The opening of the Little Rock School District's Southwest High School is getting closer.
After eight years of talking, planning and construction, opening day is now eight months away for the district's first high school to be built in 51 years.
Just as the final accent coats of electric lime green and boysenberry purple paint are drying in classrooms and hallways, the first of more than 100 faculty openings -- including teachers, athletic coaches and support staff -- are being advertised for applicants.
Additionally, the furnishings are beginning to be put into place in what will be the $100 million home of the Gryphons -- a mythical creature with the head of an eagle and body of a lion -- at 9715 Mabelvale Pike.
The numbers give a sense of the magnitude of the 55-acre, three-story, 2,250-student-capacity campus that will hold about 1,800 students in grades nine through 12 in the first year. The school has:
• 410,000 square feet, including 340,000 square feet of academic space.
• 131 classrooms and laboratories ranging from 950 square feet to 1,500 square feet.
• A 900-seat cafeteria with four food lines, and a 1,200-seat auditorium.
• Two elevators and four sets of collaboration stairs for off-time congregating and group presentations.
• A 4,000-seat football stadium, a 2,500-seat arena and a 500-seat auxiliary gym, as well as a practice field/track; four tennis courts; soccer, baseball and softball fields; and a field house with practice space for wrestling.
"This reminds me of the schools I see in Texas, like in Allen and Plano," Karisa Allmon, principal of Little Rock's J.A. Fair High School, said last week as she began a hard-hat tour of Southwest -- which students now assigned to Fair and McClellan high schools will attend, starting in August.
Southwest also will serve as many as 300 students who live in what will be the Southwest attendance zone but will attend Hall High for its services to students who are not native English speakers. The current Hall students can opt to remain at that school.
To Southwest Principal Marvin Burton, just as significant as the popping colors, the walls of windows, the two-level media center, the dance studio, and the stadium Jumbotron and skyboxes are the array of academic opportunities to be had at Southwest.
"We're about educating the whole student," said Burton, a 31-year Little Rock educator. "So any particular area that a child wants to pursue -- we're trying to fill that niche. Some students may not want to go to college right out. Some want to go directly. We want to prepare them all for life."
Burton emphatically rejects the viewpoint voiced in recent weeks by some civic and government leaders that Southwest is going to be a trade school and perhaps lesser in stature than other district high schools that are viewed as college preparatory.
"That's why I'm very clear about the Advanced Placement offerings and that is why I'm very clear about the type of magnet options I want to offer," Burton said. "That is why I am clear about wanting to promote college-going for my kids. We will have ACT [college entrance exam] preparation so students will have options.
"This is not going to be a trade school," he continued. "But if a kid decides on their own that they want to pursue a trade, that's fine. I want to prepare kids and equip them for life after high school. If they decide to pursue a trade to help them pay to go to college, I'm good with that."
Southwest will offer 20 Advanced Placement courses and concurrent high school/college credit opportunities -- both of which offer potential of college credit for high school work -- and Burton said Southwest will be organized around academies.
Having adopted the Ford Next Generation national model of academies that blend academics and career education, Southwest will start with the ninth-grade Freshman Academy and its seminar course, which will introduce students to other, overarching academies for upper classmen. The Southwest academies will be:
• Business and Computer Science.
• Engineering, Aerospace and Health Sciences.
• Leadership, Hospitality and Tourism.
"Under each of those academies, there will be different programs of study," Burton said. "For instance, in business, if a student wants to have a program of study in banking, they will take three sequential courses in banking. We will have a functioning bank in this facility. First National Bank is partnering with us. Our kids will learn not just how to be tellers but how to manage and operate a bank."
"We'll also have a functioning store where kids can purchase Gryphon gear, hoodies and other things you would sell in a clothing store," Burton said. "Kids will learn that operational side, as well."
SCHOOL PLANS
There are still decisions to be had about Southwest's features, Burton said. The Arkansas Board of Education earlier this month called for Southwest to include a special "magnet" program within the overall school that would draw students from across the Little Rock district to Southwest, much in the way Central High's program in international studies draws students.
Such a program at Southwest would be intended in part to increase the racial and ethnic diversity of Southwest's student population, which is projected to be majority black and Hispanic.
