It's 7:40 a.m. on a rainy Tuesday.
Happy-seeming kids assemble in the cafeteria of Baseline Elementary School in southern Little Rock for "Wake Up, Baseline."
It's a regular morning program of chanting and cheering led by City Year volunteers and designed to channel energies and provide a day's focus.
The ritual of enthusiasm reminds me a little of visiting a KIPP charter school in Helena. And that's good. The best use of charter schools is to introduce successful methods for regular public schools.
Superintendent Baker Kurrus wades through the children. He is saying "hola," mostly, because 60 percent of the school's 300 or so students are Hispanic. All the rest except for seven are black.
That little guy there, Kurrus tells me, has been enrolled in four schools in a year as his family seeks affordable rent. That young man over there--he's seated at a table with adults--is "street smart," but having issues.
Baseline was one of the six Little Rock schools found to be in chronic academic distress, which led to the state's takeover of the district. Kurrus, a Harvard-educated lawyer and businessman and former school board member, was the unconventional but potentially brilliant choice to lead the state-controlled district as superintendent.
Kurrus' choice for principal at Baseline was Jonathan Crossley, a native of South Carolina who came to the Palestine-Wheatley school district in eastern Arkansas in the Teach for America program in 2010 and got named the state Education Board's teacher of the year.
As Kurrus set out to try to turn Baseline around, he aimed for Crossley as the new principal and reeled him in. Crossley then had a month or so to hire his own team.
Crossley stands in the middle of the kids in the cafeteria. He's asking for the definition of leadership, the day's theme. A tiny girl tells him it means doing good things when no one is watching.
Crossley tells me he instantly accepted the job because it was perfect for him. He's 27, unmarried, and committed to this work as the very definition of himself, at least for this season of his life.
He says he can visit with me in his office at 8:26, but, at 9, he'll meet with the mom of the lad having issues.
Often you can fix behavior problems, he says. He mentions a youngster who got special praise during the cafeteria assembly for helping a fellow student. That same young man was a holy terror at the start of the school year, Crossley says.
Crossley sent the fourth-grader into a fifth-grade classroom to live among bigger kids and face a commanding teacher who was willing to do extra work to personalize fourth-grade teaching for him amid her general fifth-grade duties.
Kurrus proclaims Baseline turned around, based on academic assessments and data collections. Crossley says that 37 of 40 problem readers have shown demonstrable gains, which he said was a spectacular percentage.
So then this happens: Kurrus leads me through Baseline's richly equipped library. As we head out, he sees Joy Springer, paralegal to the famous civil-rights lawyer John Walker, who recently sued Kurrus and others to allege that the state takeover is racism.
Springer was an elected school board member who essentially was ousted by the state takeover. She is seated at a library table waiting to participate in Reading Day as put on by Volunteers in Public Schools.
As it turns out, the keyed-up Kurrus had risen about 2 a.m. to stew in part on an email that had been forwarded to him. It was from Springer, telling assorted recipients that she'd been told that Kurrus plans to close eight elementary schools.
The strict fact is that Kurrus has asked for input on the idea of closing eight schools from a citizens' advisory committee on which Springer sits. But he says he most certainly does not have a specific plan to close eight specific schools.
So he confronts Springer. She recoils and tells him to calm down--that he is being loud and rude.
He tells me later he will not tolerate false information. Springer tells me later that Kurrus was unprofessional.
She says we don't need to consolidate closely located elementary schools on the east side of town simply because some people choose not to live near people of her color, which, for the record, is black.
So there you have it.
We have happy-seeming kids. We have new energy and new methods. We have evidence of academic and behavioral progress. We have a hardworking superintendent and principal. We have a faculty going above and beyond.
And we have adults in official capacities arguing in the library.
It is a microcosmic glimpse inside the ever-challenging Little Rock public school experience.
------------v------------
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 11/19/2015