When a district is going through major changes—and making major changes—the leader has to be highly visible in supporting staff and connecting with the community, Joseph Goho says in this edition of “Superintendent Speaks Out.”
Goho, the superintendent of North Providence Public Schools in Rhode Island, has seen the demographics change dramatically in recent years, which required educators to revamp the curriculum. At the same time, the district is about halfway through rebuilding all five of its elementary schools to ensure alls students have access to up-to-date facilities.
“Being in the schools on a daily basis, talking to people, telling them they’re doing a great job, reminding them that yes, change is difficult, but we understand, and we appreciate how hard your job is, I think those little things go a long way,” says Goho, Rhode Island’s 2025 Superintendent of the Year. “People in the trenches want to know that their central office leaders recognize, appreciate, and support them.”
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One way he supports his educators is by not overloading them with new initiatives. A leader can even provide staff with too many resources, he cautions. “When you get a pandemic and a rapidly changing demographic, that’s a lot of change so I think it’s important for leaders not to have too many balls in the air,” he adds. “My leadership philosophy is to concentrate on a couple of things in a short period and do them well and do them deeply and have a timeframe to get input on what’s going well, what’s not working and how do we adjust it.”
Superintendent Speaks Out: Managing change
The number of multilingual students and children in poverty in North Providence Public Schools has been growing steadily ever since the Great Recession of the early 2000s, says Goho, who, prior to his six years as superintendent, served as the district’s high school principal for 20 years.
The district in 2019 passed a $75 million bond with overwhelming support to replace two of its five elementary schools with brand-new buildings. “Obviously, that created an equity issue for us, where we had some kids, depending on where they lived, going to school in a beautiful state-of-the-art facility, and we still had the majority of our elementary kids in old outdated buildings,” Goho explains.
Goho and his team returned to votes with a $125 million bond to replace those remaining schools—and upgrade its middle schools and high school—and won with an even greater percentage of the vote.
“North Providence is a very tight-knit community and always very supportive of education,” he points out. “So it’s never been very contentious in terms of supporting kids and supporting the schools in coming together to provide them what they need.”
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Goho and his team seized the opportunity of ESSER funding to get a jump start on a state requirement to implement a high-quality curriculum by 2026. They also expanded in-house programs for students with special needs to reduce the number of children who had to be placed outside the district for services. The money saved by fewer outside placements is being used to sustain funding the extra staffing hired with the relief funds.
