A changed Helena to lead schools

After 5 years, state control to shift back home

John Edwards, economic development director of the industrial Helena Harbor is shown in this file photo.
John Edwards, economic development director of the industrial Helena Harbor is shown in this file photo.

HELENA-WEST HELENA -- After Kelsey Riley taught her first year at Central High School, she looked forward to leaving the school and this Mississippi River Delta city.

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Literacy specialist Kelsey Riley says she has seen her Helena-West Helena students’ “deep thirst for knowledge” as they have progressed in the past five years.

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Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Information about the Helena-West Helena School District.

A year later, though, when the opportunity presented itself in the form of graduate-school acceptance at Vanderbilt University, Riley chose to stay.

Riley, originally of North Little Rock, arrived at the Helena-West Helena School District in 2011 by way of a two-year commitment with Teach For America. She ultimately taught for five years and still hasn't left the city.

"Something about Helena and the people and the kids that I had the opportunity to work with just captured me," said Riley, who joined the district at the beginning of an Arkansas Department of Education takeover that is now concluding.

Riley, 27, is among the few people who have moved to Helena-West Helena and stayed, as thousands have headed elsewhere in search of jobs. An exodus over 60 years has drained Phillips County of half its population, eroded its quality of life and strained its taxpayer-funded services.

A resulting student-enrollment plunge at the public schools has repeatedly imperiled the school district's finances, and the district's leaders have been slow to adjust -- twice prompting the state to sweep elected School Board members from office and take control of the district, in 2005 and 2011.

The community, which for nearly eight of the past 11 years has not had control of the district, will regain decision-making authority of its public schools Dec. 12. It also will have less money, staffing and facilities than previously to deal with several academic and financial challenges that it will immediately face.

Some of the challenges are:

• Competition with Kipp Delta's public charter schools and the nonprofit DeSoto School for a smaller population of students.

mThe school district is one of the state's most expensive to run on a day-to-day basis, spending an average of $12,324 per student, and all of its 1,391 students this year qualify for free lunches, according to state data, an indicator of the district's poverty rate.

• The district's Central High School is on the Department of Education's academically distressed list.

• Most of the cash the district saved while under state control is being spent to build a new elementary school, reducing the district's budget cushion for emergencies.

• Voters rejected a proposal to increase taxes to overhaul the high school campus, leaving the district without the money for upgrades that school officials say are urgently needed.

"Their challenges are going to be the continuing challenges of rural Arkansas," state Education Commissioner Johnny Key said.

The school problems are intertwined with those of a once-flourishing city that, along with others in the Delta, grew as manufacturing declined, farming industrialized and families left to find work elsewhere.

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Since 2007, the Helena-West Helena School District's enrollment has fallen by 1,323 students, its enrollment-based state aid has dropped by $10.7 million, and regular-operations spending is down $9.7 million. Using those metrics, the district is about half what it was a decade ago.

"We need jobs," said John Edwards, economic development director of the industrial Helena Harbor. "If you start getting the jobs, you start reversing the trend of the out-migration. You start having parents that aren't worried about where the next meal is going to come from or whether they're going to pay the light bill."

An ailing public school system does little to make the community appealing to potential businesses and residents, state-appointed Superintendent John Hoy and others said.

"The idea is to make the community attractive -- the best way is to fix the schools academically," Hoy said. "The thinking is that any area can potentially heal itself. I would love to be a part of that process."

CITY'S DECLINE PERSISTS

In Bruce Hudson's unsuccessful bid for city alderman this year, he posted black-and-white yard signs that read "Who Cares About Helena?" in large typeface above his barely visible name.

Hudson, a former elected alderman who has run for mayor and county clerk, has often criticized the city's elected leaders. He has blamed the lack of industry and the prevalence of vacant, decaying houses for sapping the town's pride.

Residents have lost hope, said Hudson, who wanted his campaign slogan to become a rallying cry for the community. "We've got a sad face and a slow walk."

More than one-third of the county's residents live below the poverty level, according to census estimates. The median household income is $27,200, or about two-thirds of the statewide average.

"We've lost all of our bright, young minds," Hudson said. "We've lost a lot of our middle-class young people. That was heartbreaking to see. The community now is left with senior citizens and very young people, and a middle segment that is strictly poverty. Then, ... everything around us [is] just going to waste, going into nothing."

