Planners of the newly approved Quest Middle School of West Little Rock are asking the Arkansas Department of Education to approve a change in the charter school’s Rahling Road location.
Responsive Education Solutions, a charter management company based in Lewisville, Texas, has sent an email to the Education Department requesting that the agency’s Charter Authorizing Panel amend the school’s charter to change the school’s address to 400 Hardin Road.
Hardin Road is a short cul-de-sac off Financial Centre Parkway, just west of the intersection of Interstate 630 and Shackleford Road. The proposed site is a multioffice building that is or hasbeen home to a radio station, church and the Arkansas State Bank Department. The site is about 5 miles away from the current school site, which is 1815 Rahling Road.
Residents of northwest and west Little Rock recruited Responsive Education Solutions to consider opening a taxpayer-supported, independently operated charter school. That was done at leastpartly out of frustration with the lack of close Little Rock School District middle and high schools serving children in the growing northwest section of the city, including children completing Roberts Elementary School.
Gary Newton, president of the Arkansas Learns school choice advocacy organization and a parent leader in the effort to open a west Little Rock charter school, on Friday downplayed the possibility of disappointment that a Hardin Road school won’t be closer to Roberts Elementary and the Arkansas 10 corridor.
“I think people were looking for a more convenient, more excellent option,” Newton said. “It is my understanding now that that doesn’t change. What becomes more convenient for some becomes less convenient for others.”
Responsive Education Solutions’ email to the state gives no reason for altering the address in the charter application. The application was approved in November by the Charter Authorizing Panel and in January by the state Board of Education. Those approvals came over objections to the school raised by the Little Rock and Pulaski County Special school districts.
Grif Griffin, a communications officer at Responsive Education Solutions, said Friday that the Rahling Road site “didn’t work out economically.”
School planners now have the 22,650-square-foot Hardin Road site under contract to purchase it if the state approves the charter amendment, Griffin said. Once that approval is received, the planners will do a marketing campaign, including parent information meetings, to recruit students.
The school initially will serve up to 220 students in grades six through eight and eventually will expand to include as many as 490 students in sixth through 12th grades.
Griffin said planners do not believe the school’s August opening is in jeopardy.
“I’m responsible for the marketing and recruiting and, unfortunately, sometimes it is even later than this,” Griffin said. “If we get approval in March, we’ll be fine.”
The Charter Authorizing Panel’s next meeting is March 19. The state Board of Education, which has the authority to review the panel’s decisions, next meets March 20-21.
Newton said the Quest charter school development is going well despite the location issue. He attributed the need for the school’s address change to a state system for approving charter schools that puts a burden on a charter school management organization to “tie up” property for several months before students begin attending class and generating state aid for the school.
“That points to a flaw in the system,” he said.
Responsive Education Solutions is in its first year of operating three other charter schools in Arkansas, including Premier High School on the Arkansas Baptist College campus in the central part of Little Rock, Northwest Arkansas Classical Academy in Bentonville and Quest Middle School of Pine Bluff.
The original site for Quest Middle School of West Little Rock is an unused building shell on Rahling Road, between Chenal Parkway and Arkansas 10.
Attorneys for the Little Rock and Pulaski County Special school districts argued in January to the state Board of Education that the Quest School’s proposed budget exaggerated the percentage of low-income students and state funding that a school on Rahling Road, in an affluent part of the city, would generate. That put the proposed school at risk of insufficient revenue, they said.
The Little Rock School District has purchased land for a new middle school on property just north of Arkansas 10 on Katillus Road, near Roberts Elementary. The district has not developed any financing or building plans for the site.
For many years, the Little Rock School District was prevented from building new schools in what was the predominantly white, northwest part of the city. That was because provisions in a federal court-approved desegregation plan called for new schools to be built in areas accessible to both white and black students. A later desegregation plan permitted the construction of what became Roberts Elementary on LaMarche Drive and Cantrell Road.
In recent years, families along Cantrell Road and Arkansas 10 have repeatedly appealed to the Little Rock School Board for schools that would be closer to their homes than the current attendance zone schools of Forest Heights Middle and Hall High schools, which are more than a dozen miles away from Roberts Elementary.
The Hardin Road site is about 2 miles from the Little Rock School District’s Henderson Junior High.
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 02/22/2014