State law has town planning

Weiner’s school goal: Agriculture

Residents of Weiner, the northeast Arkansas town that valiantly but unsuccessfully fought to keep its school district in 2010, have come up with a plan to resurrect their school system.

Armed with a 2015 state law, the residents propose re-establishing the Weiner School District as a home to a kindergarten through 12th grade agriculture academy.

"We are passionate about our school and about agriculture, especially in our area," Greta Greeno, one of the Weiner school district planners, a farmer and a grandmother, said last week. "We feel like this agriculture school is going to be a perfect fit here."

Proponents of the Weiner plan, including the Weiner City Council and Mayor Todd Bartholomew, are asking the Arkansas Board of Education to schedule a special election in the 200-square-mile former district on the question of whether to detach from the larger Harrisburg School District.

That district absorbed the Weiner district in 2010.

The state Education Board is scheduled to consider the election petition at its regular monthly meeting Thursday.

"With the closure of the Weiner High School campus of the Harrisburg School District two years ago, we have seen local business and population dwindle away," a City Council resolution accompanying the petition for detachment states. "We strongly believe that once again having a viable and excellent school district in the Weiner, Waldenburg and Fisher area will revitalize our towns and allow for economic growth, while providing educational opportunities for our citizenry."

Planners of the Weiner academy would like the special election on detaching from the Harrisburg district to be held as soon as this November and the academy open for the 2016-17 school year.

An application to form the Weiner Academy of Agriculture and Technology will be submitted to the Arkansas Department of Career Education as soon as the forms become available, Greeno said.

Act 1286 of this year's legislative session authorizes the creation of agriculture schools for elementary and secondary school students. The act calls for the Arkansas Department of Career Education in collaboration with the Arkansas Department of Education to adopt rules setting up the pilot program.

Already, the planners have developed a list of courses such as crop production, beef and equine science, welding, electricity, and technology in agriculture, along with the more typical high school courses of English, geometry, history and chemistry.

Rep. Mary Bentley, R-Perryville, one of the sponsors of Act 1286, said last week that the agriculture academies can serve the dual purpose of building up the state's agricultural workforce while helping to preserve rural school systems that have diminished in number because of state law that requires a 350-student minimum for operating a district. Laws passed this year make some exceptions to that minimum number.

"Arkansas is a huge agricultural state and we have lots of agricultural businesses that are having to go out of state to get employees because we don't have students that are trained," Bentley said about her motivation for the act.

The act calls for the designers of the agriculture academies to partner with their local universities and agriculture schools as well as with farming-related businesses to plan for the operation of the schools. That will include the development of a curriculum for kindergarten through 12th grade that incorporates hands-on training and a means to earn concurrent high school and college credit while in high school.

"It's a huge undertaking," Bentley said of establishing an academy. "It's going to have to be in a community that's really involved in agriculture. Weiner has done its homework. They have huge support with Arkansas State University and with the agriculture industry. If they can make it work, I think it will be great."

The planners for the Weiner school have the hurdle of detaching from the larger Harrisburg district that other rural communities considering an agricultural school won't necessarily face, Bentley said.

About 170 students from the former Weiner district attended Harrisburg schools this past school year, according to a feasibility study done on the possible academy by Winston Simpson, a former long-time Arkansas school district superintendent.

Simpson projected that the academy's enrollment would be about 220. That total would include students who live in the Weiner, Waldenburg and Fisher areas but exercised alternatives to attending the Harrisburg schools.

As an agriculture academy, the Weiner school system would be exempt from state requirements on school district size.

The proposed academy would be housed in existing Weiner school buildings, which planners say are in good shape. The Weiner Elementary School is still open and is operated by the Harrisburg district. Weiner Elementary is a state-approved school of innovation, Greeno said, and has an "A" letter grade from the state.

The high school was constructed in 1999. That building, closed by the Harrisburg district in 2013, has been vacant since that time.

Residents of the former Weiner School District pay a 39.9 mill school property tax and it is anticipated that the rate would continue "until and unless voters of the detached Weiner Academy of Agriculture and Technology School District" approve a change in the rate, Simpson said in his study.

Residents in the former Weiner School District, which is in Poinsett County, has a history of thinking creatively to avoid annexation in the face of declining enrollment.

One of the plans called for combining the Weiner district administration with the administration of another small district facing annexation -- Delight, about 200 miles away.

When that proposal failed, Weiner residents pursued a federal court lawsuit against combining with Harrisburg. The plaintiffs, known as Friends of Weiner School District, argued in the lawsuit that attaching the Weiner district to Harrisburg put the rice-producing community and the nation's food supply at risk of terrorist acts.

The merger of the school districts would cause families to leave Weiner to be closer to their children's schools, resulting in farmers living away from their fields and leaving fields open to "agro-terrorists" who would attempt to contaminate the nation's food supply.

The case was unsuccessful at both the district and appellate court levels. The district court judge ruled that the Friends of Weiner couldn't prove their claims. At the time of the 2010 district court ruling, both the Weiner Elementary and High Schools were open and operating as part of the Harrisburg district. The Weiner High School was later closed and students transferred to the Harrisburg campus.

Greeno said last week that planners have been working toward an agriculture academy for about three years. An effort to pass a legislative bill to authorize such schools in 2013 was referred for an interim study.

The result was different this year. The bill received overwhelming, bipartisan support from lawmakers, she said.

The act doesn't specify a number of pilot program schools or possible locations.

"We would like to be the first," Greeno said about the Weiner area. "We would like to set the standard. We feel like we are more prepared than anyone else is since we've been working toward this for three years and we have already formed the connections with local agriculture businesses and with two- and four-year colleges.

"We feel like this is going to be something that will really help rural Arkansas," she said.

Metro on 08/10/2015

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