"We're still trying to flesh that out with staff, students and stakeholders to see what type of magnet might we have," Burton said. "We have some thoughts that might segue into what we have around the academies, but that will be a collective decision."
Students who reside in the Fair and McClellan attendance zones will be automatically assigned to Southwest and do not have to sign up for the school during the open-enrollment registration period in January, Burton said.
Southwest will be the first new high school constructed by the Little Rock School District since Parkview was built on John Barrow Road. It opened in 1968.
The new school will replace McClellan High, which opened in 1965, and J.A. Fair High, which opened in 1982. Both of those schools were constructed by the neighboring Pulaski County Special School District before the Little Rock district annexed them in 1987 as a result of a federal court desegregation order.
The district last year initiated what has been called Pinnacle View High School of Innovation in a renovated office building. The school serves about 60 ninth-graders this year but is expected to add grades.
Southwest is at the tail end of the line of new high schools built in Pulaski County in recent years. Maumelle High, North Little Rock High, Maumelle Charter High, eSTEM Charter High, Lisa Academy North, Mills High, Jacksonville High and Sylvan Hills High are among the secondary campuses built anew or significantly renovated in the past decade.
Southwest will open in the waning weeks of the state's complete control of the district, which began with dismissing the school board in January 2015 because six schools -- including McClellan, Fair and Hall -- were classified by the state as being in academic distress. A new school board is to be elected in November to govern the district -- with possible state-set limitations.
The desire for a new high school in southwest Little Rock to replace McClellan, in particular, predates the state takeover. Morris Holmes, as the district's superintendent in August 2012, announced plans for a property search for a new high school.
The Little Rock School Board voted to purchase the land for a replacement school for McClellan in April 2013.
Superintendent Mike Poore said in December 2016 that while he wasn't in the district at the time of the initial planning for the new high school, "I want to be the guy that fulfills that promise."
Burton, a former McClellan principal and most recently the district's deputy superintendent, has served as point man on the high school project for four or more years -- calling early on for students, educators and community members to identify desired features for a new school.
Those included spaces for technology and hands-on projects, as well as windows and natural daylight -- not available in most rooms at the existing schools. There were also calls for the arena and auditorium to be accessible to the general public and that the athletic facilities enable the district to host state tournaments.
The resulting school has those features and more: a two-level media center and art rooms that look over the cafeteria, two dance studios and six community-based instruction rooms for teaching life skills to special-needs students. And then there are aeronautics and computer-aided drafting labs in the career-technology education hallway of the building.
As for bringing together students from two rival schools, Burton said there have been many intentional activities for student groups, parents and faculty members from both McClellan and Fair, and there will be more activities to take place in the spring.
"There is some negativity out there about how these students are going to get along, but people fail to remember that these kids attended elementary and middle schools together," Burton said. "Even the kids at Hall who will attend Southwest live in the southwest part of the city. It's not like they are totally unfamiliar.
"I'm not going in with blinders on, thinking we won't have some disruption," he said. "We will, like in any school. We will have that, but we are being very intentional to mitigate that by getting these kids together and having a unifying core vision."
Student groups, as well as parents and faculty members from the different campuses, are being asked about what is important about school and what they want to see when they walk into the school.
"We are taking all that in and vetting it to create our core values, which will lead to our vision, our mission statement and our goals, and even our alma mater," Burton said.
Principals, assistant principals, counselors and a few teachers from McClellan and Fair met last week to take a tour of Southwest and to discuss values and vision. Those sentiments included: Dream big, make history; be innovative; don't fear failure; and discover and create.
"This is going to be amazing," McClellan English teacher Ivey Kelly said after the tour of the new high school. "This is going to be good for the city."
Hiram Sumlin, an assistant principal at McClellan, said he was excited by the new school and the possibilities it holds for students.
"There are students who have been in the Little Rock School District their entire lives and never been inside a 21st-century school," Sumlin said.
"This is going to be nothing but great for southwest Little Rock," said McClellan social studies teacher Todd Ferguson, who said the larger, more spacious classrooms at the new school will allow for organizing students into small groups and for collaborative team work similar to real-world work.
"We have so many right things in the Little Rock School District, but our kids need a lot of support," Ferguson said. "I think this will give them exposure to things they never have dreamed of."
A Section on 12/26/2019