Victor Capellan has been a high school principal in New York City, superintendent of Central Falls schools, and a top aide to Angélica Infante-Green.
Now he’s striking out on his own.
Capellan has launched the Rhode Island Education Collective, a nonprofit that sounds like it will start off as a consulting and advocacy organization but he hopes will eventually become an incubator for initiatives that can improve student outcomes in Rhode Island’s urban school districts.
He’s been working on the concept since leaving the Rhode Island Department of Education nearly two years ago, and next week will hold a series of forums on reimagining public education with various stakeholders at the collective’s office in Providence.Capellan said the collective’s goals are to organize and support families and communities to advocate for the change they want to see in their schools, support high-impact programs in traditional public schools, and grow the number of charter school seats at existing or new schools.
Wait a second: For those who have been around the education space for awhile, this sounds a lot like a reinvention of the Rhode Island Campaign for Achievement Now from a decade ago. That organization mostly advocated for expanding charter schools before fizzling out.Capellan isn’t shying away from the fact that he believes charter schools are part of the answer in Rhode Island, and he’s playing a behind-the-scenes role in the effort to allow Achievement First and Excel Academy take over what used to be the Carl Lauro Elementary School on Federal Hill.But his experience running the school system in Central Falls gave him insight on the limitations of charter schools, and the importance of needing to push for innovation in traditional school districts. In other words, he supports charter schools, but he’s not a zealot.
The bigger picture: Capellan’s vision for the collective is to look back 20 years from now and see that it had a significant impact on education in Rhode Island. To do that, the incubator aspect is probably the most intriguing. He’ll need a long-term funding strategy to make it a reality.
This story first appeared in Rhode Map, our free newsletter about Rhode Island that also contains information about local events, links to interesting stories, and more. If you’d like to receive it via e-mail Monday through Friday, you can sign up here.
Dan McGowan can be reached at dan.mcgowan@globe.com. Follow him @danmcgowan.