The first week back to school after the holidays can be tough, but the state has made the return a little sweeter this year for 206 high-performing schools.
Those schools, out of the state’s nearly 1,100, will share in about $7 million as a result of their high student scores on 2013 state exams combined with high achievement growth on those tests. In the high schools, graduation rates are substituted in the calculation for achievement growth.
Valley View High School in Craighead County is anticipating $100,374 from the Arkansas Department of Education for being in the top 10 percent of achieving schools. And Valley View Elementary School with about 1,400 pupils in kindergarten through sixth grade tops the other schools in total amount awarded. It is slated to receive $125,935.91.
“This is a big amount of money for us,” said Radius Baker, superintendent of the Valley View School District. “We don’t have the [large amounts of] federal money that most schools have. We can’t get the grants that most schools get. This is a big deal for us. This is an outstanding amount of money that we can use to better the educational opportunities for our kids.”
Faculty and parent leaders at the recognized campuses are spending the early part of this month deciding how to use the rewards provided by the Arkansas School Recognition and Reward Program.
They must submit plans to the Arkansas Department of Education to receive the funds.
Schools last received rewards for high achievement and achievement gains in 2009-10 under a system that has now been replaced with a new formula, said John Hoy, assistant commissioner for school accountability at the Arkansas Department of Education.
The top 10 percent performing schools this past academic year are slated to receive rewards of $90.70 per student. Campuses that performed within the second-highest 10 percent tier of schools will take away $45.35 per student, Hoy said.
Recipients include 10 of the 19 campuses in the Bentonville School District, 10 campuses in Conway, nine in Fayetteville, eight in Fort Smith and Rogers, and five each in Little Rock, Springdale and Cabot. There are two in the Pulaski County Special School District. Cave City, Calico Rock, Buffalo Island Central, Mena and Nettleton are just some of the other districts that are home to recipient schools.
Eight Bentonville district schools are among the top 10 percent of achieving schools. Two more are in the next-highest tier. Together, the schools in the district will receive in excess of $610,000.
Karen Morton, Bentonville’s director of testing and data management, said Friday that news of the rewards delivered in a state Education Department commissioner’s memo caught her by surprise.
“I called the Education Department to see if it was real,” she said.
Arkansas Code Annotated 6-15-2107, amended by Act 1429 of 2013, calls for the funding that is appropriated by the Legislature for the rewards system to be distributed to eligible schools after the Education Department approves a school’s plan for spending the money.
A school committee made up of the principal, a teacher elected by the school’s faculty and a parent representative to be selected by the local Parent Teacher Association or some other local parental involvement group will develop the spending plan.
The options available for using the money are nonrecurring bonuses for faculty and staff at a school, nonrecurring expenditures for educational equipment or materials to assist in maintaining and improving student performance, or employment of temporary personnel to maintain and improve student achievement.
Hoy, the Education Department’s assistant commissioner, said the department will begin Wednesday to review and approve the school proposals received by that time and will continue those reviews as the proposals are turned in.
Morton said the school committees have been hampered in preparing their proposals by the winter weather that closed the Bentonville School District on all but Wednesday and Friday last week. But one school so far has settled on a plan to purchase traveling carts equipped with laptop computers, Morton said.
Baker said the Valley View Elementary School committee is committed to coming up with ideas that will improve academic skills.
“We are heavy on reading,” he said. “I think we are going to look at the purchasing of computers on wheels where students won’t have to go to a computer lab, but the computers would go to the teachers.”
He said those laptops would provide another way to get text in front of pupils.
He said another possibility is the purchase of computer tablets for the youngest pupils at the elementary school to use as older pupils do, which includes managing reading materials and going on virtual, online field trips to museums.
At the high school, the details are not decided. But the reward money is likely going to be directed toward improving student skills and classroom instruction using the new Common Core State Standards, Baker said.
Those standards in math and English/language arts have been adopted by Arkansas and most other states.
“We’re doing well on our reading scores, our math scores, and we’re actually doing well on the science scores. But we want to get those up a little. We’re going to try to figure out ways to make that happen,” he said.
Arkansas’ charter schools also are eligible for the School Recognition and Reward Program, and several are on the state list to receive money this year.
The eStem Elementary School in Little Rock announced the award Friday in its weekly online newsletter. The school is slated to receive $42,119.64, which it wants to use to buy additional technology equipment and increase bandwidth to ease the use of that technology.
More than 91 percent of the eStem pupils met goals on the Arkansas Benchmark Exam, as did 85 percent of students in literacy, according to the school newsletter.
Other recognized charter schools are LISA Academy in Little Rock, Academics Plus in Maumelle, Haas Hall Academy in Fayetteville and the Benton County School of the Arts in Bentonville, all independently run charter schools.
Little Rock School District schools to receive reward money for being in the highest achieving tier are Don R. Roberts Elementary, $73,667.18; Forest Park Elementary, $38,050.58; Jefferson Elementary, $33,119.05; and Williams Magnet Elementary, $38,214.21. Terry Elementary was in the second-highest tier for achievement and will receive $18,142.
Baker Elementary and Joe T. Robinson Elementary in the Pulaski County Special School District also were in the second tier and will receive $18,493 and $7,568, respectively.
Arkansas, Pages 11 on 01/12/2014