In the fall of 2025, St. Mary Academy — Bay View will embark on an educational mission 150 years in the making, hearkening back to the very first principal of the school and its foundational mission.

The “Purcell Promise” program will enroll between three to five 9th grade girls with mild to moderate cognitive impairments in a new inclusivity program that looks to provide specialized services where needed, while offering opportunities for those students to be integrated within traditional classrooms and to partake in extracurriculars and athletics open to the full student body.

“As we’ve been reflecting on who we are as a community and where we want to go with our future, we’ve been looking at our history, and our core document,” said Mary Ann Snider, Vice Principal of Academics & Curriculum at Bay View in a recent interview. “Sister Juliana Purcell, who was the first headmistress of the school back in 1874, made the promise she would educate young women — all young women. In order to really fulfill that promise, we need to broaden our reach, and part of that meant starting a program like this where we would be able to meet the needs and welcome into our community young women with diverse and complicated learning needs.”

The concept had been percolating for a while, Snider said, but came together into clearer view following the arrival of the academy’s new president, Amy Gravell, and a meeting with Martha Murray, a Bay View alumna and National Director of the Tom and Terri Murphy Foundation, which helped start the state’s first inclusivity program within a Catholic school at Bishop Hendricken in Warwick 16 years ago.

Some seed money from a current Bay View family helped provide the necessary jumpstart to furnish classrooms for the program and buy educational materials, and now administrators are in the preparation stages for launching the program in earnest next year. According to Snider, the goal is to expand the program each year until a maximum of five students can be included in the program at each grade level from 9th to 12th grade.

“We certainly want to grow but we don’t want to grow so big that we lose that ability to really make it a niche program,” Snider said.

A tailor-made academic, and social experience
According to Jennifer Geary, Special Education & Academic Support Coordinator — as well as a graduate of St. Mary Bay View and parent to a current student at the school — the opportunity to join the school after 20 years in the field of special education was truly a dream job, and a full-circle moment.

“When I saw this advertised for the job that talked about this position and program being created, I think I jumped up and wrote everything up and submitted (her application) that night,” she said. “I have never been more excited.”

Geary said that the program is purposefully designed to be exactly as Snider described it; a niche program with small class sizes and the ability to craft lesson plans and activities as diverse and unique as the students the program intends to serve.

“We have the ability to customize and tailor their education plan to each child specifically,” she said. “So we will have a broader frame, scope, sequence, and curriculum to follow for each of the core subjects, but within that we have so much room that we can customize and tailor it to each student.”

Geary said that the program will include a mix of integrated classroom activities, along with more specialized lessons when needed.

“We’re trying for a blend and a mix of both, depending on the student,” she said. “Our goal is for every student to have their own experience. Some classes will be taught in the Purcell Promise program with a special education teacher, and other classes will be integrated. They’ll have opportunities for electives and athletics for other integration opportunities.”

Snider said that another key element of the program, which has been successful at Bishop Hendricken, will be a mentoring aspect, where students from the wider student body will be able to serve as mentors to the students in the Purcell program.

Snider believes that intermingling between the student body is particularly important in the modern era, where Covid disrupted social-emotional learning to a significant degree and the stressors from social media have wreaked havoc on teenagers’ sense of emotional wellbeing.

“We’ve seen an increase in anxiety, there is no denying that,” Snider said. “I think the pandemic was one issue, but I think the world is a lot more challenging to navigate.”

“This program, while it has all the academic components, it also offers such a great social opportunity within the school at a larger scale, but also with the girls in the peer mentorship program, which will be beneficial on both sides,” added Geary. “I think everyone is going to learn something from one another.”

Role models from Rumford
Along with the aforementioned influence of Bishop Hendricken’s Options Program, Snider said that another place they found inspiration while planning the program came from another East Providence-based school.

The Wolf School, a private K-8 special education school located at 215 Ferris Ave., in Rumford, has established itself as a destination for children throughout New England with various learning differences that make success in a traditional learning environment difficult; they call them “Complex Learners”. They celebrated their 25th anniversary last year, and the demand for their unique model that incorporates speech and language pathologists, occupational therapists, and special educators within the classroom experience has proven to be in demand. They’ve gone from three students in 1999 to 73 this year.

“We welcomed Bay View staff here last week to tour our school, see our model in action, and learn more about our students,” said Wolf’s Head of School, Anna Johnson. “It was a great chance for them to learn more about our program and more specifically, what has worked well for Complex Learners on a K-8 level.”

Snider said that they have already had multiple inquiries from families of current Wolf students about the program at Bay View as they look ahead to where they should send their children to high school.

“Integration into high school can be complicated for kids,” Snider said. “Our ability to maintain that focus and not just meet their academic needs, but meet the whole learner, is something that a place like The Wolf School or the Options Program or Purcell’s Promise is uniquely suited to do.”

Johnson expressed enthusiasm for Bay View’s program and the increasing number of likeminded programs in the state.

“It's wonderful to see schools like Bay View and other private schools in Rhode Island incorporate this type of programming to allow even more students to be able to access their school and be set up for success,” she said. “We want our students to be able to find a high school that will set them up for a great four years and beyond, and it's wonderful to see a new option opening up right in our own city.”