School district prepares to cut

Goal $20 million in 3 years

Specialty academic programs, college-style block scheduling and more than a dozen school buses are some of the expenses identified by Pulaski County Special School District leaders to be included in proposed budget cuts of $6 million for the 2014-15 school year.

Superintendent Jerry Guess said millions of dollars in cuts will be necessary in each of the next three years in anticipation of the district losing $20 million a year instate desegregation aid after the 2017-18 school year. The district has total annual revenue of more than $200 million.

“We’re turning every rock over in an attempt to find ways to make changes and make those changes as painless as possible,” Guess said last week. “The goal is to provide every elementary student, middle school student and high school student with the very best instructional services we can provide at the most efficient level we can provide.”

But some of the possible budget cuts that Guess and his staff have identified are not sitting well with at least some parents of children attending the 644-student William Jefferson Clinton Elementary Magnet School in Sherwood.

The Clinton Elementary parents want the district to hold off on eliminating that school’s speech-communications, computer-technology and home-counselor programs and the three staff positions tied to those programs.

“We know that cuts are coming,” Meredith Poland, a Clinton Elementary parent, said about district operations. “We understand that. Our issue is why do these cuts have to happen immediately and have such a strong impact on our students’ learning?”

Poland said about 420 pupils participate in activities such as the show choir and drama productions or take the school’s public-speaking class in a school year.

As many as 530 children cycle through the school’s two computer laboratories where they learn keyboarding, as well as how to put together computerized slide presentations, operate different computer programs, create websites, edit videos and even take computers apart and rebuild them, she said. And about 100 families are served by the home counselor who is a liaison between the school and families who need help in supporting the education of their children.

To lose the technology and speech-communications programs is to lose the school’s identity, Poland said.

Clinton Elementary parents will make their case to preserve the programs to the district’s Community Advisory Board, which meets at 6:30 p.m. today in the district’s administration building at 925 E. Dixon Road in Little Rock.

The advisory board offers suggestions and recommendations to Arkansas Education Commissioner Tom Kimbrell, who acts as the school board for the district. The district is completing its third year in the state’s fiscal-distress program and remains under state control without a locally elected school board.

“We are going to formally ask that the district give us at least a year so that we as a PTA can use our resources to come up with something,” Poland said. “We’re not against putting our resources toward funding a technology program. Our thing with the district is to say, ‘Give us the opportunity.’ Don’t just say, ‘This is a done deal. You have no say.’”

The speech-communications and technology programs were features initially incorporated into the 600-student campus to make the school attractive to both black and white families, and thereby assist in racially desegregating the school and district. The school and its programs were meant to serve neighborhood students as well as attract black pupils from Little Rock through the majority-to-minority interdistrict student transfer program.

For similar reasons, specialty academic programs and staff members were added and/or highlighted at other schools, including a communications program at Crystal Hill Magnet Elementary; an economics education program at Baker Interdistrict Elementary School; an environmental science program at Chenal Elementary; and gifted education and orchestra programs at College Station Elementary, Fuller Middle and Mills University Studies High schools.

Last year, the three Pulaski County school districts, the state and intervening parties representing school employees and black students negotiated a settlement in the 31-year-old federal school-desegregation lawsuit. That settlement, approved by a federal judge in January, sets the ending date for $68.3 million a year in state desegregation aid to the three Pulaski County school districts. It also ended new enrollment into the majority-to-minority interdistrict student transfer program that allows students in a district in which their race is in the majority to transfer to a school and district in which their race is in the minority.

Guess, the Pulaski County Special School District superintendent, said he and his staff are looking across the district at programs that have been directly supported with desegregation funds.

“What we have here is a three-year plan, because we have three years of funding, and what we hope to do is make incremental changes each year, taking some programs down, moving or eliminating some positions and, at the same time, hoping for growth in property assessments and state foundation [per-student] funding that will help offset the losses,” he said.

Guess said the staff also is looking for possible cuts in expenses in nondesegregation-related operations so the district won’t have to cut as many of the programs that its leaders would like to preserve.

Besides looking at the specialty programs and staffing at Clinton and Crystal Hill magnet elementary schools, Guess and his staff are looking at the home counselors based at Clinton Elementary and at other schools.

Also under review is possibly combining bus routes for children who are currently in magnet schools or are already making majority-to-minority transfers into the Little Rock and North Little Rock districts. Students already in those programs will be able to continue in them. Guess said the merger of magnet school and majority-to-minority routes could result in 20 fewer bus routes, producing a savings in staffing and fuel.

Guess said he has called in consultants to assist in making course scheduling more efficient at the middle and high schools while continuing to offer some electives in courses such as Advanced Placement physics that do not attract large numbers of students.

The college-style, 90-minute-class periods at Fuller Middle and Mills High are under review to determine whether block scheduling - good for gifted-education programs, Guess said - can be saved while using a seven-period, 50-minute class day for students not in the gifted “Scholars” programs.

“My philosophy is we need to be as efficient as we possibly can … so that in the places and classes where we shouldn’t have to be so efficient, we can afford to allow the inefficiencies to exist,” he said. “We are trying to apply that same idea all the way across the district. But, still, the reality is we have to plan for the loss of $20 million.”

Front Section, Pages 1 on 03/17/2014

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