The Little Rock School District's Civic Advisory Committee will divide into subcommittees to help formulate recommendations to district leaders on modernizing school buildings, raising student achievement and increasing public interest in the school system.
The committee that is made up of 36 community members, teachers and students was created by the state Board of Education in January when that board took control of the Little Rock district by dismissing the elected School Board and putting the superintendent under the supervision of the state education commissioner. The state took over the district because six of the system's 48 schools were classified by the state as f̶i̶s̶c̶a̶l̶l̶y distressed* as the result of chronically low student achievement on state math and literacy tests.
The appointed committee struggled in its first months to accomplish its tasks in part because of its large size, its once-a-month meeting time and because no such group had existed previously to be used as a model. Committee members held a recent Saturday work session that was closed to the public to better organize itself.
Committee co-chairman Greg Adams, one of the displaced Little Rock School Board members, said Thursday that at the end of the work session the committee concluded it had two purposes: to give advice to the district and to engage the public in the school system's operations.
"So we decided that we would have two different areas of focus under each of those overall goals," Adams recapped for the committee members at its regular monthly meeting Thursday.
"Under 'Advice to the district,' we are going to look at giving advice for facilities which Mr. [Superintendent Baker] Kurrus has asked us to give feedback on," Adams said. "Another area we are going to look at is the whole idea of the six distressed schools because the committee felt that was how we got into the state takeover and so we wanted to continue to give focus on what is happening there."
A third subcommittee on community engagement will seek ways to gain the trust of stakeholders in the district as well as muster community resources for students in need, he said.
And the fourth subcommittee will home in on communication strategies, including ways to communicate "the positives about LRSD," as well as identify ways for students, parents and teachers to convey their questions, concerns and praises.
While the committee meets on the fourth Thursday of each month, the subcommittees will meet on the second Thursday of each month and could add additional dates as needed. The plans call for the subcommittees and the committee to meet at different schools -- in part to attract the interest of the school communities. The October subcommittee meetings will take place at Hall High.
"Another thing we decided that when we give feedback to the district on things like facilities and the distressed schools, we will not expect that we will always be unanimous," Adams said. "There may be a diversity in the feedback that we give. We may say that 'a lot of our group felt like this, but we had another theme or a part of our group that had this concern.'"
Kurrus asked the committee members to visualize what they want the district to look like for the high school graduating Class of 2030, which is when this year's prekindergarten class of 4-year-olds will graduate from high school.
"Are we comfortable with 60-year-old buildings? They are clean," he said, "but do we want something better?"
He then compared old schools with old firehouses that are "lovely" and suitable for "boutiques and restaurants" but not for modern firefighting. Similarly, he said, old school buildings are typically small, costly to maintain, drab and ill-equipped for the staff required for student services and for art, music and physical education programs.
He held up Springdale and North Little Rock school districts as possible models for Little Rock. Springdale has almost as many students as Little Rock but half as many schools. The North Little Rock district is finishing a districtwide capital improvement program that reduced 21 campuses to 13 -- 12 of which have been newly built or extensively remodeled.
Kurrus said the district that has the seating capacity for 32,000 will record its official enrollment for the year Oct. 1. He anticipates the total count will be about 24,950 including the addition of 260 new prekindergarten seats. The kindergarten-through-12th grade student count will be down by about 200 compared with last year, he said.
Metro on 09/25/2015
*CORRECTION: The state of Arkansas took over the Little Rock School District earlier this year because six of the system’s 48 schools were classified by the state as academically distressed — the result of chronically low student achievement in math and literacy over a three-year period. An earlier version of this article in Friday’s edition inaccurately described the type of school distress.