State charter panel backs Little Rock school's plan to move

A map showing the location of Little Rock Preparatory Academy middle school.
A map showing the location of Little Rock Preparatory Academy middle school.

An Arkansas Department of Education panel on Wednesday preliminarily approved a new location for the Little Rock Preparatory Academy's middle school and voted down a plan to replicate the A-graded Haas Hall Academy at a Springdale site.

photo

Haas Hall in Fayetteville.

The Charter Authorizing Panel, made up of top-level staff members at the Education Department, voted 5-2 in support of the academically struggling middle school's northerly move in Little Rock, to take effect for the 2016-17 school year.

Citing concerns about student diversity, past lottery selection practices and a tight timeline for opening a school by August, the panel voted 8-0 against a 500-student Haas Hall Academy for seventh- through 12th-graders at the Jones Center for Families in Springdale.

The panel decisions will now go in June to the Arkansas Board of Education, which can either accept the panel decisions or vote to conduct its own hearings on either of the proposals before making final decisions.

LR Preparatory

Tina Long, superintendent of the Little Rock Preparatory Academy, told the panel that a change in the school's location from 4520 S. University Ave. to a more spacious 6711 W. Markham St. site would provide up to 180 fifth- through eighth-graders and their teachers with features not available at the current school.

Little Rock Preparatory generally serves academically struggling pupils from low-income families at two campuses -- a kindergarten through fourth-grade school at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral on Spring Street and the South University Avenue campus. The system's fifth grade would move from the downtown Spring Street campus to join grades sixth through eighth grades at the the new Markham Street site.

School leaders plan to offer a school bus service that will pick up pupils at three central locations around the city.

Teachers at the South University site currently have to lock up their supplies and can't hang anything on the walls because they are sharing building space with Promiseland Church Ministries, Long told the panel.

"Families currently do not see our facility as a permanent home," she said about the school. "Many of our students come to us for either behavior or academic remedies and, after they are 'remedied,' they transition on."

She said the middle-school campus that now has 119 pupils in grades six, seven and eight lost almost a third of its pupils last year.

"We are really looking, and parents are really looking, for facilities that offer the amenities of a gymnasium, science labs and green space that are found in a traditional school while still keeping our academic model," she said.

The new 4.8-acre site -- the former Lutheran High School at Markham and South Hughes Street -- has all of those elements.

"So at the end of the relocation process we'll be able to strongly address the retention concerns," Long said.

The lease for the new middle-school site would be less than at the current building, school leaders said. The rent at the new site will be 11 percent of the student revenue -- an estimated annual rent of $117,327 -- compared with 15.8 percent of enrollment revenue at the current site, which amounts to $136,200 in annual rent.

School planners applied in April not only for a new site but also for a 120-student increase in the combined 432-student enrollment cap for the primary and middle-school campuses. The request on the enrollment cap was withdrawn before Thursday's meeting.

Several Little Rock Preparatory parents and staff members asked the panel to support the new site. One mother said her son's school soccer team was unable to play the game in a paved parking area at the current school site without repeatedly kicking the ball into the street.

No one affiliated with the Little Rock School District spoke in opposition to the change in location.

The request for the change comes just weeks after the Charter Authorizing Panel and the state Education Board approved the hotly debated multiyear expansion of the eStem and LISA Academy charter-school systems in Little Rock by almost 3,000 seats.

Little Rock Superintendent Baker Kurrus and others affiliated with the school district argued that expansions would be detrimental to the state-controlled Little Rock district because those particular charter systems draw more affluent, high-performing students, leaving the district with fewer resources to educate larger percentages of high-needs students.

Within days of the state Education Board's votes for charter-school expansions, Education Commissioner Johnny Key told Kurrus that his contract will not be renewed and he will be replaced July 1 by Michael Poore, who has been the Bentonville superintendent since 2011. Key has denied that the replacement of Kurrus is tied to the charter-school opposition.

Assistant Commissioners Annette Barnes and Greg Rogers, both members of the charter panel, voted against the Little Rock Preparatory move to the new site.

Rogers said he had concerns about the fiscal condition of the Little Rock Preparatory system, which he said has two outstanding loans of $108,000 and another of $128,000. Payment on the later loan from Exalt Education, a charter-management organization, has been delayed until the 2017-18 school year.

