Cushman school can go out with pride

By Amy Widner

LITTLE ROCK — Cushman Superintendent Gary Anderson was preparing for the district's last home basketball game on Tuesday when he heard the news.

U.S. News and World Report had listed Cushman, which will be annexed into the Batesville School District next year, a bronze medal award as part of its "America's Best High Schools" list. The news came to Anderson just a day after the Arkansas Board of Education put the final rubber stamp on Cushman's annexation to Batesville, also a bronzemedal awardee.

Throughout Cushman's closure, Anderson has emphasized that the district can go out with pride. It was not fiscally distressed and had some of the best standardized test scores in the state, especially in literacy, a statewide trouble spot. Cushman and Mount Pleasant - another bronzemedal-winning school, which was annexed at the start of the 2007-2008 school year to Melbourne - had the highest percentage statewide of 11th-grade students who scored at the advance level or better in literacy.

But both schools dropped below 350 students and had to close. Anderson said the U.S. Newsaward is another thing to feel good about during a time when it's difficult to always feel good about what's happening to the district, although they are happy to have worked out a deal with Batesville.

"It makes us extremely proud that we know we were doing what we were supposed to do," Anderson said. "A lot of people around here, lay people, to them it just doesn't make any sense to shut down a high-performing school, but it's happened before and it'll happen again."

Anderson gave credit to the students, teachers, counselors and employees for making things happen, a sentiment echoed at another bronze-medal school, Hoxie. High School Principal Jim McMullen said that, like all districts, they've been concentrating on getting their test scores up. He said they try to take the results each year and learn from them in order to target areas that need improvement. This year they're concentrating on literacy. They even invited outside consultants to come in and work with them on some best practices and techniques.

"And of course, the bar goes up each year, so you have to keep improving each year or eventually that bar will catch up with you," McMullen said.

- awidner@ arkansasonline.com

Three Rivers, Pages 125, 128 on 02/15/2009