CUMBERLAND — Mayor Daniel J. McKee is proposing opening a public elementary school serving Woonsocket, Pawtucket, Central Falls, Lincoln and Cumberland that would be separate from the existing school system and run through the mayor’s office.

The school would be supervised by the mayor or a board of mayors from the five communities, but the day-to-day operations would be run by a nonprofit organization specializing in running schools, McKee says. Its budget would draw its revenue from the state and private donations, and be a fraction of the cost of running a school its size under the current system.

And, most importantly, says McKee, the school’s students would perform better than students at other public schools.

“We’re talking about building it completely from scratch, creating a network of schools that is a lot more transparent and more accountable,” says the town director of Children, Youth and Learning, Michael Magee. “If the current system could control costs and improve education, we wouldn’t be doing this. But we don’t. What we have is an economically unsustainable situation and failing schools.”

State Department of Education Commissioner Peter McWalters said in a statement yesterday that he had met with McKee regarding his proposed school system.

McWalters said that the department’s staff would be willing to work with the mayor to develop his plan under the state’s current charter school provision (the General Assembly has put a halt to the building of new charter schools in the state).

Yesterday, McKee, Magee, and Bryan Hassel, of the education research firm Public Impact, talked about the mayor’s vision, which is tentatively being called a “municipal academy.”

Magee says the new school would serve about 150 to 200 elementary school children. It would have no admission criteria and would be the first of several schools to be established over the next five to six years in the Blackstone Valley.

McKee hopes that the school system would become a pilot project for a statewide regional school system.

Hassel, whose firm is based in North Carolina, has been working to flesh out the system on behalf of the Coalition of Communities Improving Rhode Island, a group of mayors and town administrators (including McKee) that was founded this year.

He says the first step is getting General Assembly support. This could come in the form of lifting the moratorium on creating charter schools, thereby allowing the schools to receive state money. “The basic structure of this is all possible under the existing charter law,” Magee says.

But if the moratorium remains in place, the other option, says Hassel, is drafting legislation that specifically creates the Blackstone Valley regional school system.

McKee says he is working on such a proposal and meeting with assembly leaders in anticipation of the start of the legislative session next month.

The initial startup cost of the first school would be $500,000, which Magee says would come from major grant-writing foundations and private donations, not local revenue. The administration is eyeing a number of open spaces in the Valley Falls section of town to establish the school, including the now-closed St. Patrick’s parochial school, according to Magee. The target opening for the school is September 2009.

pmarcelo@projo.com