Phillips County's population fell from 46,000 residents in 1950 to 21,800 in 2010, or 53 percent. From 1970 to 1990, the county's population declined by 12,000 -- equal to the present-day population of Helena-West Helena, according to census data.

"It all happened in a five- to six-year period," said Jimbo Boyd, 62, regional chief executive for Southern Bancorp and a lifelong Helena-West Helena resident.

In the late 1970s, Mohawk Rubber Co. and smaller manufacturers closed their plants, and several hundred middle-class jobs evaporated, Boyd said. The region's farmers were burdened by drought and 20 percent federal interest rates in 1980, heightening the city's economic stress, he said.

Over time, local businesses supported by now-gone middle-class workers began disappearing throughout the city, Boyd said.

The Mohawk plant closing has become a marker for when things began to turn bad in the Delta county, and the decline has continued, further straining taxpayer-funded services. Phillips County lost about 5,000 residents between 2000 and 2010, a nearly 18 percent drop, according to the census.

Across Phillips County, fewer than 6,500 people had jobs in September and close to 400 were looking for employment but unable to find it, equating to a 5.7 percent unemployment rate that ranked the county 69th among the state's 75 counties, according to Arkansas Department of Workforce Services. According to census numbers, the county's actual working-age population -- people ages 16-64 -- totals 13,200.

Edwards said that since he accepted the Helena Harbor post in 2014, he has shifted the focus from trying to land big employers to recruiting smaller businesses that can incrementally add jobs in the region.

"We're really just getting started on something," Edwards said. "It's like a painting. I don't have the painting completed. No one else does either, but you better be able to outline on the canvas what the painting is going to look like. If you can't, you're not going to be able to get anyone interested in working with you."

A REFOCUSED DISTRICT

The annoyances that Riley felt as a 22-year-old, first-year English teacher in an academically struggling school have morphed into fondness.

"At the time, I was like, 'Oh my goodness, I'm going to pull my hair out,'" Riley said when recalling that students would sometimes shout out references to the television cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants, disrupting their lessons.

Riley once took her entire class to the principal's office amid a cacophony of cellphone rings that, for the second consecutive day, no one would own up to.

But as she watched her students progress academically, witnessed their curiosity in off-book lessons -- such as origami -- and began understanding them on a personal level, Riley realized that the students had a "deep thirst for knowledge."

"I think the perception is that the population of students is disrespectful and unconcerned with learning," said Riley, who now works with the district and others as a literacy specialist for a regional cooperative that supports public schools. "That's the very opposite of what I experienced."

The students' academic difficulties, Riley said, stemmed from a school system that hadn't necessarily put their needs before all else and from a broader community suffering economic hardship.

As Riley taught that first year, state-installed administrators rushed to shrink the district, which had become too bloated for its revenue.

"I just didn't have a choice," said Suzann McCommon, the first of two superintendents installed by the Arkansas Department of Education. She oversaw the school district's deepest cuts.

Helena-West Helena's school district was on pace for a fourth consecutive year of deficit spending. It had depleted its cash reserves from $6.6 million to a projected negative balance when the state stepped in nine days before the end of fiscal 2011.

"I think [the district] got carried away thinking we were doing the best thing and weren't looking at what the money meant to us," McCommon said of the repeated budget deficits that preceded the takeover. "Particularly when you realize we were losing about 100 kids a year and, some years, more than that. You can't take a hit of $600,000 and $700,000 a year and not be decreasing staff. You can't live like that."

A 2011 audit found that $25,000 in equipment was missing, that the district did not solicit bids for a contract despite maintaining an apparently false bid sheet stating that it did, and that officials could not provide documentation supporting a payroll liability of $308,000, among several other issues.

Within two years of the takeover, the district laid off 114 employees, did not fill some job vacancies and closed three schools on two campuses. It also targeted inefficiencies like too many bus routes, and ended after-school and Saturday detention, according to McCommon and Arkansas Department of Education documents.

Local leaders said the school district -- which in total eliminated 130 jobs -- was whittled to a more manageable, appropriate size for the number of students and the amount of money it had.

Cash reserves soon accumulated. By 2013, the fund balance exceeded $8.8 million. But repeated audit findings, mainly related to the lack of financial checks and balances, dogged the district and kept it under state control until now, the fifth and final year that state law allows for a district takeover.

