3 Arkansas charter schools that received F letter grades to face questions

Three Arkansas public charter schools that recently received F letter grades for the 2017-18 school year are being called in by the state Charter Authorizing Panel to explain the ratings and their plans for improvement.

Pine Bluff Lighthouse Elementary Academy, an open-enrollment charter school for 233 children in kindergarten through sixth grade, will be asked to account for its F grade when its state-issued charter goes to the panel Dec. 18 for renewal, panel members decided Tuesday.

The Capital City Lighthouse Lower Academy, an open-enrollment charter school serving 188 students in North Little Rock, and the 608-student Blytheville High School-A New Tech High School, operated by the Blytheville School District, will be called to make similar presentations at the panel's January meeting.

The panel reviewed the letter grades given to 77 open-enrollment and district-run conversion charter school campuses in the state.

"What contributed to the declines?" panel member Naccaman Williams of Springdale said he wanted to know from the campus leaders. "I'm into facts and circumstances."

The panel, made up of state Department of Education officials and others from outside the agency, has the authority to take preliminary action against the F-rated schools at those upcoming meetings, Deputy Education Commissioner and authorizing panel Chairman Ivy Pfeffer said.

Search by school or district:
Click here to load this Caspio Cloud Database
Cloud Database by Caspio

Placing a school's state-issued charter on probation, not renewing it at the time of expiration, revoking it or taking no action against it are among the panel's options after hearing the presentations.

Decisions by the charter panel are ultimately subject to a possible review and a final vote by the Arkansas Board of Education.

The state Department of Education announced the letter grades for more than 1,000 traditional and charter schools in October. In all, there were 44 F's given to traditional and charter schools. There were a total of 152 A's, 313 B's, 380 C's and 145 D's assigned to traditional and charter schools.

The review of the charter school grades comes at the same time that the state has proposed waiving legal employment protections for faculty and staff members at 22 D- and F-rated schools in the Little Rock School District. Arkansas Education Commissioner Johnny Key proposed the waiver of the state Teacher Fair Dismissal Act and the Public School Employee Fair Hearing Act in the 22 traditional schools in Little Rock.

The letter-grading system for the state's public schools is based on the Every Student Succeeds Act's index numerical scores.

Those scores were calculated using student scores on the 2018 state-required ACT Aspire exams given to grades three through 10, growth in the scores since 2017, high school graduation rates, student attendance, academic progress by non-native English-language learners, the percentage of students reading at their grade level, college entrance exam results and other factors.

Two other charter schools received F's for the past school year -- Rockbridge Montessori Charter School in Little Rock and Quest Middle School of Pine Bluff. Rockbridge's charter was revoked by the state Education Board in June on the recommendation of the authorizing panel, and Quest Middle School voluntarily surrendered its charter. As a result, neither school is in operation.

Panel members also asked Tuesday for the Education Department's charter schools office to check in with charter schools that have received letter grades of D in two consecutive years. The staff -- now under the direction of the newly hired Reginald Ballard -- will report to the panel in January on concerns about those schools, including any similarities in the reasons for the consistently low grades.

Greg Rogers, the Education Department's assistant commissioner for finance and a panel member, said he was particularly interested in getting the percentages of students at the school who were reading at their grade level on the ACT Aspire tests.

Schools that received D's in two consecutive school years were KIPP: Delta Elementary Literacy Academy, KIPP: Delta Blytheville College Preparatory, Arkansas Virtual Academy Elementary, Little Rock Preparatory Academy Elementary, Hot Springs Junior Academy, Osceola STEM Charter, Forrest City College Preparatory School, Covenant Keepers Charter in Little Rock, Exalt Academy of Southwest Little Rock, Ozark Montessori Academy in Springdale, Hot Springs World Class High School and Harrisburg College and Career Preparatory.

Panel member Angela Kremers, deputy director for career and technical education at the Arkansas Department of Career Education, asked whether charter schools that saw their Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA, index score decline by 10 or more points -- regardless of whether their letter grades dropped -- should also be reviewed.

Alexandra Boyd, who is leaving the job as head of the state charter school office for another job in the Education Department, said the schools with changes of 10 points or more were typically schools that had greatly expanded their enrollments in a year's time. She said those schools could be expected to show steady improvements over two to three years.

Boyd also noted that charter schools with F letter grades are ineligible by law from acquiring any state-provided facilities funding.

A Section on 11/14/2018

Upcoming Events