A plan to convert Little Rock's McClellan High into a kindergarten-through-eighth grade campus generated discussion and mixed reactions Tuesday at the first of five forums on reorganizing and repurposing district campuses.
"We have some issues with K-8," Terry Lawson told the audience of about 100 meeting in the cafeteria at the current McClellan High where he is on the faculty. "Kids try to grow up so fast and try to grow up even faster when they are with older kids," he said, although he added that he appreciated the idea of new schools that carry with them the potential to attract a diverse student body in the traditional school system.
Lawson said he would like the district to explore the restoration of one or more junior high schools for seventh-through-ninth graders as a way to motivate ninth-graders to work for high school credits and to mature before entering high school. He also urged that extracurricular activities, such as athletics and music, be enhanced as ways to keep students in school who otherwise don't want to be there.
"We didn't all agree on the K-8," said Rohn Muse, another forum participant, when the audience reconvened after small group discussions. "We did agree that new facilities are important and that we have to bring up the schools in this area to be as good if not better than other areas of Little Rock."
Edwin Davis, another audience member at the Tuesday forum, urged district leaders to prepare Fair and McClellan students in advance for their merger into one campus as a way to avoid confrontations.
Davis, like Muse, is a candidate for election to the Little Rock Board of Directors.
Still another audience member focused on the elementary schools that might be closed and pupils assigned to a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade McClellan campus. She said she favored closing Cloverdale Middle because of its poor building condition and Meadowcliff Elementary because of its declining enrollment. She opposed closing Watson and Baseline elementaries that she said are a backbone to the Hispanic and black families in the southwest part of the district.
"Don't treat us like guinea pigs," she said in objecting to large elementary schools that she described as "a recipe for disaster."
Superintendent Mike Poore and his staff are hosting the community forums in different parts of the city this month to propose and solicit ideas for combining schools or altering their uses. The planning for the reorganization comes in advance of the opening of the district's new Southwest High School in August 2020.
McClellan and J.A. Fair high schools will be closed as high schools and their students assigned to Southwest High. Additionally, about 300 students now attending Hall High will be reassigned to Southwest High.
The long-planned changes at the high schools trigger changes at other campuses.
Poore has proposed converting the McClellan and Fair campuses into kindergarten-through-eighth-grade schools, which could change the uses for Henderson and Cloverdale middle schools, as well as various Little Rock elementary campuses such as Romine, Dodd, Watson, Baseline, Meadowcliff and Wakefield.
In the east, Poore and his staff have proposed converting Rockefeller into a campuswide early childhood school. Elementary children now assigned to Rockefeller could be rezoned to Washington Elementary on South Main.
In the northwest, the district leaders have raised the possibility of a small high school with a technology theme for the former office building next to Pinnacle View Middle School, which has just become the district's largest middle school.
In the central part of the city, Poore and his staff have proposed pairing Bale Elementary with the now vacant W.D. Hamilton Learning Academy, formerly Southwest Middle School, to form an academic village where prekindergarten through second grade would be housed at Bale and the upper elementary grades at Hamilton.
The next forum will be at 5:30 p.m. Monday at Fair High, 13420 David O. Dodd Road. That will be followed by forums at Pinnacle View Middle School on Sept. 17, Bale Elementary on Sept. 20, and Dunbar Magnet Middle School on Sept. 24.
Individuals can provide suggestions on the district's website: LRSD.org.
Metro on 09/05/2018