Little Rock School Districk Notebook

Friday, July 25, 2014

Ex-principal picked to fill new position

Veronica Perkins, a former high school principal in a neighboring system, is the new chief academic officer in the Little Rock School District as the result of a School Board vote Thursday night.

The position is a new one, created to ensure the district’s curriculum and instructional program are fully and uniformly implemented, especially in the six schools recently labeled by the state as academically distressed, Superintendent Dexter Suggs said.

Baseline Elementary, Cloverdale and Henderson middle schools, and J.A. Fair, Hall and McClellan high schools are designated as academically distressed schools because fewer than half of their students over a three-year period, 2011-13, scored at proficient or better on state math and literacy tests.

Perkins worked for the past 14 years in the Pulaski County Special School District as an assistant principal, language arts coordinator and, most recently, as principal at Wilbur Mills University Studies High School, which is also labeled as an academically distressed school.

Asked why the district would select an academic officer from an academically distressed campus, Suggs said Mills’ achievement results improved significantly this past spring compared with the previous year.

Sixty-one percent of Mills students scored at proficient or better on the 11th-grade literacy exam this past spring, up from the 50th percentile the year before, according to Arkansas Department of Education data. Forty-eight percent of Mills geometry students scored at proficient or better this past year, up from 32 percent proficient or better the year before.

A former middle school English teacher in the Pine Bluff School District, Perkins has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English education from the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff and a doctorate in educational leadership from Arkansas State University.

Perkins’ annual salary will be $104,616 plus $3,000 for her doctorate.

‘Distressed’ option letters nearly done

The Little Rock School District will send letters as soon as today telling parents of students assigned to the six schools designated as academically distressed by the state of their rights to seek transfers for their children to higher-performing public schools, including charter schools.

Frederick Fields, the district’s senior director of student services, told the School Board that a telephone call with the same message went out to the affected families Thursday night.

Once a family makes a transfer request, the district has 30 days to respond. Fields said the effort will be made to respond as quickly as possible to the parents’ requests. To date, four transfer requests have been made.

Superintendent Dexter Suggs told board members that within the next month, he will present to them a detailed, step-by-step plan for raising achievement at the six schools. Those steps will include scheduling math and literacy facilitators at the schools to provide 45 minutes a week of training to core academic teachers.

$75,000 land buy gets panelists’ OK

The School Board on Thursday voted unanimously to authorize the purchase of 3 acres at 9715 Mabelvale Pike in southwest Little Rock.

The district will pay $75,000 for the property to Lewis Hammons.

Kelsey Bailey, the district’s chief financial officer, said the property is needed to provide access to a larger piece of land purchased by the school district last year as the site for a possible replacement school for McClellan High. McClellan is now on Geyer Springs Road.

The purchase of the Hammons’ property will give the district the setting for a main entrance with a possible traffic light to the proposed high school site.

Facilities session to be held Aug. 14

School Board members have circled Aug. 14 on their calendars as the date of a work session on consultant recommendations for improving the district’s facilities.

A team of architects, engineers and educational planners have been working for almost a year on those recommendations, which are likely to include proposals for new campuses, as well as additions to existing schools as a way to eliminate the use of portable buildings.

The facilities team led by Fanning-Howey of Indianapolis won’t be recommending the return of sixth grade to the district’s elementary schools, as was suggested earlier as a way to ease overcrowding in the middle schools.

The team recently reported to the district administrators that shifting the sixth grade out of the middle schools and into the elementary schools would create excess capacity at the middle schools and the need for new pre-kindergarten centers and elementary school expansions.

The anticipated cost savings at the middle schools would be exceeded by the cost of constructing new pre-kindergarten centers, additional elementary classrooms and expanded elementary cafeterias and activity centers, the consultants said.