Superintendent Dr. Sandra Forand confirmed on Tuesday morning that she would be leaving the East Providence Public School district — where she spent 26 years of her career in education — at the end of the school year on June 30.

“It’s time to move on to other opportunities and challenges,” Forand said in a phone interview. “It's been a great run here. I've been a principal, I've been a teacher, I’ve been assistant superintendent, but I'm just ready at this point to retire and pursue other opportunities.”

An East Providence native who still calls the city home, Forand graduated from Rhode Island College in December of 1995. She got her master’s from Providence College and her doctorate from Northeastern University in Boston. Her first job in education was in Cumberland as a resource teacher for five years. Then a job opening became available in her home town.

“This has been my home my entire life, so I applied,” she said. “I spent two years teaching high school special education.”

Forand then moved over to teaching at Martin Middle School, where she would ultimately rise to become the assistant principal, a role she held for five years. The next promotion made her principal of Riverside Middle School. Then she took on an administrative role helping evaluate teachers as a part of President Obama’s “Race to the Top” initiative. That work led to a role being loaned out to the state department of education doing teacher evaluations statewide.

Then she came back to East Providence, taking over as principal of Martin Middle School for a short stint before getting hired as the district’s assistant superintendent in the fall of 2015. She held the role through Covid, where she was put in charge of figuring out how to transition students to remote learning, and then back into classrooms when in-person learning was allowed to resume.

Forand was voted in as superintendent of the district in the spring of 2022.

Contractual details

Forand was originally signed to a three-year deal worth $175,000 a year that would run through June 30, 2025. But there was a clause in the contract that would extend an additional year if the school committee did not expressly make a motion to end her employment one year ahead of the contract’s end date.
That extension ultimately happened, but not without some drama.

An agenda item was added to the June 18, 2024 meeting of the school committee labeled "Consider & Vote to Inform Superintendent of Intent Not to Extend Contract”. A strong showing of support for Forand was seen at the meeting, and no motions were made on the matter, bringing Forand’s new contractual end date to June 30, 2026.

Recently, at the school committee’s meeting on March 10, 2026, the committee voted 4-1 (with at-large councilman Anthony Ferreira the lone ‘nay’ vote) to grant a one-year extension to the contract, which would now go until June 30, 2027 and bump her pay to $187,532, retroactively to July 1, 2025.

But the new deal obviously wasn’t enough to convince Forand to stay in the district.

Looking back

Forand said that she was proud of the progress that the district had made over the years, including partnerships to bring wraparound services that aid the greater school community.

“We've created the food pantry. We've been a part of the EBCAP, school-based health center across the street. We have a very strong relationship with the police department,” she said. “We've put in place high-quality curriculum. We have a writing program that's new to the district. We have a strong relationship with the Boys and Girls' Club, with Hope and Faith.”

She said that school security had improved across the district, and policies and protocols have been cleaned up and improved, and the programming at the district’s Career and Technical Education center has never been more robust or popular. School facilities, as well, have seen significant facelifts.

“We have a brand new high school building, a brand new middle school, and we'll be completing the preschool soon. We've upgraded all of our facilities,” she said. “I'm proud. I feel like we've built a great team. We've built a great central office and a great group of building-based administrators. And I do feel like I'm leaving the district in a better place than I found it, and that the work will continue here.”

Some surface level data shows improvements during her tenure are more than just talk, too.

According to the Rhode Island Department of Education’s Report Card, East Providence went from a rate of 28.3% chronic absenteeism (where a student misses 10% or more of the school year) in the 2021-22 school year (prior to Forand taking the helm). That has dropped to 19.6% in 2024-25, which represents a 30% decrease in overall chronic absenteeism compared to when she started as superintendent.

Among students taking the English Language Arts (ELA) SATs, proficiency improved from 34.9% in 2021-22 to 49.6% in 2024-25. Math proficiency (among all levels of assessments, not just high school SATs) improved from around 22% proficient in 2021-22 to 28.6% proficient in 2024-25. Math SAT scores stayed flat at around 13% proficient.

David Luiz, who currently sits as the Ward 3 representative and chair of the school committee, said that losing Forand will be a loss for the city.

“Her resignation is certainly a significant moment in our school community,” he said. “You go to any type of sporting event, any type of play or musical that we're having, anything that's going on our district with regards to students, Dr. Forand is there.”

Luiz said it will be hard to replace someone who had grown up in the community and regularly demonstrated her dedication to its growth.

“I think we've improved greatly in some areas,” he said. “I think Dr. Forand certainly brought some pride and some culture and stability to our district. Whether it was through policy or just her presence in our schools with our students. Yeah, it's a loss.”

“We're losing a Townie. She's one of us,” he continued. “We're going to feel that. We're certainly going to feel that.”

Looking ahead

Forand said that she wasn’t ready to call it quits on her career in education just yet, but wasn’t ready to say what the next job might be, or where it might be.

“I'm not ready to leave education altogether,” she said. “So I'll be pursuing other opportunities.”

She said, for the moment, she would be focusing on family. She has two children, including a son currently deployed in the Middle East as a pilot with the United States Marine Corps.

“I want to be able to travel more and see them when I can,” she said. “I do think that kind of put things in perspective a little more, too, for me. About what's important.”

Forand said that she wasn’t aware of any potential candidates waiting in the wings to take over her spot. But said that they will have a challenge ahead of them with the continued uncertainty of federal funding, rising costs of materials, and insurance.

“It's getting more and more difficult to keep the level of service that we need for students, and to have a balanced budget,” she said. “So, I do anticipate that that's going to be a challenge for the district in the next few years.”

As for what advice she would give to the next leader of the school district, she kept it simple.

“The best advice I can give is always try to do what's right for students. Students always need to come first,” she said. “We need to support our staff in the classroom and our principals and all of our staff, but I think if you always keep in mind what's best for students, that should be the goal.”