Expansions of charters in Little Rock win OKs

School district voices opposition, but state board sides with eStem, LISA

Little Rock School District Superintendent Baker Kurrus listens to proceedings during a special evening meeting of the Arkansas State Board of Education Thursday night.
Little Rock School District Superintendent Baker Kurrus listens to proceedings during a special evening meeting of the Arkansas State Board of Education Thursday night.

The Arkansas Board of Education on Thursday approved expanding the eStem and LISA Academy charter school systems by four campuses and 3,000 seats -- all within the boundaries of the Little Rock School District and despite objections from district supporters.

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Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

2015 PARCC exam results for Arkansas and Pulaski County.

The Education Board, meeting in a rare, special evening session before a crowd that spilled into auxiliary viewing rooms, voted on the eStem expansion proposal late Thursday.

Baker Kurrus, the state-appointed superintendent of the 23,164-student Little Rock School District, told the board his concerns about the eStem plan, which the board approved about 11:35 p.m. on a 4-2 vote. Voting against were Jay Barth of Little Rock and Mireya Reith of Fayetteville. Vicki Saviers of Little Rock recused from the vote.

Earlier, the board also approved a three-year renewal of the state-issued charter for Covenant Keepers Charter School in southwest Little Rock. The charter was to expire June 30 for the 171-student middle school that is state-labeled as academically distressed because fewer than half of students scored at proficient levels on state tests over three years.

The evening's main focus was on the additional campuses for eStem and LISA and the potential impact on the state-controlled Little Rock School District -- an issue that has been in debate for months.

Lawmakers and other officials, including Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin, state Reps. Douglas House, R-North Little Rock, Mark Lowery, R-Maumelle, Clarke Tucker, D-Little Rock, and Charles Blake, D-Little Rock, state Sen. Joyce Elliott, D-Little Rock, and Little Rock Vice Mayor Lance Hines, attended the meeting to express their views on the charter school requests. Eleven other state senators and representatives sent letters in favor of the expansions.

"There's nothing more clear to me tonight that there are strong opinions about this matter on both sides," said Toyce Newton of Crossett, the chairman of the Education Board. "At the end of business tonight, one group will be pleased, and one group will be displeased. I think it is incumbent upon us as adults, leaders, legislators, state Board of Education and staff to set an example of how adults can come together irrespective of decision and work for what is better for the students and the families and the communities of the Little Rock School District.

"I think that doing anything else or showing any other spirit speaks the wrong message. I think that as we are watching, others are watching also. I hope that everyone realizes that the impact isn't just with the charter, isn't just with the Little Rock School District, but the impact -- either negative or positive -- will be to the community, the families and the children and those people who don't have a voice here. However we lead and however we take our spirit back into our community in large part dictates whether there will be a level of cooperation or a level of continued divisiveness."

Many opponents of the expansion of both the eStem and LISA systems asked the Education Board to delay those requests and instead put together a plan for all public education -- open-enrollment charters along with the traditional kinds of schools -- in central Arkansas.

Officials for eStem Public Charter Schools Inc. had requested to move its downtown high school grades 10 through 12 to the University of Arkansas at Little Rock campus, retain its elementary and junior high schools at Third and Louisiana streets, and open new elementary and junior high schools at 400 Shall St., near Heifer Project headquarters. The high school campus would open in 2017-18, and the Shall St. campuses will open the next year.

The eStem charter school system's enrollment cap would grow from the current 1,462 to 3,844.

Of the current 1,462 eStem enrollment, 808, or 55 percent, are from the Little Rock School District this year.

The eStem schools, which have a waiting list of 6,182, were able to offer 182 seats to families for the coming school year, and so far 132 have accepted seats. Those include 66 students from the Little Rock School District.

Sixty-six percent of eStem's 6,182-student waiting list are black students. The school's director of admissions emails families on the waiting list twice yearly to see whether they want their children to remain in the pool, according to information provided by the eStem system.

Kurrus had provided the Education Board with data on student enrollment, student achievement and school facilities in the traditional district and two charter systems.

About 80 percent of the Little Rock district's enrollment qualifies for subsidized school meals this year because of low family income, as does 33 percent of the eStem enrollment and 44 percent of the LISA enrollment, according to Kurrus' figures.

About 12 percent of the Little Rock enrollment has limited English-speaking skills as compared with 1.5 percent at eStem and 3.3 percent at LISA. Almost 12 percent of the Little Rock district enrollment qualifies for special-education services as does 7.34 percent at eStem and almost 7 percent at LISA.

The per-pupil expenditure in the Little Rock district is $12,677 this year, according to that district. Officials for eStem said their cost per student was $7,907 in 2014-15, and LISA officials listed their cost per pupil as $7,268.

The Little Rock data showed that 1,856 former Little Rock School District students moved to eStem and LISA campuses since 2008-09. Of that number, 42, or 2.3 percent, of students qualified for special-education services; 13, or 1 percent, had limited English-speaking skills; 734, or 40 percent, qualified for free-or-reduced price school meals; and 944, or 51 percent, were black; and 81.9 percent had scored at proficient or better on state tests.

Kurrus also reported that there are more than 4,000 available school seats in the areas to be served by the new charter school campuses, including 1,244 seats in the Shall Street area, and 1,743 near the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and 517 in west Little Rock.

