Speakers at Tuesday's public forum on the future of the state-controlled Little Rock School District heavily favored the return of the district's governance to a locally elected school board without splitting off or otherwise penalizing low-achieving schools and their faculties.
"The only option is a locally elected school board because it is the only entity that would be answering to us," said Ali Noland, a district parent and one of the first of almost two dozen speakers at the forum attended by about 200 people on the campus of Arkansas Baptist College.
"If you choose and appoint a school board, you are saying you don't trust us to govern our own schools," Noland told Education Board members Charisse Dean and Fitz Hill, who moderated the 1½-hour session.
Tuesday's forum was the first in a series of sessions being held throughout the district by the Arkansas Education Board on what members of the public think should happen to the state-controlled Little Rock School District.
The second session -- a recent addition to the list -- will be at 6:30 p.m. Monday at Don R. Roberts Elementary School, 16601 LaMarche Drive. That will be followed with a session at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at Saint Mark Baptist Church, 5722 W. 12th St. A fourth forum will be at 5:30 p.m. Sept. 3 at the Arkansas Department of Education's auditorium at 4 Capitol Mall. Another session is being planned for southwest Little Rock.
Additionally, the state board and the state Division of Elementary and Secondary Education have set up an online survey and an email address as a way to collect comments from the public.
The public forums come in advance of the January 2020 expiration of the Little Rock district's five-year deadline to correct its student-achievement deficiencies.
Chronically low test scores at six schools led the state Education Board in early 2015 to vote 5-4 to assume control of the Little Rock school system by dismissing the locally elected School Board and placing the superintendent under the supervision of the Arkansas education commissioner.
Current state law and rules for carrying out the law call for a district under state control to meet exit criteria set by state leaders, face consolidation or annexation of the district to one or more other districts, or be reconstituted.
Mike Hernandez, the Arkansas Department of Education's state superintendent for coordinated support services, said Tuesday that whether the Little Rock district met the criteria for exiting state control won't be known until October.
He described the qualitative and quantitative exit criteria that have been established for the district and particularly for the district's eight schools that have F letter grades. The exit criteria include in part the 2019 ACT Aspire test results, as well as achievement growth of students on the tests compared with past years, and school-quality measures such as student attendance and high school graduation rates.
"We as a state can't release the district if it has not met the exit criteria," Hernandez told the audience of parents, district teachers and administrators, past and present lawmakers, and community organization leaders.
Annexation and consolidation are not considered viable options by state leaders for the Little Rock district, which is surrounded by the Pulaski County Special School District that is under federal court supervision for its desegregation efforts and, as a result, has protected boundary lines. The Little Rock and North Little Rock districts are separated by the Arkansas River.
Hernandez said the option of reconstitution is not defined in the law and that one of the purposes of the forums is for state leaders to get feedback on what form reconstitution might take.
Dean and Hill, both of Little Rock, posed four questions intended to elicit possibilities for reconstitution if the district or some of its schools fail to meet the exit criteria.
Those questions were:
• In thinking about a reconstituted district, what are the pros and cons of school board elections that the Board of Education should consider? Are there benefits to having an appointed versus an elected school board? And should/could there be an option for both?
• If the district has one or more schools that fail to meet the exit criteria, there are options under a reconstituted district. Attendees were encouraged to discuss those options: that schools that meet exit criteria are returned to local control, that schools that do not meet exit criteria remain under state authority, or that schools that do not meet exit criteria are closed and students moved to higher-performing schools. The attendees were also asked whether there were other options.
• In a reconstituted district, schools with the greatest needs should have access to the greatest resources, including the most effective teachers and administrators, according to the questioners. Attendees were asked: What would motivate or incentivize educators to choose to work in the most challenging schools? How would educators be recruited and hired? What are the challenges to staffing struggling schools?
• In a reconstituted district, additional support should be available to students in the district's struggling schools, the questioners said. The attendees were asked: What are some options for additional academic support and services that should be made available to schools that do not meet exit criteria? Should private funds be utilized to make such support available?
Some audience members initially objected to being restricted to responding to the questions and to holding a 1½-hour meeting that limited the number of speakers and their time to talk.
Sens. Linda Chesterfield and Joyce Elliott and Reps. Tippi McCullough and Andrew Collins, all Little Rock Democrats, were among the Tuesday night speakers. Elliott said the 2017 law on state-controlled school systems was passed hurriedly and is flawed. She urged against dividing schools as achieving or challenging and called for just striving to ensure that all campuses are world-class schools. She argued that taking away due-process rights of teachers in the low-performing schools deters teachers from wanting to work in those schools where students have great needs.
Elliott also urged that there be no effort to separate the schools that don't meet the exit criteria and place them into any kind of charter-school zone.
"We are in this together," Elliott said. That was echoed by Collins, whose district covers the northern section of Little Rock and its generally higher-performing schools.
"We are stronger together," he said.
Chesterfield and McCullough were among those who called for a return of a locally elected school board. McCullough said the welfare of the city and its business climate are at stake.
Michelle Davis, a parent, warned against the neighborhood erosion that would occur by closing schools. She also said that she is concerned that people speak out in unison at public forums about their desires for the Little Rock district but that the voices don't appear to be heard.
Elementary school art teacher Lori Kirchner also urged against closing low-performing schools and forcing children to move to other campuses.
"We're not serving students by moving them," she said. "We need to meet them where they are."
Kirchner told the Education Board members that the state has changed the state-required tests multiple times since the takeover and keeps "moving the mark" that the schools must meet to attain state release. She said teachers need adequate notice -- nine months -- of the criteria that they must meet.
She and several other teachers -- including ones who work in the academically struggling schools -- said they love and are motivated by their students and wouldn't choose to work in other campuses.
Noland and other parents objected to the possibility of private funding for student-support services. Noland said the strings are attached to that kind of funding and that those conditions need to be known upfront. Another parent said that she feared the funding would come from the Walton Family Foundation of Bentonville, which is a supporter of independently operated charter schools.
Herb Rule, a Little Rock attorney and former school board member in the 1980s, suggested that the state condition the district's release on the passage of a property-tax increase.
Ryan Davis, who called himself a proud parent of students in a downtown Little Rock school, told the state education leaders that the best way to have a good city district "is to elect people that we can hold accountable and not have to fight around the podium every meeting or so."
Metro on 08/21/2019