LITTLE ROCK — A pilot program to pay bonuses to Meadowcliff Elementary School faculty and staff based on the achievement gains of their students won Little Rock School Board approval Thursday.
The School Board voted 5-1 for the $179,000 incentive-pay program that was started at the school last year with funds from an anonymous donor.
Meadowcliff pupils, who were given the Stanford Achievement Test, ninth edition, at the start of the school year and again in the spring, showed an average 17 percent gain on the test. Financial rewards were then distributed to teachers and other staff members based on the gains of the individual children with whom they worked in the classroom or in school programs.
A proposal to carry out the Achievement Challenge Pilot Project a second year with district funding created a bit of a stir in recent weeks.
Leaders of the Little Rock Classroom Teachers Association, unaware of the program this past year, objected to a second year without first negotiating the parameters of the alternative-pay plan with the association, as is required by language in the teacher contract.
The pilot project did become part of the 2005-06 teacher contract negotiations between the district and the association that were completed last week.
Teachers and district leaders agreed that the plan could be carried out if Meadowcliff teachers followed the process laid out in the contract for trying an alternative-pay plan.
That process requires that at least 75 percent of the teachers at a school vote in support of any kind of alternative-pay plan.
Karen Carter, principal at Meadowcliff Elementary, said Thursday that 100 percent of the staff - including certified and non-certified employees - voted in support of the pilot project over the past few days.
The School Board vote on funding for the project was the final hurdle. Meadowcliff students have already taken the Stanford Achievement Test, 10 th edition. Teachers will use the results from that test to guide their instruction and the pupils will take the test again in May.
"We're ready to get the scores back so we can start planning what our students need and base our professional development on the areas we need growth in," Carter said after the meeting.
Board member Katherine Mitchell cast the sole negative vote, saying that she wasn't against incentives but was against a process that didn't open the alternative-pay plan to employees at other schools.
She questioned how long the district must try a pilot program before deciding whether it works.
Board President Larry Berkley said the district's purpose in trying the pilot project is to learn from it.
"Measures of merit have not been universally accepted," he said. "We are looking here at a norm-reference test as a sole measure of academic growth and that may not be the best way to do it. It may be some combination of [tests] and those kinds of things are what we are trying to learn. The measure of merit may need to be changed. But we can't learn if we don't try something new."
Board member Tony Rose said paying bonuses to some teachers is not unprecedented in the school district and he noted that the district pays teachers for earning certification from the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards.
"Those teachers have demonstrated they have accomplished something," he said. "And this is another way for teachers to demonstrate they have accomplished something in the classroom."