Longtime educator, co-op chief set to retire

Guy Fenter, director of the Western Arkansas Education Service Cooperative, will retire at the end of the school year.
Guy Fenter, director of the Western Arkansas Education Service Cooperative, will retire at the end of the school year.

Guy Fenter still remembers when a group of superintendents wanted a regional career center to provide more options for high school students nearing graduation.

“I was at a loss of how,” said Fenter, director of the Western Arkansas Education Service Cooperative in Branch. “I couldn’t get the money to build a building and equip it.”

Fenter found a solution at Westark Community College, now the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith. The college had an equipped, modern technical center for college students. He worked with the late Joel Stubblefield, who was president of the college, to allow students to take career-oriented courses on the college campus.

The project is a hallmark of Fenter’s career, he said.

Fenter, 82, will retire June 30 after spending six decades as an educator. He is the longtime and only director of the Western Arkansas Education Service Cooperative, which opened in 1983, and is governed by school district superintendents from six counties: Crawford, Franklin, Johnson, Logan, Scott and Sebastian.

The Western Arkansas Technical Center formed in 1998 and now has an annual enrollment of about 600 high school students, Fenter said. The key component of the project was providing free transportation to students from all 22 school districts served by the cooperative.

Fenter started his education career in 1955 as a teacher and coach in Paris. He became the Charleston High School principal in 1960 and was promoted to superintendent of Charleston six years later. A road in Charleston is named Guy Fenter Drive, an honor that surprised Fenter, he said.

“I always wonder what I have done for some of that stuff to happen,” he said.

It may have something to do with one of Fenter’s favorite stories.

The tale is of a boy running up and down the beach after an ocean tide has washed up hundreds of thousands of starfish, Fenter said. A man stops to ask the boy whether he thinks he can make a difference in returning the starfish to the ocean with so many on the shore. The boy answers by picking up a starfish, tossing it back in the water and responding, “It made a difference to that one.”

“If you can make a difference to one kid, good things are going to happen,” Fenter said.

During his tenure as Charleston superintendent and then as the cooperative director, Fenter spent many days during legislative sessions walking the halls of the state Capitol, said Morril Harriman, the chief of staff for Gov. Mike Beebe. Harriman was a state senator from Van Buren for 16 years, beginning in 1985. Harriman now lives in Little Rock.

Fenter’s chief concerns at the Capitol were trying to help schools and children, Harriman said.

Harriman met Fenter during his 1984 election campaign when Fenter was the Charleston superintendent. During Harriman’s years in the state Senate, he developed a friendship with a group of superintendents who would give him honest opinions about education, Fenter being among them.

“He became a person I trusted very much in regard to public school issues,” Harriman said. “Guy was very direct with people. He would tell you very, very bluntly how he felt about particular issues.”

During the 1980s and 1990s, Fenter played a role in helping legislators resolve issues with public school funding, which Harriman considers to be among Fenter’s most significant contributions to the state. Fenter was among people who thought the state needed to take on a greater share of funding schools rather than relying heavily on the revenue local school districts could generate through property taxes.

Fenter sought a funding system that would provide a more equal basis of per-pupil funding because of disparities in the amount of tax revenue large districts with high property wealth could generate compared with smaller districts with lower property wealth, Harriman said.

Alma Superintendent David Woolly said Fenter comes as close as anybody to being “Mr. Education” in Arkansas.

“He’s intolerant of people in any position who don’t have the best interests of children at the forefront,” Woolly said.

When legislation or regulations are proposed, Fenter never hesitates to ask lawmakers and state officials why the proposal works for children, Woolly said.

“He’s had such a knack for knowing what schools and school districts and teachers needed and positioning his co-op to provide that,” Woolly said. “We value his insight, his historical knowledge. When you have somebody like that leave, that’s what you lose that you can’t replace.”

The idea to create a network of regional education service cooperatives emerged when the late Don Roberts was in charge of the Arkansas Department of Education, Fenter said. Roberts asked Fenter to help with the effort.

The development of the cooperatives started with five pilot programs, including the Western Arkansas Education Service Cooperative, Fenter said. A state committee studied the concept for two years before recommending that Arkansas develop a network of cooperatives to serve all the schools in the state.

Fenter contributed to the legislation that passed to create the network and worked to convince lawmakers that provisions in the law would prevent them from turning into the giant bureaucracies they had become in some states, he said.

The network of 15 regional education service cooperatives are governed primarily by superintendents of the districts served by the cooperative, Fenter said. They are situated to be no more than an hour’ drive from the districts in the cooperative.

Cooperatives provide programs for preschoolers with disabilities, programs that would be expensive for small school districts to provide on their own for just one or two children, Fenter said. The cooperatives also help their districts by providing training for teachers and principals.

While they have some similar programs, cooperatives differ because they react to the needs of the local districts that govern them, Fenter said.

Providing state-required training to teachers would be difficult for small schools to provide by themselves, but the training sessions at the cooperatives allow multiple teachers from several districts to attend a single workshop, said Bill Abernathy, executive director of the Arkansas Rural Education Association.

“They can do things together that they can’t do individually,” Abernathy said.

Abernathy described Fenter as a creative and progressive thinker in education who has continued to fend off proposals to change or eliminate the cooperatives. Abernathy was a legislator from 2005 to 2011 and can’t remember a session when such a proposal wasn’t introduced.

“When the thinking is being developed, if you’re not in on that, it’s hard to stop that train,” Abernathy said.

Fenter will take the time to meet with the legislators Abernathy said.

Fenter said it’s not hard to convince lawmakers of the effect cooperatives have on schools. “You just show them what benefit the schools are getting from them.”

Even as he nears retirement, Fenter still gets excited about projects that affect students. The work to create the shared Western Arkansas Technical Center has led some high school students to become first-generation college students. Fenter has story after story of students who attended the center, graduated from college and found high-paying jobs.

As director of the cooperative, Fenter worked to be an advocate for the local school districts and their students, he said. He never stopped learning.

And he abided by a rule he learned from the late Charles Dyer, who was superintendent of Alma School District — to always ask how a new idea would be good for children.

“If you’ll get the answer to that question, you’ll be all right,” Fenter said.

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