's almost this missionary zeal with someone involved in this program being here."

Ambrogi told Patch that although Teach for America is focusing its Rhode Island efforts on the Providence area, Newport asked if it could benefit from some of the participants.

"We asked to be involved, and they gave us three applicants," he said.

Founded in 1990, Teach for America is a nationwide program that assigns top-performing recent college graduates to teach in low-income communities for two years. Participants are paid by the school districts in which they serve, and often receive salaries commensurate with other beginning teachers. Each receives five weeks of intensive summer training to help set them up for success in teaching. The program pays for this and other ongoing support.

Teach for America announced its expansion to Rhode Island in February of this year, stating at the time that it would bring approximately 30 college graduates to teach here in the 2010-11 school year, and would provide 30 more in each of the following two years. The organization originally announced that it would be serving the Providence Public School District and Democracy Prep, a charter school in Cumberland. Rhode Island is one of Teach For America's four new regions for 2010, along with Alabama, Detroit, and San Antonio.

Ambrogi said the school district is optimistic about what will come of Teach of America in Newport, and that they'll be watching how it goes in the first year.

"We'll see how it works for the future," he said.

Just in time for the first day of school, the School Committee also approved the hiring of six other faculty members Tuesday night, all effective Sept. 1.

In addition to Paloian, the Committee also OKed the hiring of Christine Korney as a special education teacher at Sullivan; Kacie Gallo as a special education teacher at Thompson; Edward Synan as the Dean of Students at Thompson; Maria Sabetta as a part-time math intervention specialist at Rogers; Elizabeth Copeley as a science teacher at Rogers; and Dianne Martin as cosmetology instructor at the Newport Area Career and Technology Center.

Ambrogi noted how impressed he was with the quality of candidates the district had to choose from for the positions, several which opened up last-minute after other faculty resignations.

"It has been nonstop hiring since last week," he said. "I would say we were pleasantly surprised that we were able to find at least one good candidate for every one of these positions."

One important new member is Synan, who will serve as the Dean of Students at Thompson. School Committee member Patrick Kelly asked how much Synan had been briefed on the middle school's new redesign this year, which will bring changes to classroom assignments, truancy, tardiness and behavioral policies.

Ambrogi noted that Synan was teacher of the year at his last school in Virginia, where he worked with behaviorally challenged children. He also worked for some time in the human resources department at the National School Board Administration and as a policy analyst for the federal government.

"I was worried about finding the right person, but we were very lucky with this one," he said.

The Newport School district still has several positions it's working to fill: school psychologist, 5th grade teacher at Thompson and kindergarten teacher at Sullivan.

The latter position is needed, Ambrogi said, due to a wave of last-minute enrollments. The district had originally planned to have two kindergarten sections at each elementary school.

"I did budget for nine, but I thought we would be able to save some money," the superintendent said. "It doesn't look like this year we'll have any savings in terms of kindergarten enrollment figures."

Ambrogi said the district already has several applicants in mind for the position, but that they won't go through with filling it until they're absolutely sure it has to be done. He said those interested applicants would be able to start by Thursday should the district follow through with hiring one of them.