"There were internal control issues that took a few more years to address and resolve," Key said. "Their fiscal strength is much better now than it was a couple of years ago."

CHALLENGES REMAIN

Andrew Bagley, former chairman of the state-installed advisory board who was elected Nov. 8 to the School Board, said the circumstances are different now than when locals regained control of the school district in 2008.

School Board zones have been reconfigured to require that at least two of seven elected members represent the whole district rather than smaller wards. Bagley is one of those two at-large representatives.

Most of the newly elected School Board members served on the state-appointed advisory board, which has afforded them an opportunity to learn about the issues and better prepare to conduct district business than was possible in the previous, shorter state takeover.

"We are determined not to let the scarlet 'F' of fiscal distress be affixed upon our forehead ever again," Bagley said.

In one of its first actions, the board will offer a contract extension to Hoy, whom the state appointed in 2014, Bagley said. The superintendent said he wants to stay as the schools chief until he retires, if that is what the board wishes.

"What is different this time is it appears people want some stability in the district," said Bagley, noting that 15 different superintendents have been hired over a 22-year period.

The new School Board, however, will work with less money, and the district will have fewer students, teachers and classrooms than in previous years.

The district's cash balance is projected to fall from $6.7 million to $1.2 million this year to pay for a new upper-elementary school. That project, supported by the community advisory board and Key, was necessary to replace Eliza Miller Primary School, which sits atop deteriorated sewer lines and gas lines, Hoy said.

"There are times when having a growing fund balance isn't in the best interest of the students, and this was one of those cases, when making this investment in this new facility," Key said.

Construction is underway on the new building at the J.F. Wahl campus, which will serve grades kindergarten through sixth. The district's only other campus will be Central High School, where classes are held for seventh-through-12th grades.

Central High, too, needs an overhaul, leaders said, but the district doesn't have the money to pay for it since voters rejected a tax increase Nov. 8.

The overhaul would consist of building all-new instructional space at the campus, which would require tearing down the antiquated structure that frequently floods, Hoy said. Electrical wires and cables are exposed in places. In some spots, the exterior wall does not touch the floor, exposing students indoors to the outside elements.

Bagley said the School Board will likely ask voters again in the spring for a tax increase.

Otherwise, an influx of revenue is not expected. The district's enrollment dropped again this year -- at least the 12th consecutive year of decline, according to state data -- to 1,391 students.

Kipp Delta operates five charter schools in east Arkansas that are focused on college preparation. Enrollment at its three Helena-West Helena campuses this year is 927, although some of those students are from outside the riverside city. The charter's Helena-West Helena enrollment cap is 1,100.

The Helena-West Helena School District, recognizing the importance of student recruitment, is addressing shortcomings that Kipp's 2002 opening has highlighted, Hoy said.

A college-prep track began this year at the district's elementary school and should expand to junior high and high school next year, said Hoy.

He called the initiative a "school within a school." Participation in the more rigorous college-focused track is voluntary and requires more parental involvement.

"In my opinion, if we had lost children from the district because of the appearance that we are not preparing children for college, then I think it is the duty and obligation of our district to rev ourselves up and do that challenge," Hoy said. "If you want the push, you get the push."

Hoy, a former assistant commissioner over public school accountability in the Department of Education, said efforts to better align curriculum with testing standards is progressing after consecutive academic audits found shortcomings in the district.

Administrators also are working on student discipline to reduce suspensions and eliminate expulsions to cut down on missed class time.

The district also has rewritten its mission statement to emphasize molding students into "productive, responsible and caring citizens."

"We've got to fix the products that come out of the system, because the products that come out of the system eventually become a part of the community," Hoy said. "We don't just want smart people. We also want good people. Good people will make your communities better."

Riley, the central Arkansan who overstayed her commitment in Helena-West Helena, said one of her peeves from her first year was an inability to immediately change what she felt were systemic shortcomings outside of her classroom that affected her pupils' quality of life. Examples of that are the economic struggles that filter through families or how blight in a city affects overall morale.

Riley learned to focus on her classroom, although her community involvement has grown over time, she said. She and others are working to improve Helena-West Helena's public services, its economy and residents' well-being, although the progress doesn't always keep pace with their exertion.

"You feel like you're a duck gliding on top of water, but your feet are paddling as fast as they can underneath the water," Riley said.

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