AP course leader, NLR intervenor die
Tommie Sue Anthony and Lorene Joshua, two women who, in their lifetimes, dramatically affected the course of public education in central Arkansas and across the state, passed away last week.
Anthony, a 50-year educator, died Tuesday at 72. As a faculty member at Jacksonville High School in the early 1980s, Anthony was among the first in Arkansas to teach a College Board Advanced Placement course, enabling qualifying students to receive college credit for their high school work.
Anthony went on to lead the Pulaski County Special School District’s gifted and talented education program. In that role she led the establishment of the specialty gifted programs at Mills High, Fuller Middle and College Station Elementary schools. Those schools, which featured Advanced Placement courses, pre-Advanced Placement courses and orchestra, attracted transfer students from across the district and promoted the racial desegregation of the campuses.
In 2003, Anthony was a contributor to legislation requiring every Arkansas high school to teach at least one Advanced Placement course in each of the four core academic areas.
More recently, Anthony helped write the proposal that resulted in a $13 million grant from an Exxon-Mobil foundation to promote student enrollment in Advanced Placement courses in math, science and English. Between 2007 and 2013, Anthony was president of the Arkansas Advanced Initiative in Math and Science, the grant-created organization that provided academic and financial support to high schools to increase their numbers of successful Advanced Placement students.
Joshua of North Little Rock, a longtime leader in the state’s NAACP activities, also died Tuesday.
She was 84.
Joshua was a familiar face in the audience for many years at North Little Rock School Board meetings and at federal court school desegregation hearings.
In the early 1980s, the mother of 10 was among those who successfully asked to intervene in a Little Rock School District lawsuit against the North Little Rock and Pulaski County Special school districts and the state.
The Little Rock district sought the consolidation of the three districts as a way to bring more racial desegregation and equity to schools in the districts. Consolidation was denied, but desegregation efforts continued under federal court supervision.
For more than 30 years, the intervenors, who represented the class of all black students in the three school districts, have been known as the Joshua intervenors. That’s because Lorene Joshua’s name was the first of the intervenors to be listed on court documents.
Petitions address potential takeover
The Arkansas Board of Education’s plan to decide Jan. 28 whether to take over all or part or the Little Rock School District has spurred a couple of online petition drives.
The Education Board is weighing the possibility of action against the district because of dissatisfaction with district efforts to raise student achievement at six schools that were labeled last year as academically distressed. At those schools, fewer than half of the students scored at proficient levels on state math and literacy tests over a three-year period. The schools are Baseline Elementary; Cloverdale and Henderson middle; and J.A. Fair, Hall and McClellan high schools.
Barclay Key, a parent in the district, initiated a petition drive against the takeover that can be found at the Our Community Our Schools page on Facebook.
“A state takeover would undermine grassroots efforts by local people to fix local problems,” Key wrote in the introduction to the petition.
A second Facebook page titled “Collaborate to Educate: Big Change Now for Little Rock” also has a link to a Change.org petition. Little Rock businesswoman Marla Johnson writes in the introduction to that petition that “16 schools in the LRSD rank in the lowest 11% of all Arkansas schools based on state testing! That must change!”
Both petitions can be found on Change.org by clicking the “Education” link under “Popular Topics” and typing in Little Rock public schools.