"What is especially scary for me is I have no way to plan, to do what you have tasked me to do, which is to build an effective community-based school district that enrolls students from a broad cross section of our community and begins to look like our community again," Kurrus told the Education Board. "That's what we're trying to do. We've made tremendous steps in that direction. If you don't provide me with a little more guidance, I don't know how we're going to get through. If we don't make a plan at some point, where will we be in 12 more years? Will we be spinning out of a different orbit than we thought we were in when we started on a trend, or will we have an integrative, collaborative, communicative process where we understand how to serve every child?"

Kurrus said he could help the Education Board better if the panel gave him an idea of what the future might look like.

"If you tell me that the future is going to be a future where each application is considered ad hoc on its own, never knowing where it might spring up -- I think there's six letters of intent before you now. All of those letters together will take another 5,000 students -- I can deal with that if that's what you're going to tell me you're going to do," he said. "But I will tell you this: I don't see a bright future for the Little Rock School District if it continues to increase in terms of its levels of poverty because other kids are moving quickly into other environments where they are not so isolated."

The board's vote was 5 to 3 for the LISA Academy plan to open this fall a new kindergarten-through-sixth-grade school off Bowman Road at 12200 Westhaven Drive in a former movie theater building now occupied by ITT Tech.

The new LISA elementary school will enable the charter organization to move its sixth grade class from the existing LISA Academy, 21 Corporate Hill Drive, to the new site. That will leaving grades seven through 12 on Corporate Hill.

The enrollment cap for the LISA Academy system -- which also has a kindergarten-through-12th-grade campus in Sherwood -- will increase from 1,500 to 2,100. The system has a waiting list of 2,957, according to data from the LISA system.

Education Board member Diane Zook of Melbourne moved to allow the expansion, with board member Brett Williamson of El Dorado seconding the motion.

"I have listened to families, read every email and studied data for weeks," Zook said before presenting her motion. "I have weighed pros and cons as presented. I have done research on my own and engaged educators, parents, students and patrons. And finally, in the midst, it dawned on me, with my 47 years of experience, that I had allowed myself to get caught up in the rhetoric that presented a false premise. The question I needed to focus on is 'What is in the best interest of students -- regardless of where their parents or guardians choose for them to attend school?'"

Members Barth, Reith and Saviers voted against it.

Barth had prepared another motion to deny LISA's proposal to allow the state Department of Education to work with an outside consulting firm to build a "strategic plan for public education (traditional and charter schools) south of the Arkansas River in Pulaski County to guide the evaluation of these and future charter proposals."

He did not get to present the entire motion when Zook's motion passed.

LISA plans to open its new elementary school this fall, said LuAnne Baroni, LISA Academy West's middle school principal. The charter school system will now work on setting application deadlines for its lottery process for the new seats and start the hiring process, she said.

"So the good news is we built a high school in nine months from start to finish," she said. "Unless something unforeseen happens, we're all systems go."

Barth later offered a separate motion to have a strategic education plan to the state Education Board by December. The board will decide on that during its April meeting.

The Education Board unanimously voted to renew Covenant Keepers Charter School's charter for three years after hearing from Valerie Tatum, the school's founder and superintendent, and from faculty members, parents, students, the Education Department staff and the Arkansas Public School Resource Center, which is a consultant to the campus.

The speakers talked about the academic programs, efforts to improve the culture at the school and the drive to provide "wraparound services" to the students and their families.

Student Avimael Hernandez, an eighth-grader, said he moved to Little Rock from California and was not optimistic about his chances of avoiding expulsion when he arrived at the charter school.

"[But] the staff and students connected with me, they wanted me to learn and succeed," he said. "I can really trust the staff. They have helped me with so much."

Jenna Jones, the school's data coordinator, told the Education Board that the middle school's students start in sixth grade with test scores that are below proficiency; 90 percent are below in math and 70 percent are below in literacy.

Sarah McKenzie, executive director of the University of Arkansas' Office for Education Policy, described the school's use of the NWEA Measure of Academic Progress to track student achievement. Greater percentages of Covenant Keepers pupils are meeting or exceeding national growth, particularly in literacy, she said, adding that Covenant Keepers pupils are on a trajectory to significantly exceed their peers in surrounding schools in literacy but achieve at the same rate in math.

Richard Wilde, program coordinator for the Arkansas Department of Education's school-improvement unit, noted that Covenant Keepers is labeled as both a priority school under the federal accountability system and a school in academic distress by the state's accountability system. But he said the school's leadership has become more stable and has fully embraced the school-improvement process in collaboration with the state agency.

Barth, with some reservations, made the motion to affirm the state Charter Authorizing Panel's decision from February for the three-year renewal.

"I really love a lot about this school," Barth said. "I love the heart there," he said and praised the support from the community partners. "I'm struggling with the absence of achievement," he also said and he questioned how to retain the community support and parent engagement but turn it into greater academic achievement.

He suggested that the Education Board will have more options for working with the school after next month's meeting when the board will designate schools in academic distress for the coming school year.

The state's Charter Authorizing Panel -- made up of top-level staff members at the Department of Education -- in February approved the charter school expansions and a three-year charter renewal for Covenant Keepers.

The Education Board voted March 10 to review the charter panel decisions, as it is legally permitted to do. The nine-member, governor-appointed Education Board has the authority to either accept the Charter Authorizing Panel decisions or conduct its own hearing on a charter school plan and make its own final decision on a proposal.

A Section on 04/01/2016

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