LITTLE ROCK — Communities all over Arkansas are interested in making a promise to help young people attend college.
More than 75 people from school districts, chambers of commerce organizations and residents from across the state are responding to an offer of help from the nonprofit Arkansas Community Foundation to learn about starting Promise college scholarship programs.
The foundation held a conference last week to help interested communities understand what goes into starting a traditional Promise scholarship, including estimating the cost and partnering with industry.
The conference also covered talks from other groups that have started Promise-like scholarships either locally funded or tied to attendance at a specific college.
The term Promise scholarship encompasses a variety of scholarship programs, but the general premise is that if students who live in a particular community attend classes regularly and graduate with a set gradepoint average, then money will be available to help finance college.
Most of the communities interested in learningabout Promise scholarship programs have not reached a point where they are ready to announce or implement a program this year, but many have been talking about it since Murphy Oil Corp. announced the state’s first Promise scholarship for El Dorado School District graduates in 2007.
“Right now some communities have told us they’re closer than others,” said Heather Larkin, president and chief executive officer of the Arkansas Community Foundation.
“We’re hoping to give out small, mini-grants of about $500 for those communities who can pull together community meetings and drum up interest,” she said. “It’s not a lot to start with, but we’re hoping it will help with the beginning stages.”
The mini-grants also will help the Arkansas Community Foundation keep track of those potential scholarshipprograms and maybe offer further help to communities that make progress.
Foundation members started on their quest to help communities create Promise programs after the foundation finished its “Aspire Arkansas” report.
The report looks at countylevel data - everything from income and educational attainment to life expectancy and crime. The result produced seven goals from the report data that will aid in accomplishing the group’s larger mission of “building community.”
“I think we decided to start with education because it touches so many other aspects of quality of life and community,” said David Johnson, vice president of community investment at the foundation. “We received responses from people all over the state.There are people from Carroll County, Chicot County, Forrest City, Mena, Mountain Home ... all over.” DEFINING A PROMISE
The word “promise” has become a buzz word in education circles. Some universities are changing the names of some scholarships to incorporate the word promise into the titles, but have not aligned the requirements to the traditional Promise standards.
For example, the Arkansas Promise Scholarship at Arkansas State University at Jonesboro requires a 3.0 grade-point average and awards $2,000 per year - well below the university’s tuition - and considers other criteria such as class rank and extracurricular activities.
Promise programs in their original form were established to give average students who graduate from schools in the scholarship towns a chance to have a large portion of tuition paid.
No group keeps a comprehensive list of Promise or Promise-like programs across the country. The W.E. Upjohn Institute at Western Michigan University, commissioned to study the Kalamazoo Promise when it started, has kept track of many programs.
The institute keeps track of several Arkansas programs: the El Dorado Promise, the Arkadelphia Promise, the Sparkman Promise, the Great River Promise in Phillips County and the Leopard Challenge in Norphlet.
In addition, Promise-like scholarships exist at the University of Arkansas Community College at Morrilton and Arkansas Northeastern College in Blytheville.
Four Promise scholarships - Arkadelphia, El Dorado, Sparkman and Norphlet- are tied to high schools in those towns.
Arkadelphia and El Dorado are funded by corporate foundations, Murphy Oil in the case of El Dorado and Southern Bancorp and the Ross Foundation in Arkadelphia.
In Sparkman and Norphlet, local businesses - from bankbranches and sawmills to retired community members who donate $50 a year - have funded those scholarships.
Sparkman’s small graduating class of 14 last year enabled the program to promise the same financial backing as the Arkadelphia and El Dorado programs, which offer as much as the highest tuition for a public university in Arkansas. Currently the University of Central Arkansas charges the highest in-state tuition at $7,180 per year. In Norphlet the amount of money offered per student caps out at $4,000 per year.
The Phillips County, Morrilton and Blytheville scholarships are tied to any accredited high school in their counties, but also require attendance at specific colleges.
The four broader Promise programs allow students to attend in-state or out-of-state institutions.
NO SILVER BULLETS
According to national education statistics presented at the foundation’s Promise conference Thursday, 18.8 percent of Arkansans have some form of college degree, ranking the state 50th out of 51, including the District of Columbia.
For many supporters of existing Promise scholarships, the programs are intended to address challenges beyond college attendance and retention. Many are looking at Promise programs as ways to stem population exodus from smaller communities, attract industry and quality workers who will view the community commitment to education as a bonus when choosing to relocate.
Promise scholarships havebeen billed as salvation for smaller communities, but many people who spoke at the foundation’s kick-off conference for the Promise training program emphasized that Promise scholarships are not silver-bullet solutions to all of the challenges facing communities.
In El Dorado, while the Promise program likely slowed down the population decline, Union County and El Dorado had population losses in the double digits in the past decade.
“We have our challenges. We have lost population and we have lost several industries,” said Magen Parker, a representative of Murphy Oil.
Since the Promise started, the El Dorado School District increased enrollment by 5 percent, reversing its trend of losing students. The current 2011-12 school year had the first drop in enrollment since the program was announced, but the dip was small - 29 students - and school district officials tied the drop to a smaller-than-usual kindergarten class.
Murphy Oil’s retired chief executive officer, Claiborne Deming, founder of the El Dorado Promise, said he believes the commitment turned the tide in attitude for many residents of El Dorado. Schoolmillage and sales-tax initiatives that had repeatedly failed had passed in 2007 after the announcement of the Promise. Those initiatives were used to build a high school and a conference center at the community college.
Whether the start of the Promise symbolized a turning of the tide is yet to be seen for many of the communities because the scholarship programs are still in their infant stages.
“Regardless of whether everything changes, the fact that something is changing is important,” said Susan Bergman, a Mountain Home community leader who attended the foundation’s conference.
Bergman is a member of the Mountain Home Education Foundation, a nonprofit group formed to support the Mountain Home Public Schools. The group already gives out a limited number of scholarships for academic achievement.
“I think the No. 1 goal for us, the No. 1 thing that interests us about starting a Promise scholarship, is the effect it will have on our children,” she said. “We heard over and over again about the change in attitude that happened along with these programs. It’s giving students the kind of scaffolding they need to get somewhere.”
Jason Jones, director of the Arkadelphia Promise, said a side effect of the very public Promise scholarship has been education about the overall financing of a college education.
“A major requirement of the Arkadelphia Promise is that the students have to apply for other financial aid,” Jones said. “A lot of students who qualify for the Promise also qualify for a number of other scholarships and grants that they never knew about and wouldn’t have applied for before. A big part of what we’re achieving is making parents and students aware of the other financial aid they qualify for to help make college a reality.”
Arkansas, Pages 15 on 11/06/2011