TOMAS HANNA

PROVIDENCE — As soon as Tomas Hanna arrived in Providence as the School Department’s new deputy superintendent in charge of operations, he met with his human resources staff and asked each person, “What do you do in the Providence schools?”

The first time around, the employees said they performed specific tasks. Then, Hanna, a no-nonsense cheerleader for change, launched into his spiel. The HR department, he said, isn’t about the keeping the bureaucratic trains running. It’s about making sure that teachers and principals are treated with respect. It’s about making parents — the consumers — feel welcome. And it’s about delivering the best educational product possible.

Then, Hanna asked his staff the same question: What do you do in the Providence schools? This time, an employee said, “I’m here to accelerate student learning.”

This is the kind of global perspective that Hanna wants every member of his staff to share — from the clerks to the bus drivers, the teachers to the principals.

To paraphrase his former boss, outgoing Supt. Paul Vallas, of Philadelphia, “We’ve got to put the human back in human resources.”

Hanna made waves before he even arrived here. Two City Council members complained that his contract, negotiated by the School Department, violated the city’s compensation ordinance because it went beyond the scope of what was budgeted for the position. The matter was resolved when Hanna’s housing allowance was cut and his contract was subjected to City Council oversight. He replaces Deb DeCarlo, who left the district last year to pursue a principal’s job in Fall River.

When Hanna was appointed director of teacher recruitment and retention in Philadelphia in 2005, he fired four top managers in human resources after a consultant called for major changes. When Hanna met with the staff here, he assured them that he wasn’t embarking on a slash-and-burn policy.

“I’ve been told to fix things, but not clean house,” he said during an interview. “But once we’ve given them the tools and the training to get the job done, if it’s not a good fit, we’ll have to reconsider.”

Hanna has spent his entire career — 18 years — in the Philadelphia school system, which has 25,000 employees, ten times as many as Providence. The son of a principal, Hanna began his career as a substitute teacher and rose through the ranks: teacher, elementary school principal and then high school principal.

He is credited with turning around one of the most troubled elementary schools in Philadelphia, in a neighborhood known for its gun violence. Then he was asked to do the same thing with a high school.

It was Vallas, the new hot-shot from Chicago, who tapped him to transform the human resources department. Working with a coalition of community and business leaders, Hanna launched the “Campaign for Human Capital,” a sweeping call to recruit and retain talented teachers.

“We were losing 27 percent of our teachers after the first year,” Hanna said. “They were leaving in droves.”

So Hanna asked the business community, the unions and the nonprofit world, “How do we do this better?”

That discussion gave birth to the “Roll Out the Red Letter” campaign, a effort to attract mid-career professionals into the teaching field, tapping two seasoned organizations, Teach for America and the New Teacher Project. The district also began running ads that described how tough it was to be a teacher in a big city school. One ad described an urban teacher as a “philosopher, referee, teacher.”

“We told teachers, ‘This is hard work. The meek need not apply,’ ” Hanna said. “We had to tell the truth about this work.”

Part of the challenge was getting the area colleges — the teacher-prep programs — to acknowledge that they weren’t doing a good job preparing students for an urban setting. Vallas pitched teaching as the unfinished business of the Civil Rights Movement; he described it as the local version of homeland security.

“We asked, ‘How can we sell our schools?’ ” Hanna said. “And we rolled out the red carpet. We chartered buses so prospective teachers could visit our schools. And they visited the real places, not just the Classical High Schools and the Vartan Gregorians.”

Hanna said he never forgot to include the unions in his discussions. When Philadelphia was moving to site-based management, where the principals have authority over local hiring, Hanna asked the unions how to do it.

“I’m here to build relationships built on respect,” he said. “I recognize that we don’t do this work alone.”

So why Providence? Hanna believes that the stars are aligned to make reform possible here. It’s a small district with only 60 schools as opposed to Philadelphia’s 300. Both Mayor David N. Cicilline and the School Board are behind Supt. Donnie Evans and his mission. The city is 60 percent Latino and Hanna is Puerto Rican. And Hanna said he likes Evans’ thoughtful, deliberative leadership style, a huge shift from Vallas’s larger-than-life persona.

Hanna said his first goal is to make the human resources operation more customer friendly, a major theme of the superintendent. He wants to take the HR staff on visits to classrooms so they can witness what it means to have a vacancy.

“One vacancy means 30 kids don’t have a teacher,” he said. “Ten vacancies mean that 300 kids don’t have classroom teachers.”

Hanna is already brainstorming what it would take to make the first-floor offices of the school administration building on Westminster Street more welcoming to parents and teachers. He is already thinking about how to improve the hiring timeline so the district can actually appoint new teachers before August. And he has already met with union leaders and is in the process of visiting schools.

“It’s been scary,” Hanna said of the move, “but I haven’t regretted my decision for a second. I’ve already gotten Rhode Island plates and a Rhode Island license.”

lborg@projo.com