FAYETTEVILLE -- What started as an outline for the School District's agenda for the next five years is looking more like a detailed plan for "ensuring all students succeed in a highly competitive and rapidly changing global society."
A 30-member team met for three days in October to draft the five-year plan, with discussions and debates culminating in a new mission statement approved by the School Board last fall focusing on setting high expectations for students.
Framing Our Future Planning Team
Representing Fayetteville School District: Kim Garrett, Justin Eichmann, Michelle Hayward, Bobby Smith, Lori Linam, Brooke Buckley, Brady Carman, Karyn Francis, Lisa Davis, Leah Rose, Ruth Mobley, Warren Collier, Chantlee Nash, Dana Troutt, Luke Adams, Matt Pledger and Mona Foster
Representing the community: Jennifer Irwin, Karen Boston, Eva Diaz, Denise Roark, Regina Thompson-Henry, Teresa Fuller, Mary Lynn Mantooth, Michelle Kieklak, Dr. Nirmal Kilambi, Missy Joyce and Sara Brady
Representing students: Ramil Fitz and Ophelia Duchesne
Source: Fayetteville School District
They handed their work off to 10 action teams, made up of School District and community volunteers. The teams spent four months focusing on how to achieve the planning team's strategies.
The planning team, led by two facilitators and with input from Superintendent Paul Hewitt, spent Tuesday and Wednesday at the Fayetteville Public Library hearing reports from the action groups to determine what details to include in a five-year comprehensive plan proposal going to the School Board for consideration next month.
"It's almost like having a baby," said planning team member Regina Thompson-Henry, a parent with a son and daughter at Holt Middle School. "You worked so hard in October."
Action team leaders have explained how they interpreted what the planning team put down on paper, she said.
Thompson-Henry was interested in some ideas presented from an action team that focused on community partnerships, she said. She understood the strategy as focusing on identifying community partners and the action team took it a step further. That group envisioned an online system that would enable teachers to search for potential community partners for specific needs, such as those gardeners or a seed supplier for a teacher planning a lesson related to growing plants.
Thompson-Henry thinks the implementation of the new five-year plan, once it's approved, will lead to well-rounded students who not only are learning academics, but also know how a community works and are prepared for life, she said.
Parent Eva Diaz is satisfied with her children's education at Ramay Junior High School and Fayetteville High School, but said she has concerns about services for English language learners. Diaz also is a research associate for a project at the University of Arkansas focused on training teachers with English language learner students.
"There is so much potential to be better," she said.
Serving on the Framing Our Future planning team has given Diaz a chance to talk about her experiences as a parent and about the educational and emotional concerns of children in families that speak other languages. She appreciates the other perspectives of teachers and administrators.
Diaz is from Puerto Rico, and her husband is from Greece. They left the United States in 1999 and spent 12 years in Greece, where their children were born. They moved to Fayetteville in 2012.
NW News on 05/19/2016