LOWELL — Two non-profit organizations aim to open charter schools in Northwest Arkansas that they claim will help students from low-income families achieve on the same level as their peers.
The Fayetteville and Springdale school districts, where the charter schools intend to locate, oppose the proposals. They are asking the Arkansas Board of Education to deny the organizations' requests to form open-enrollment charter schools.
The districts claim the schools can't meet theunique needs of low-income students without hiring certified teaching staff, for which both schools have sought waivers, and the resources and experience of a larger, traditional district to back their curriculum.
"The traditional system hasn't met their needs," said Misty Newcomb, the superintendent of the proposed Prism Education Center in Fayetteville. "There's more than just academics at stake. It's basically systemic poverty. They fall through the cracks in first or second grade, and the rest of their life stays on that path."
Prism, proposed by a group of Northwest Arkansas teachers and social workers, would be located in a strip shopping center off of Martin Luther King Boulevard. The school would have 252 kindergarten through eighthgrade pupils in its first year, expanding to an enrollment of 650 at full capacity.
In Springdale, the Oklahoma-based Sky Foundation wants to open the Dove School of Excellence, enrolling 375 kindergarten through 12th-grade students in its first year with an eventual enrollment capacity of 650.
If approved, both schools would open for the 2010-11 school year.
NEW SCHEDULES
Open-enrollment charter schools are public schools that are exempt from some of the laws and rules that govern traditional public schools.
In return for the flexibility, they are held to stricter standards for student achievement. The schools' enrollment is not confined by district boundaries, and must be determined by an open lottery system that relies on no special criteria for selection.
Arkansas law caps at 24 the number of open-enrollment charter schools the state's education board can approve. The state currently has 18 such schools. Seven organizations have applied for new charters for the 2010-11 school year, one more than allowed under the state cap.
The Northwest Arkansas schools merit serious consideration because none of the region's three existing charter schools target lowincome students, Newcomb said.
Arkansas Code Annotated 6-23-304, which establishes rules for opening charter schools, sets as one of its goals closing the achievement gap for "economically disadvantaged, racial, and ethnic subgroups."
To accomplish this, both Northwest Arkansas applicants are asking for waivers for longer school days and years to allow children, who may return to empty homes after school, to have more intentional, adult-supervised learning time.
The Dove School's application calls for school days lasting from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., required foreign language learning and a curriculum with an emphasis on math, science and technology "to create an environment that will nurture a desire to obtain a college education for underserved communities."
The Prism Education Center would hold classes from 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. with an afterschool program until 6 p.m.
The school would focus on developing life skills likehygiene and studying to make up for guidance that pupils may not receive at home, Newcomb said.
"We want to form a community network to support these kids," she said. "To break the cycle of poverty, we need to instill skill for daily living."
NON-CERTIFIED TEACHERS
Both applications request waivers from policies that require teachers and administrators to be certified teachers, opting instead to hire teachers with bachelor's degrees in any subject. The waiver is a key point of opposition by the districts.
"They need a certified person to work with them," said Ginny Wiseman, Fayetteville's associate superintendent. "We serve our poverty students in a much better way than these people would be capable of doing."
In an opposition statement approved Thursday, the Fayetteville School Board also cited a lack of diversity in the charter school's planned enrollment, a lack of effective leadership and plans to use Ozark Regional Transit routes for transportation as reasons for their disapproval.
"Our premise is to look at what's best for the kids," Wiseman said. "We feel that we already meet the needs of these students they're referring to."
The Springdale SchoolBoard will hold a special meeting at 4 p.m. Monday to structure its response. At its September meeting, board members and administrators cited a lack of English as a Second Language curriculum as a key concern with the Dove School's proposal.
Many of Springdale's students who qualify for free and reduced lunch programs, which classify them as economically disadvantaged, do not list English as their first language. The district has a goal of certifying all of its teachers in second-language acquisition to raise the test scores of these students.
Caroline Procter, director of the New Schools Group, a state resource center for private and charter schools, said that non-certified teachers can compensate for a lack of teacher training with professional experience.
"I can't go in and give the science and math and literacy concepts to every teacher, but I can teach almost anyone to handle a grade book or classroom management," she said.
Procter opened the state's first charter school, Academics Plus in Maumelle. At the school, students learned violin from the assistant conductor of the Little Rockbased Arkansas Symphony Orchestra and science from a researcher in a commercial laboratory that had its facility nearby. Neither had teaching degrees.
OPEN ENROLLMENT
Procter's concern is not with the proposed schools' teachers but with their targeted demographics.
Charter schools must admit all interested students. If the number of applicants tops the school's enrollment cap, students are selected through a lottery.
"Charter schools by federal regulation cannot cater to any particular income group," Procter said. "It's a random selection of parents who apply. When people talk about that they are aiming at low-income students, they really can't."
Although the proposed charter schools may have good intentions and wellcrafted curriculum, the kind of parents that typically seek out alternative public schools don't fall into the low-income category, Procter said. If they are both approved, the schoolsmay enroll students from far outside of their targeted groups.
It's an issue the Prism leaders have attempted to address by targeting marketing campaigns to their key demographics, going door-to-door in poor neighborhoods to inform parents about their choices.
"If we could target them, we would," Procter said. "Believe me, we've tried." To contact this reporter:
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 21, 25 on 09/27/2009