LR plans shape up to convert 2 schools

Planning is underway to vacate all jobs at one Little Rock elementary school and convert another into a stand-alone early childhood education center for the forthcoming 2015-16 school year, interim Superintendent Dexter Suggs said.

Suggs' preliminary plans for the Baseline and Rockefeller elementary campuses are referenced in a four-page "Update on the Little Rock School District" that Suggs recently sent to Arkansas Education Commissioner Johnny Key and that Key distributed to the Arkansas Board of Education at its meeting late last week.

Included in the update were previously announced plans to reduce and streamline the district's central office staff, reduce the length of contracts for some elementary and middle school principals, convert the college-style block schedule to a seven-period class day at most middle and high schools, and reduce the number of necessary high school graduation credits from 26 to 22.

Suggs said he will meet with staffs and parents at Baseline and Rockefeller in the coming days about the plans, which include making Baseline an "early reading and language lab academy." Instituting an early reading academy would give pupils -- many of whom are Hispanic and don't speak English as their first language -- a strong start in literacy, he said. Baseline is at 3623 Baseline Road.

"The reason Baseline is so attractive is because it's the foundation of the feeder pattern for so many of the academically distressed schools," Suggs said. "You leave Baseline Elementary, you go to Cloverdale Middle and from Cloverdale to McClellan High. We have to start at the very beginning if we want to make a difference."

The Arkansas Department of Education has classified six of the district's 48 schools as academically distressed because fewer than half of the students at the schools scored at proficient levels on state math and literacy exams over a three-year period.

The state Board of Education voted Jan. 28 to assume control of the district and dismiss the locally elected seven-member School Board primarily because of those six schools. In addition to Baseline, Cloverdale and McClellan, the academically distressed schools are Henderson Middle, and J.A. Fair and Hall high schools.

The preliminary plans call for vacating all the jobs at Baseline, including that of the Principal Katina Ray. The district would advertise for applicants to fill the resulting vacancies.

Ideally, as many as 50 percent of the jobs at the school would be filled with staff members who are bilingual, Suggs said.

The children now attending Baseline from the school's attendance zone would continue to do so, Suggs said. There would be no change to the attendance zone or enrollment requirements.

Suggs said he has approval from Key and the Arkansas Department of Education to proceed with planning, but there was not yet final approval to make the changes.

"We are still in conversation. They have approved the developmental stages of it," he said of the plans, which also include staff training and the use of instructional strategies that have been proven successful elsewhere for all pupils but particularly those learning English as a second language.

Cathy Koehler, president of the Little Rock Education Association that is the union for certified and support staff employees in the district, said Monday that neither she nor the employees at the two schools were aware of the plans. She was disturbed that employees would first learn of the threats to their current jobs in the newspaper.

"They are going to be devastated. They haven't even been talked to," Koehler said, adding that she was even more upset that the families of children at the two schools would be "blindsided" by the news.

Koehler, a media specialist/librarian at Baseline before her election to head the association, said she had received an email late Sunday night inviting her to attend staff meetings at the two schools this week. She said she was not told the purpose of the meetings.

"It makes me want to cry," she said. "Obviously, communication with the employees of this district is not a consideration in planning.

"If you were going to pass something out [at the state Board of Education meeting] that would become part of the public record, wouldn't you have the decency to inform the employees first?" Koehler said. "Why do the employees of this district continue to be an afterthought in everybody's discussion? Yet we keep getting up and going into work and doing the right things for kids, but the grown-ups don't seem to think that we matter."

The Little Rock district, the state's largest with about 24,000 students, currently has almost 1,140 seats for prekindergarten 3- and 4-year-olds at elementary schools and early childhood centers throughout the system.

That total number of seats for 3- and 4-year-olds would increase with the possible establishment of Rockefeller Elementary as an early elementary education center, similar to the Fair Park and Woodruff early childhood centers in the district, Suggs said.

Suggs praised the Little Rock district's early childhood program, calling it "second to none."

Key told the state Board of Education last week that he had asked Suggs to look at ways to expand the district's prekindergarten seats but did not specifically identify Rockefeller as the site for a new early education center.

Rockefeller, 700 E. 17th St., is unique in the district in that it provides care and programs for infants and toddlers in addition to prekindergarten-through-fifth-graders.

Suggs said the older children in the Rockefeller attendance zone would be sent to other nearby schools, including Carver Magnet, Washington, Stephens and Martin Luther King Jr., elementary schools.

The Rockefeller faculty also would be reassigned to other schools, he said, except for current faculty who hold credentials to teach in an early childhood education program.

State Rep. John Walker, D-Little Rock, who represented black students in a long-running federal school desegregation lawsuit involving the district and who continues to monitor and critique district operations, was critical Monday of the Rockefeller plan and of Suggs for suggesting it.

He said Suggs had "promised" not to reconfigure the grades at Rockefeller and Carver last year, when a team of facility planners proposed those schools as candidates for early childhood centers.

Carver, in particular, at that time was singled out as a high-performing school.

"Rockefeller is a successful school in terms of having a successful, continuous faculty and a diverse student body," Walker said Monday.

"I'm just glad people will have an opportunity to see how obtuse and uninformed he is in his decision-making," Walker said of Suggs. "And eventually people like Commissioner Key and the governor will understand that they just can't wave a wand, put someone in a position and get a result.

"Education is much more than a consequence or a conclusion. It is a process. It involves multiple people and other things that they have empowered Suggs to alter and modify at his discretion. It will come back to haunt them," he said.

Metro on 04/14/2015