By Joe Broadmeadow
Rhode Islanders know how this story goes, because we lived it.
In 2010, the state guaranteed a 75-million-dollar loan to lure Curt Schilling’s video game company, 38 Studios, from Massachusetts to Providence. Two years later the company was bankrupt, the jobs were gone, and taxpayers were left holding roughly 88 million dollars in bond obligations. Even after years of lawsuits and settlements, the net loss ran into the tens of millions. We found that money fast, for one man’s company, on a bet that a single hit game would remake our economy.
I raise it not to relitigate an old wound, but for what it says about priorities. When the political will exists, Rhode Island can move serious money in a hurry. The only question is what we decide is worth it.
So consider a different proposition. There are about 136,000 students in Rhode Island’s public schools. Give each a capable device and reliable home internet, buy in bulk, add the cases, tech support, and software management a real program needs, and you are looking at something near 80 million dollars a year, sustained. Roughly what one failed corporate bet cost us, except this one does not vanish into bankruptcy court. It compounds, in reading scores and diplomas and kids who can do the work we assign them.
And 38 Studios was not a one-time lapse. Subsidizing business is routine here, and the state keeps the receipts. Rhode Island’s own Division of Taxation reports that in fiscal 2024, 18 companies collected more than 34 million dollars through just three programs: corporate tax-rate breaks, film credits, and historic preservation credits.
Citizens Bank took more than 10 million of that by itself. Since 2008, the state has disclosed 504 million dollars in credits to more than 464 businesses, and that is only the slice the law requires it to publish. It does not count Rebuild Rhode Island, which can award up to 15 million per project, or the Qualified Jobs Incentive, which pays up to 7,500 dollars per job for as long as a decade. Some of these programs do real good. But nobody at the State House calls them unaffordable. That word gets reserved for schools.
I spent twenty years in law enforcement. I commanded an Investigative Services Division, worked narcotics, and sat at a task force table with the FBI and the DEA. That work teaches you to follow the money, and to notice when the official story does not match the ledger. Here, the ledger shows a state that can guarantee 75 million dollars for a startup and hand out tens of millions a year in business credits but somehow cannot promise every child a working laptop and a home connection.
I am not arguing every subsidy is waste, or that government should never invest in an industry. I am arguing for honesty. If we can find the money to close a developer’s financing gap, we can find it to close the homework gap.
And there is a cost to pretending otherwise, one I watched for two decades. A kid who falls behind because he cannot get online does not disappear. He shows up later, in a different system, one far more expensive and far less forgiving than a Chromebook and a monthly Wi-Fi bill. We pay for these children either way. The only real choice is whether we pay on the front end, when the investment still grows, or on the back end, when it mostly just costs.
Rhode Island already proved it can write a big check on short notice for something it decided mattered. The 38 Studios deal was a gamble on one company, and we lost. Connecting every student is not a gamble. It is one of the few investments where we already know the return.
We found 75 million dollars for a video game. Surely we can find what it takes to make sure every kid in Rhode Island can do their homework.
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