Rogers noted that the school, which is one of the state's 5 percent lowest-scoring "priority" schools, was projected earlier to end this school year with a negative balance of more $70,000. School leaders said Wednesday that the system will end the year with balances of about $50,000, partly the result of funding increases for student enrollment growth.

"I still have concerns about the school taking on additional challenges. I'd like to see Little Rock Prep in better fiscal and academic standing," Rogers said.

Barnes noted that the panel took no action against the charter school for its priority academic status in February to give the school time to demonstrate whether it was moving in the right direction before its state-issued charter comes up for renewal in early 2017. Barnes said Wednesday that she wanted to stay true to the earlier decision.

Assistant Commissioner Ivy Pfeffer was one of the panel members who said the new location would be a better learning environment for students and teachers, but she also encouraged school leaders to improve their fiscal and academic status in advance of the charter renewal process.

Haas Hall

Haas Hall Academy on Wednesday generated some opposition from the Springdale School District to plans to add a Springdale campus to the existing Fayetteville and Bentonville campuses.

Haas Hall Academy features an accelerated college preparatory program for grades seven through 12. The older Fayetteville campus is nationally ranked for student achievement and recently received the highest number of points and an A grade from the state for student achievement and academic gains on state exams over a three-year period.

Martin Schoppmeyer Jr., the founder and superintendent of Haas Hall Academy, told the panel that 22 percent of students at the Fayetteville campus and 30 percent at the Bentonville campus are of races and ethnicities other than white. He said the new Springdale campus at the Jones Center would be a means of further increasing the school system's racial and socioeconomic diversity. The center is easily accessible by public bus service and provides many wellness and recreational services that attract diverse families, he said.

In response to questions, he said the school system does not participate in the federal school meal program that subsidizes the cost of school meals for students from low-income families. He didn't have any numbers but assured the panel that Haas Hall schools provide meals and uniforms to those in need.

Jared Cleveland, Springdale's deputy superintendent, objected to the timing of the Haas Hall proposal, saying that the potential loss of as many as 500 students in the 2016-2017 school year after his district has made legally required staffing decisions for that year by May 1 could be costly to the district over time.

He also said that the district has invested millions of dollars into a new conversion charter school of innovation. Northwest Arkansas school districts provide an array of educational options, he said and questioned the need for an independently run open-enrollment charter school.

The Charter Authorizing Panel on Wednesday actually cast three different votes on charter amendments proposed by Haas Hall.

The panel's first vote of 6-1 denied the charter-school proposal to increase the enrollment cap from 400 to 500 at the charter system's Fayetteville campus.

Panel members praised recent efforts to make the school's lottery system for selecting students more transparent and open to public scrutiny, but they also said more time is needed to build trust in the altered system. Panel members had asked questions about past enrollment practices that appeared to enable a small number of students to enroll in the school outside the random lottery system and in violation of laws and rules about charter school enrollment.

The panel did approve by a 5-2 vote a proposal to give enrollment preference to the siblings of Haas Hall students.

It voted 8-0 against allowing the opening of a new campus at the Jones Center for different reasons.

Deputy Commissioner Mark Gotcher said that the Springdale district offers multiple opportunities for students and didn't see a need for charter expansion at this time.

Jennifer Liwo, an attorney for the department and a panel member, said she had concerns about the lack of diversity at the charter school and the impact on the surrounding school district.

Pfeffer said the timeline for opening the school was too rushed to allow for an adequate student recruitment and lottery process. She said she felt that the school leaders were taking steps to correct matters that were of concern in the past.

"I think there needs to be time to show that things that are being put in place are going to set the foundation for changes in the future," Pfeffer said.

Deborah Coffman, the Education Department's chief of staff and chairman of the panel, said she hoped Schoppmeyer would take the positive criticism and return with data and evidence that the recruitment plan for diverse groups of students is working.

Schoppmeyer said after the meeting that he would resubmit the proposal for the Jones Center location as long as the space at the center -- the former home of the Springdale School of Innovation -- remains available.

Metro on 05/19/2016

Upcoming Events