Parent Lucia Gill Case was involved in the revival of Nathan Bishop Middle School and will be sending her son, Lars, to it.

The Providence Journal / Ruben W. Perez

PROVIDENCE — With a dramatically overhauled Nathan Bishop Middle School set to reopen this fall on the city’s East Side, a growing number of middle-class parents have decided to put their trust in the public schools.

After undergoing a $35-million renovation, Nathan Bishop will open this fall with slightly more than 200 sixth-graders, the majority of them from the East Side, including less-affluent neighborhoods such as Camp Street and Mount Hope.

Supporters are hoping that the refashioned Nathan Bishop, which will offer Advanced Placement courses, student advisories and team teaching, will attract children of more affluent parents back to the public schools.

So far, Nathan Bishop seems to be doing just that: more than 55 students are coming from private schools, including Moses Brown, The Wheeler School, Providence Country Day, St. Mary Academy-Bay View and several other schools. And more than 65 youngsters will come from two high-performing public elementary schools, Martin Luther King and Vartan Gregorian.

According to the 2000 census, almost half of the East Side’s 937 middle-school students, which include grades five through eight, were enrolled in private schools.

Parents say that Nathan Bishop represents a turning point for the city’s public schools. Until now, affluent parents typically opted out of the public schools because the city’s middle schools were seen as failures, plagued by chronically low student performance, disruptive students and a high turnover of principals and staff. Only one middle school, Nathanael Greene, was seen as an option because of its gifted-and-talented program.

“This truly was a David-and-Goliath story,” said Lucia Gill Case, whose son, Lars, will attend Nathan Bishop this fall. “This school had gone downhill. It was in horrible shape. There was a sense of hopelessness.”

In the spring of 2006, then-Supt. Donnie Evans stunned parents with his decision to close Nathan Bishop, citing falling enrollments and alarmingly low student achievement. But Evans was forced to reconsider after hundreds of East Side residents launched a massive e-mail campaign protesting his decision. Evans not only listened, he invited parents to participate in the process of planning a new middle school.

“Now, there is this beautifully renovated building where many students can walk to school,” Case said. “It has a certain miraculous quality, like Obama becoming president.”

The new Nathan Bishop is changing for the better for several reasons: a dynamic principal, Michael Lazzareschi, who was named Rhode Island’s 2008 elementary school principal of the year; greater autonomy for the principal, who can hire his own staff; the opportunity for students to take advanced courses and a learning environment that offers the latest technology.

Tobias Lederberg, of Laurel Avenue, graduated from Nathan Bishop more than 30 years ago and he is tickled that his son, Eli, 10, will go there next year. Eli currently attends the Henry Barnard School, a laboratory school at Rhode Island College.

“We’re going back to the public schools,” Lederberg said, adding that he would have probably sent his son to a private school if Nathan Bishop had not been available.

“First,” he said, “we like that it’s a neighborhood school. Secondly, there are a number of students from his current class at Henry Barnard that are going there. There is some comfort in knowing that other people have made the same decision.”

Every parent interviewed for this story said that what sold them on Nathan Bishop was Lazzareschi, who currently runs the successful King Elementary School on Camp Street.

“What clinched it for us was Michael Lazzareschi,” said Debra Warshay, whose son, Matthew, currently attends the Jewish Community Day School in Providence. “He has a very sophisticated understanding of the role that parents play. I think he has a vision of what the school can be.”

Warshay, who lives on the East Side, said she was excited by some of the policy changes at Bishop, notably that the principal has the authority to choose his teachers, a policy that was successfully implemented at Hope High School.

Still, the decision to send Matthew to Nathan Bishop was not made lightly — or quickly, Warshay said.

“What I needed,” she said, “was enough time to trust that the school’s potential wouldn’t be blocked by archaic policies like bumping.”

Starting this fall, teaching vacancies at six schools, including Nathan Bishop, will no longer be filled based on seniority, which has often led to bumping — wherein a teacher with more seniority can replace someone with less seniority, a process that can result in a cascading series of disruptions.

Warshay also likes the fact that the school is opening with the sixth grade only, which means that her son will always be in the oldest class at the Elmgrove Avenue school. Bishop will add grades seven and eight during the next two years, for a total of 600 students.

In a 2001 Brown University survey, Providence parents said that offering a gifted program was the single most important factor that would bring them back to the public schools. But parents who were involved in the early planning of the new middle school wanted it to be inclusive. Instead of offering a separate strand for gifted and talented students, Nathan Bishop will offer advanced courses to all students, depending on their abilities.

That was a huge draw for a number of parents, who said that without that offering they might have sent their children to a private or parochial school.

But parents stress that this is not about creating a boutique school for the city’s middle class. Although almost 80 percent of the school’s students will come from the neighborhood, many of those who attend the two feeder elementary schools are children of color.

These parents hope that Bishop will be the catalyst for a deeper change throughout the school system.

“Superintendent Tom Brady feels strongly that it’s not just about Bishop,” Case said. “He is starting to put things in place that will be harbingers of change all over the city.”

“The Providence public schools want to be the school of choice for all families,” Brady said. “My goal is to put the charter schools out of business in five years.”

lborg@projo.com