PROVIDENCE — With Donnie Evans becoming the third superintendent to announce his resignation in eight years, some question whether Providence can attract a quality leader.

That’s a concern of Warren Simmons, director of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, who said that Evans’ unexpected announcement Monday will make it less likely that the city can find a high-caliber leader, either from inside or outside the system.

“I think there is a problematic culture here,” Simmons said yesterday. “We are consuming school leaders at an alarming rate. If we continue to have this environment of criticism, it will be difficult to retain some of the top leaders that are here.”

Simmons, who has worked with Evans on high school reform, said the city will never get the school leaders it deserves until the entire community stops focusing on “school buses and snowstorms” and concentrates instead on student achievement.

“It’s not about a single leader,” Simmons said, “it’s about the entire community. Do we have what it takes to support good leadership?”

Providence is far from the only school district struggling to hold onto strong leaders. The average tenure of an urban superintendent is three years, according to the Council of Great City Schools. And only 25 percent of superintendents have been in office for more than five years. Evans has run Providence for 2½ years, and the previous two superintendents, Melody Johnson and Diana Lam, didn’t last much longer.

Mary Sylvia Harrison, executive director of the College Crusade of Rhode Island, worries that the change in leadership will further disrupt a district already roiled by stalled contract negotiations and successive years of budget cuts. When a leader leaves, institutional memory is lost, she said. Projects get delayed while everyone waits for a new superintendent.

“Old beliefs and attitudes resurface and cynicism begins to run rampant,” Harrison wrote in a letter to Cicilline last week. “If we remove Donnie or fix the ‘leadership’ problem, we are still left with the other parts of our school community that also need fixing. If Donnie is the problem, he isn’t the biggest or the only big problem we have and no new superintendent will be a panacea.”

While Harrison didn’t name names, she said that the Providence schools are controlled by a unique culture, one that she calls “potent, formidable and toxic.”

According to Harrison, Evans was moving in the right direction. Elementary test scores are rising, high schools are on the road to accreditation and everything from math and literacy instruction to special education is being scrutinized.

In the end, however, the drumbeat of displeasure grew too loud for him to stay. In an interview last month, Evans acknowledged that he had never been subjected to such intensely personal attacks as he has here.

“I have a lot of bullet wounds,” Evans said last month. “There are a lot of people who wish I wasn’t here. But I’ve never worked in a system where I didn’t finish what I started.”

So what changed in the past three weeks?

Last week, talk-show host and former Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr. began hammering Evans about a contract that the School Department awarded to Charlene M. Staley, a former colleague and employee of Evans, who became his wife a month ago.

In a conversation with The Journal last week, Evans said he was outraged that anyone would accuse him of improprieties and said that the $4,200 special-education contract was awarded to Staley in April, before the two of them became romantically involved:

“That someone would have the audacity to connect [the contract] to my connection with her, I’m incensed by that.”

(Evans declined to talk about his resignation yesterday. Instead, he spent the day speaking privately with administrators and principals about how to continue the work that he has begun.)

Meanwhile, the City Council picked up on the conflict of interest allegations and Councilman John Lombardi asked the city auditor to investigate the issue. By Friday, City Councilmen Terrence M. Hassett and Nicholas J. Narducci Jr. were calling on the School Board not to renew Evans’ contract, which expires Sept. 19.

“I wanted [the mayor] to know that the superintendent did not have the support of the council,” Hassett said. “I don’t know if the mayor asked him to step down but we were calling for that.”

Narducci spoke with Cicilline briefly on Friday about the council’s displeasure with Evans’ leadership, which was repeatedly assailed by the City Council in the wake of the December snowstorm that left scores of schoolchildren in buses stuck on city streets.

“When the mayor knows the kids are in jeopardy and the school system is in jeopardy, he will do the right thing,” Narducci said yesterday. “Now I’m not saying he definitely said anything to [Evans] — but you know how it goes.”

Cicilline, however, denied that either he or the School Board called for Evans’ resignation. Evans has agreed to continue as superintendent until his contract expires in September.

But it took more than a snowstorm to bring Evans down. Last week, the Providence Teachers Union voted overwhelmingly to express its lack of confidence in both Evans and School Board President Mary McClure. The relationship between Evans and PTU President Steve Smith soured as contract negotiations, which were supposed to be wrapped up by Christmas, have dragged on for months.

Yesterday, Smith said that he harbors no animosity toward Evans, adding that the superintendent always conducted himself as a true professional.

“There is no secret that the union had serious disagreements in the way the district was being led,” Smith said. “We felt we had to make a statement about [his] leadership.”

Evans came under fire early in his career for the way he handled the closing of two schools: the Nathan Bishop Middle School on the East Side and West Broadway Elementary in the West End. In both instances, teachers, parents and community leaders faulted Evans for leaving them out of the loop during the decision-making process. The outcry against the Nathan Bishop closing was so vehement that Evans reversed his decision and appointed a committee to study how to reopen the school.

Supporters, however, say that Evans not only listens but has learned from his mistakes. In response to complaints that he failed to communicate with the community, Evans recently formed two councils, one for parents and one for teachers, which meet with him regularly to share their frustrations and concerns.

But there were other missteps that created friction between Evans and the rank-and-file, some of them unavoidable. When Evans arrived, he began putting together his own administrative team, a move that rankled insiders.

First, his deputy superintendent, Frances Gallo, left and later became the Central Falls superintendent. By last fall, more than 25 teachers and principals had left the district, several to take jobs in Central Falls and Fall River, where another Providence administrator now works. Critics complained about a brain drain; supporters said the turnover was typical of what happens when a new superintendent takes over.

Evans was also facing increasing pressure to boost student performance from state education Commissioner Peter McWalters, who placed the entire district in corrective action because a majority of district’s 52 schools were chronically underperforming. Yesterday, McWalters said that he is meeting with Cicilline today to discuss how the state might play a greater role in helping the district:

“We are increasingly concerned about the stability of the district,” McWalters said, “and we intend to be at the table and become more involved.”

Evans is also struggling with a budget crisis of epic proportions because Governor Carcieri, who is also facing a large state budget shortfall, has said that there will be no additional school aid this year. More than 600 Providence teachers have already received pink slips and morale is at an all-time low.

In the end, Evans, a self-described introvert, may have been done in by his own unassuming leadership style. In a stunningly honest move, Evans wrote a letter of apology this fall to the district’s 2,200 teachers in which he acknowledged the unpopular decisions that he felt compelled to make because of budget cuts:

“Know that I hear your concerns and for each of the situations that caused them, I am deeply apologetic.”

Staff writer Daniel Barbarisi contributed to this report.

lborg@projo.com