New public charter
school OK'd for LR
Little Rock will be the home of a public Montessori charter school.
The Arkansas Board of Education accepted an earlier decision of the state's Charter Authorizing Panel to approve the proposed Rockbridge Montessori School as an open-enrollment charter school for up to 325 children in kindergarten through eighth grades.
The approval of the Rockbridge School brings to five the total number of new, independently operated charter schools scheduled to open in August. That includes four schools that are operating with new state-issued charters, plus a new KIPP Delta charter school to open in Forrest City under the umbrella of the existing charter for KIPP Delta schools.
The newly approved schools increases the total number of open-enrollment charter schools and charter school systems in the state to 22.
The Rockbridge school will be in a facility owned by the St. John Baptist Church, at 108 Roosevelt Road in Little Rock. The school will be one of two Montessori public charter schools to open in the state in the coming year. The charter panel and state Education Board recently approved a similar kindergarten-through-eighth-grade Montessori charter school to be based at the Jones Center for Families in Springdale.
The Montessori instructional program, based on the work of the late Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori, features three-hour student work cycles, multi-age classrooms, carefully selected learning materials, and giving students choices and responsibilities.
Fountain Lake
plan on agenda
The Arkansas Board of Education voted Thursday to review next month the Fountain Lake School District in Garland County proposal to make its high school a conversion charter school for up to 800 students in grades nine through 12.
The district's plan calls for establishing "career pathways" in fields such as health sciences for students and enabling students to earn college hours, industry certificates or both while in high school. The features of the charter school would be made possible by establishing a more flexible instructional day to give students the opportunity for career exploration and by allowing the district to hire noncertified but skilled instructors in specialty areas.
The Education Board accepted the earlier decisions of the state Charter Authorizing Panel to approve the following conversion charter schools for 2015-16: Career Academy of Siloam Springs; Farmington Career Academies; Southside Charter High School in the Southside School District in Independence County; and Warren High School, which will retain that name despite its newly approved charter program.
2 districts agree
to working terms
Arkansas Education Commissioner Tony Wood reported Thursday that leaders of the Pulaski County Special School District and the new Jacksonville/North Pulaski School District have put into writing their mutually agreed-upon terms for working together until the new district can operate independently.
Jacksonville and north Pulaski County area residents voted in September to form their own school district out of the Pulaski County Special district. The Arkansas Board of Education in November issued an order creating the new district but directed that it remain under the administration of the Pulaski County Special district while officials plan for the transfer of staff, property and other assets.
The five-page agreement states that the Pulaski County Special district will work to prepare the Jacksonville/North Pulaski district to be fully staffed and operational on the first day of its independent operation -- which could be up to two years away.
"The goal of the PCSSD administration will be a turnkey job," says the agreement prepared by attorneys and leaders of the two districts.
The agreement calls for the state education commissioner to select a superintendent-designate and other personnel as needed for the Jacksonville/North Pulaski district in consultation with the interim school board. The Pulaski County Special district will employ those people. The interim board has selected Bobby Lester to be the superintendent-designate and Patrick Wilson to act as the new district's attorney. Lester is a former superintendent of the Pulaski County Special district.
The agreement is now expected to be discussed at a Dec. 18 status conference hearing with U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr., the presiding judge in the long-running Pulaski County school desegregation lawsuit.
Course gets OK
for math credit
The Arkansas Board of Education on Thursday approved the frameworks, or standards, for a computer science and mathematics course that can serve high school students as one of four math credits required for high school graduation.
The standards for the course are pulled from both the common set of math standards adopted in recent years by most of the 50 states and on the Computer Science Teachers Association's K-12 Computer Science Standards. Nearly half the standards for the course are above those for algebra II.
The purpose of the course is to enable students to use mathematics and computer programming as tools in creating solutions to complex problems. Instruction will cover the broad topics of computational thinking, computing practice and programming, computers and communication devices, and social and ethical impacts of computing.
A Section on 12/12/2014