The Arkansas Board of Education on Thursday voted to allow an earlier start of school for districts that are members of the Guy Fenter Education Service Cooperative.
The 20 districts — including Fort Smith — asked for the waiver of a state law that sets the first day of school as the Monday of the week that contains Aug. 19.
The newly approved waiver will allow the applying school districts to set their first day of classes in a new school year as no earlier than Monday, Aug. 13.
Leaders of the districts said in their applications that the state law — Arkansas Code Annotated 6-10-106 — results in a “wide swing in the allowable opening date of school.” The newly approved waiver will allow the schools to start classes at about the same time every year.
Arkansas Education Commissioner Johnny Key told the Education Board that he expects additional education cooperatives and their school district members to seek the same waiver.
“I anticipate that this is going to be a larger issue,” he said, adding that one traditional public school district had asked for and received the waiver earlier this year. Some charter schools also have received waivers of the school year start dates.
No one spoke Thursday in opposition to granting the waiver, but the issue of the start date for the school year comes up periodically in the state Legislature, Key said. School systems have typically supported mid-August start dates, but some in the tourism industry have objected because of the potential loss of their end-of-summer business.
“It’s not a new debate,” Key said, “but now because of Act 1240, it ends up in the lap of the state board.”
The 2015 state law enables school districts to obtain the same waivers of the state education rules and laws that were previously granted to open-enrollment charter schools. To be eligible for the waivers, an applicant district must have one or more students living within its boundaries who attends a charter school.
The earliest a school can start classes under the law is Aug. 14 but, in the coming year, the first allowable day of classes would not be until Aug. 20.
The waiver will allow the schools to plan fall and spring semesters that are close to the same number of days while simultaneously allowing the first semester to end before the Christmas break and the second semester to conclude at the end of May. That’s barring a lot of end-of-school-year makeup days for inclement weather, said Roy Hester, director of the education cooperative.
The districts can avoid having to give first-semester exams after the Christmas break, he said, which is also a time of winter weather conditions that can close schools and delay the tests.
Additionally, the leaders of the cooperative member school districts said in their applications that the waiver will result in more days of instruction occurring before state-mandated Aspire exams are given in the spring.
“More days of instruction will result in higher test scores,” the district applications for the waiver said.
Hester said the cooperative serves 20 districts that employ a total of 3,600 teachers and enroll 44,000 students.
Besides Fort Smith, the member districts of the cooperative are Alma, Booneville, Cedarville, Charleston, Clarksville, County Line, Greenwood, Hackett, Lamar, Lavaca, Magazine, Mansfield, Mountainburg, Mulberry/ Pleasant View Bi-County, Ozark, Paris, Van Buren, Waldron and Westside.