Lazzareschi

PROVIDENCE — When Nathan Bishop Middle School, on the East Side, reopens next fall after a $35-million renovation, it will have a new principal as well as new classrooms, a new gymnasium and Internet-accessible classrooms.

Michael Lazzareschi, the principal of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School, also on the East Side, has been named the new leader of Nathan Bishop, which will open with a class of about 200 sixth graders.

The school will add grades 7 and 8 during the following two years.

Lazzareschi, 40, is well-known to East Side parents, who led the fight to reopen Bishop as a model middle school that would attract middle-class parents to the public schools they abandoned years ago.

In May, Lazzareschi was named the 2008 elementary school principal of the year by the Rhode Island Association of School Principals and he was honored in Washington, D.C., last month.

Lazzareschi, who began his career as a middle school teacher and became a principal at 28, said he has been blessed with a couple of great mentors who taught him that leadership is all about building relationships.

“It’s a wonderful opportunity,” he said yesterday, “because it gives me an opportunity to move forward with the relationships I’ve built at King.”

Three years ago, he became principal of King, where his first job was to shift the emphasis from controlling bad behavior to supporting student achievement.

“He has a record of strong leadership in helping teachers do their best,” said Sam Zurier, an East Side parent who served on the Nathan Bishop selection committee. “It’s also helpful that he’s coming from King because he will know a lot of the sixth graders at the new Bishop.”

Lazzareschi will be under a lot of pressure to prove that a middle school can be successful in Providence. Six of the district’s seven middle schools are currently in some form of corrective action, which means that they have failed to make adequate yearly progress for several years in a row and have now come under state scrutiny.

Nathan Bishop, on Elmgrove Avenue, will draw up to 80 percent of its 600 students from the East Side neighborhoods of Fox Point, College Hill and Mount Hope as well as part of the North End.

Lazzareschi will continue to run King while he prepares for the Nathan Bishop opening, which includes developing a curriculum and getting the word out to prospective students.

The School Department closed Nathan Bishop at the end of the 2006 school year because of declining enrollment and chronically low student achievement test scores.

lborg@projo.com