Last week, my daughter and I attended a meeting about rebuilding the closed Nathan Bishop Middle School on Providence's East Side. A group -- the East Side Public Education Coalition -- had formed to revive it and, in concert with the mayor, were meeting with success.

The meeting was frustrating and disappointing to me and to my daughter, and I wrote about that (Vote came before discussion at Nathan Bishop meeting). In comments, the organizers were politely aghast.

Jo Lee wrote, :... have a heart. Acknowledging the hard work that went into this event would have been nice too."

She's right about this.

The mayor is smart and passionate talking about his education ideas, and that's exciting.

The substantial work the group has done speaks for itself. That's the news story.

I do know the work involved in such a grassroots effort, and thank you for it.

You have an important, good project, with powerful support. It should work.

Your group has been very skillful at working successfully within the system -- the hardest part for many community groups, who tend to be outsiders. You've resurrected a school that had been eliminated. That's wonderful, and you deserve our gratitude and admiration for that.

Maybe the group has grown to a point where the "managing up" that has revived Bishop can expand to organizing outward and downward to involve the rest of us.

I went to that meeting for my 4th grade grandson, and for his mom, who rents a floor of a triple-decker a few streets away from me. At the meeting, the difficulty of buying a home on the East Side for young families came up, but the army of renters weren't mentioned at all.

In our part of the Lesser East Side, between Hope and North Main near Pawtucket (where it was possible for teachers and journalists and public defenders and firefighters to buy a home until a few years ago) there are many, many three-deckers and renters. I rented for my first couple of decades here and so did everybody else I knew. Only rich people and old people owned homes on the East Side. That's still true.

These earlier buyers and current renters can't afford anywhere near the roughly $30k annual tuition at the neighborhood's private schools. Many would eagerly make signs, stick leaflets in doors so more people would know about these meetings, staff booths at the farmer's market at Hope High in summer -- all the small ways in which people feel a part of something larger and are, together, able to muster power they could not have alone.

Do you need anything from us besides political support? Several people asked, at different times during that meeting, "How can we help?", and the answers trended towards "Talk to your councilman."

It would help if you could have some better answers to that. Community organizing is about participation, giving volunteers a stake, a sense of ownership. Open airing of all the issues creates trust and forges a bond of shared purpose, and an enthusiasm for breaking through walls of inertia and bureaucracy.

These school decisions have been "top down" -- something mentioned in comments on an excellent post at the R.I. Future blog. The schools targeted -- including Nathan Bishop -- seem to have been closed by fiat, and the DeJong consultants have outraged the Mount Pleasant neighborhood by recommending that their landmark high school be torn down. (Neighbors urge city to save Mount Pleasant High)

One of the questions I didn't get to ask involved the decision, already made, to site the new school at the old school, deep in a quiet, leafy neighborhood near Elmgrove Avenue that felt overrun by rowdy teenagers.

There's something to be said for putting the new school near the middle-income people who will most use it, rather than in an enclave of half-million-dollar homes near Brown Stadium. The scarcity of large alternate sites was offered as a reason for building in the same place. But what about the vacant Sears building on North Main Street? Middle-school students don't drive, and perhaps teachers and staff could share the parking lot, owned by Miriam Hospital. Sale of the prime property which the vacant school now occupies should yield enough to develop another parcel. Has that been explored?

Given all the colleges (and Miriam) that have taken city properties off the tax rolls -- further burdening taxpaying parents -- shouldn't these institutions be stepping up to support public education in their vicinity? This wasn't mentioned at all in the money discussions.

I'm sorry to have slammed the efforts of good volunteers who've brought this project as far as they have. Maybe I'm just a jerk complaining that they don't do good meetings -- but not in the direction they suggest. This was too much like a corporate board meeting with an agenda to present, and less like the cranky, quirky give and take of a New England town meeting that airs it all.

I suspect that will change at future meetings, and that all questions will get some airing.

And I hope the good folks who've worked so hard to bring a middle school back to the East Side won't be discouraged by this whine from the cheap seats. We're on your side.

There are more meetings this week about the DeJong Company’s proposals for renovating and rebuilding the city’s schools. There's a meeting tonight at 6 p.m. at Bridgham Middle School Cafetorium, and another Thursday (Feb. 15) at 6 p.m. at Hope High School cafeteria. If you go to one, it's another chance to push for what you really want for your children.

Much more about this can be found at the ESPEC blog.