Waiver Could Help Northwest Arkansas Students Get Ahead

SPRINGDALE — Asa Alsip said he could have had a head start on college had he been allowed to test out of some of his high school classes. A state requirement held him back.

Alsip, 18, and a senior at Springdale High School, is the type of student who would benefit from a waiver the Springdale School District is applying for from the State Department of Education. The waiver — called the seat time waiver — will allow students to earn class credits based on mastery of a subject and not the amount of time they’ve spent in the class, said Clay Hendrix, assistant superintendent for education innovation, technology systems, science, engineering, technology, math and district accountability.

Students in Arkansas public schools earn credits by spending a structured amount of time in a class, wrote Kimberly Friedman, director of communications for the Arkansas Department of Education, in an email.

“When a district asks for a seat time waiver, it is asking for a waiver of the time a student has to spend in the course in order to get credit for that unit,” she wrote. “In exchange, the district is promising to still teach all of the content for that class, just in a shorter amount of time.”

A student must have 120 hours in class in order to receive one credit, Friedman wrote.

The seat time waiver project is one of 11 being paid for with money from the Race to the Top Grant the district received in December, according to grant paperwork. The district received a total of $25,878,038 from the grant, of which $238,713 will be used for the waiver project.

The waiver will allow students to test out of a class as soon as they have mastered the subject, then move on to a higher level or a different course, Hendrix said. It could help students get ahead in school and graduate earlier. It also would allow students to learn at their own pace.

Alsip said he took a class called Computer Applications 3 during his sophomore year. The one-semester class is based on five to six projects students must complete. Alsip said he finished the coursework in three weeks.

“For weeks at a time I would just sit there and do other classwork,” he said of the semester. “It became a study hall.”

If he had been able to test out, Alsip said he would have wanted to take more Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes, which many universities accept for college credit. He could have taken a personal finance class, but won’t be able to because there isn’t enough time in his schedule.

The system based on time spent in class has outgrown its usefulness, Hendrix said. Students today learn more at a younger age, and the system holds them back.

“I think it was a way for the schools to ensure they had an adequate length of a school day and semester,” he said.

The system was created in 1906, according to the Carnegie Foundation website, an organization focused on advancing teaching and learning. Friedman wrote that she doesn’t know when the Department of Education started using the system, and it might predate their records.

If seat time is waived, most students will still have to sit through part of a class before testing out, but each student will spend a different length of time in each class depending on how fast they learn, Hendrix said. Students who need extra help or who are struggling will be allowed to spend more time in a class to learn the subject.

“Every student is just more skilled in a certain area,” he said.

The Rogers School District has a program focused on mastery of a subject, but it is only for students who have failed a class, said Robert Moore, assistant superintendent for secondary curriculum and instruction, in an email. The program works because the students have already spent the required time in class.

Officials in the Bentonville School District ran into challenges with the seat-time requirement last year when they were considering online classes, said Judy Marquess, director of instruction grades seven to 12. They will offer online classes next year because of new state legislation requiring they do so.

“It would be nice to have some flexibility,” she said.

Another recent piece of legislation made it possible to get a waiver for the requirement, Hendrix said. An act approved by the Arkansas Legislature in 2013 allows school districts to apply to the education department for waivers for anything except teacher fair dismissal requirements. The department will start giving waivers to school districts in the fall, he said.

The seat time waiver the Springdale district is applying for will only apply to students in the School of Innovation, which will open as a pilot program for eighth-graders during the 2014-15 school year, said Marsha Jones, associate superintendent for curriculum, instruction, accountability and education innovation. District officials plan for the pilot program to extend to ninth-graders during the 2015-16 school year.

A building for the School of Innovation will open in the fall of 2016, when the program will be offered to grades eight through 12, said Jim Rollins, superintendent. In the mean time, district officials are looking for a facility, separate from the existing school campuses, to house the program until a permanent structure for the school is built.

The waiver is a necessity for the new school, because students will be expected to take college level classes along with their high school classes and graduate with an associate’s degree, Jones said. The students will have to be able to test out of classes to do this.

Using the waiver through the School of Innovation first allows district officials to work with it before expanding it to other schools or classes, Jones said. Officials don’t have a plan for expanding the waiver to other district schools.

“We’re going to start small and then, over the next four years, those conversations will have to be held,” she said.

The next step for district officials is to find out what other waivers they may need, compile all of the details and submit their applications for the waivers, including the seat time waiver, Jones said. Examples of other waivers the district might need involve credentials of independent learning teachers and having an electronic instead of print library.