Municipal leaders and Bristol Warren Superintendent Ana Riley joined Governor Dan McKee and the head of a new educational nonprofit last Wednesday afternoon to commit to a new statewide learning initiative begun in the hopes to improve Rhode Island’s educational outcomes by 2030.

The Learn365RI program, first announced by McKee last month, strives to accelerate statewide student performance on standardized test scores, improve attendance, and increase the percentage of families who successfully file Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) paperwork — all of which are metrics that Rhode Island currently lags behind neighboring Massachusetts.

In broad strokes, the initiative focuses around supporting municipality-led efforts to increase the amount of out-of-classroom learning opportunities provided to kids (whether they attend public, charter, private or home schools), either by bolstering existing programs or creating new ones. McKee’s goal is to increase the number of out-of-classroom learning hours to 1 million every year.

As an example of the kind of programming he’s talking about, officials in Newport (the first city to sign the compact), have advertised a reading program where local schoolchildren would be able to read to animals awaiting adoption in shelters.

Town Manager Kate Michaud explained the concept and how it could work in Warren while presenting the compact to the Town Council on May 9, which they unanimously agreed to participate in.

“It’s pretty flexible at the moment. We would create a coalition of people,” she said. “Obviously our [summer] camp program is robust and already includes some science and learning programs as part of programming for the camp, so maybe there’s an opportunity to expand those opportunities…We’re also planning to work with the HEZ [Warren health Equity Zone], who has a children and youth group working on ways to benefit the youth of Warren and get them engaged. I think we have a lot of good partners that we can work with to come up with some ideas.”

And that is where the concept exists at this point in time — preliminary. McKee has said there will be a $4 million pot of money within his budget request ready to seed participating municipalities with grants to provide an initial boost to their initial programming, but there is not yet a defined structure for how that money will be allocated, or how much each participating municipality will receive on any given year subsequently, if any.

At the center of the initiative is a new nonprofit group, Always Learning RI, which sprang up in the past couple weeks. It is chaired by Robert Walsh, former head of the NEARI teachers’ union. Its executive director, Jeremy Chiappetta, who was the co-founder and former superintendent of Blackstone Valley Prep, was in attendance at the Warren signing last Wednesday.

“It’s going to look different in 39 cities and towns. And the local leader, town manager, CEO, mayor, town administrator, they’re going to work with their community to build a plan that’s tied to one or more or all of those goals, and think about how we can bring our whole community together to support the learning elements tied to the goals they’re going after,” Chiappetta said. “It may very well look very similar in Warren and Bristol because there’s so many collaborative opportunities, especially with the shared school department.”

Even still, it was specified that Warren and Bristol would each be responsible for their own Learning365 initiatives respectively, and that it would not be the purview of school districts to provide the opportunities, though they can partner with municipalities to assist towards the effort. Bristol signed the compact last week.

Chiappetta said during the interview that out of classroom learning opportunities can come in many forms.

“There are versions of it which may be disguised learning. You can have really fun activities that underneath them have really meaningful academic elements,” he said. “And I think there are other elements where, frankly, parents may know their kids are behind or have big goals and need to be pushed to accelerate, and they need more than just what the school day is able to offer.”

Chiappetta also framed the issue from a socioeconomic equity point of view.

“Parents who are wealthy spend thousands of dollars on tutors and ACT prep and SAT prep and summer programs at college campuses and consultants who help their kids write their college essays,” he said. “It’s with that in mind that we do a statewide 39 city and town strategy that tries to advance those concepts and those theories to everybody.”

At the time of the signing, Warren became the sixth municipality to join the Learn365RI initiative, joining Newport, Bristol, East Providence, East Greenwich, and Providence.