LITTLE ROCK — The Springdale School District and a multistate consortium of school districts from Arkansas, New Mexico and Washington are among 61 finalists named Monday for federal Race to the Top grants.
The Arkansas districts in the consortium led by Washington’s North Central Educational Service District 171 are Blevins, Bradley, Fouke, Genoa, Hope, Nevada, Prescott and Spring Hill.
The 61 finalists represent more than 200 school districts across the country, according to the U.S. Department of Education announcement.
The finalists are now in the running for 15 to 25 federal four-year grants that will range in value from $5 million to $40 million. The amounts of the awards will depend on the population of students served through the proposed plans.
The awards will be announced by Dec. 31.
The plan proposed by the multistate consortium that includes the south Arkansas school districts centers on integrating the new national Common Core State Standards in math and English-language arts into career and technology education programs, Phoebe Bailey, director of the Southwest Arkansas Educational Service Cooperative, said Monday.
“We have some joint projects that we will work on across the states where we will actually develop units that kids - whether they are in Washington or Arkansas - will be able to use,” Bailey said, adding that the project will initially target middle school students.
“We will create an online resource so that teachers can pull these lessons for the students,” she said.
Springdale School District leaders who developed the grant application for that district were not immediately available Monday afternoon to describe their proposal.
The 61 finalists - including the two with Arkansas connections - were selected from a pool of 372 applications sent to the federal Education Department by a deadline earlier this month.
“These finalists are setting the curve for the rest of the country with innovative plans to drive education reform in the classroom,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said.
“This competition was designed to support local efforts to close the achievement gap and transform the learning environment in a diverse set of districts,” he said. “But no matter who wins, children across the country will benefit from the clear vision and track records of success demonstrated by these finalists.”
The Race to the Top competition for school districts is modeled on the earlier Race to the Top grant competition for states. Arkansas applied for a state grant but was not selected.
The school district applications were randomly assigned to three-person panels that independently read and scored each application.
The federal department arranged the applications in rank order from high to low scores, and determined which were the strongest competitors to invite back based on “natural breaks,” such as scoring gaps in the lineup. The top 61 applications were then selected as finalists.
The finalists represent a range of districts, both rural and nonrural, and from both Race to the Top states and non-Race to the Top states, the federal agency said.
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