Panel backs renewal of 4 schools’ charters; strings attached for 2

This artist rendering shows the planned Maumelle area charter high school.
(Special to the Democrat-Gazette)
This artist rendering shows the planned Maumelle area charter high school. (Special to the Democrat-Gazette)

The state’s Charter Authorizing Panel on Tuesday endorsed five-year terms of renewal for four charter schools but asked for interim reports from two schools that have state-issued “D” letter grades.

The schools tentatively approved for renewal of their charters that are otherwise due to expire June 30 are:

Cave City High School Career & Collegiate Preparatory School, operated by the Cave City School District to serve students in grades nine through 12.

Fayetteville Virtual Academy, operated by the Fayetteville School District for kindergarten through 12th grade.

Future School of Fort Smith, an open-enrollment charter school for grades 10 through 12 this year, with an expansion to include ninth grade starting next school year.

Imboden Area Charter School, one of the state’s oldest open-enrollment charter schools and the smallest school in the state, with about 70 pupils this year in elementary and middle school grades.

The panel included in its five-year renewal motions for the Future School and Imboden school a requirement that the schools return to the panel in two years with presentations on their academic programs in light of the D grades given by the state to those campuses in recent years.

“I don’t take letter grades lightly,” panel member Naccaman Williams of Springdale told Imboden Area Charter School Director Matthew Wells at one point in the panel meeting Tuesday. The Imboden school had asked for a 10-year renewal.

The state-issued letter grades to schools are based largely on the results from the state-required ACT Aspire exams in math, literacy and science given in grades three through 10. However, the exams were not given in the 2019-20 school year because of the covid-19 pandemic that closed all public schools to on-site instruction last spring. As a result, no new letter grades were calculated. The letter grades from 2018-19 have been carried over.

The decisions made Tuesday by the Charter Authorizing Panel — made up of state employees and interested residents — will go to the Arkansas Board of Education early next year for final action.

The panel will meet again at 9 a.m. today to consider charter renewal applications from four more schools and identify low-performing charter schools to be summoned to present their cases to the panel.

Boyd Logan, co-founder and superintendent of the Future School of Fort Smith, told the panel that the 4-year-old campus completed its first year of operation with a single class of 10th graders who were academically proficient, resulting in a B grade from the state.

In the second year of operation for the school, which is structured around job internships for every student, the 10th grade class was less proficient and the school’s intervention strategies to help struggling students were not fully set up. The low D grade that year was improved to a higher D in 2018-19, the third year of operation.

Logan said he anticipated a still-better grade for this past year, but no Aspire tests were given, nor were letter grades updated. With the addition of ninth grade to the school in the coming year, two grades of students — ninth and 10th — will be taking the Aspire tests, and that will give the school more data from which a new state letter grade will be calculated.

Panel member Sonja Wright-McMurray questioned whether the 240-student school’s emphasis on job internships — and the demand on teachers to be advisers and internship facilitators — detracts from academic instruction.

Williams asked if too much student time was spent on the internships.

Logan responded that the “high value” internships with more than 130 community partners are integral to what happens in the classroom. He also said that a recent grant to the Future School will enable the school to create baseline data so as to better assess the school program.

The Imboden Area Charter, located in the Sloan-Hendrix School District in northeast Arkansas, was established in 2002. The school consists of four multi-age classrooms in which it serves a rural, high-poverty population of students — many of whom “became lost academically” in other school settings, Wells told the panel.

The school, with its family atmosphere, typically sees its students gain 1½ years of achievement in a school year, but it does have a D letter grade from the state, Wells acknowledged.

Efforts to improve that grade, he said, include new diagnostic tools to identify student academic deficiencies, an after-school remediation program with school bus transportation provided, and a recent hire of an “exceptional” reading teacher.

Panel member Toyce Newton of Crossett made the motion to renew the charter for five years instead of 10 and to require a presentation from the school in two years.

“The school meets the needs of a niche of students who might otherwise struggle,” Newton said.

The panel earlier on Tuesday had approved renewing the state charters for the Fayetteville Virtual Academy and the Cave City High School Career & Collegiate Preparatory School.

The approval included accepting the Fayetteville School District’s request to reduce the conversion charter school’s maximum enrollment cap from 5,000 to 2,500.

School district leaders had asked earlier this year for the 5,000-student cap — up from 500 — when it was unknown how many families would opt for a virtual instructional program as the result of covid-19, Assistant Superintendent Megan Duncan told the panel Tuesday.

The school’s current enrollment is about 475. That is up from about 160 last year. The school has consistently had an A grade from the state.

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