More than two dozen school districts -- most of them affiliated with the Arch Ford Education Services Cooperative -- are asking for state waivers this month of selected school laws and accreditation standards.
If all the districts seeking the exemptions are approved by the Arkansas Board of Education at its Thursday meeting, the number of districts with waivers from some state laws and rules will more than quadruple -- from the current seven districts that have approved waivers to 32 of the state's 232 districts.
The vast majority of the requested waivers are intended to provide high school students with greater flexibility in regard to their class scheduling or required time in class. The waivers are largely for students in jeopardy of dropping out of school.
The districts are requesting the waivers as allowed by state Act 1240 of 2015. They are as large as the Conway and Bryant school districts and as small as the Rose Bud and Wonderview systems, with Greenbrier, Vilonia and Mayflower in between. The Lincoln and Nettleton districts are also among those requesting waivers.
Act 1240 permits Arkansas' traditional public school districts to apply for some or all of the same waivers that the state Board of Education has previously granted to the independently operated, open-enrollment charter schools that draw one or more of their students from the applicant district.
All of the applicant districts this month are seeking just a small number of waivers. The numbers are far less than the more than two-page list of waivers earlier approved for the operation of the Arkansas Virtual Academy. The academy is an online charter school that is based in North Little Rock but serves kindergarten through high school in the state.
Quest Middle School of West Little Rock, Haas Hall Academy in Fayetteville, and Ozark Montessori Academy in Springdale are other open-enrollment charter schools cited by some of the applicant school districts as the basis for their requested waivers.
"We think it is vitally important for our high school programs to create flexibility and help us move closer to individualizing education for our kids," Bryant Superintendent Tom Kimbrell said Thursday about the five waivers proposed by his district.
The proposed waivers of laws would affect the existing requirements for school-day hours and mandatory school attendance for students in grades nine through 12. The waivers requested by the Bryant district also would affect school accreditation standards on instructional time and on the clock hours necessary for course credit.
"We are looking at opportunities to get kids into internships and into the business world to see what careers and jobs are available, or doing community service and getting high school credit for it," Kimbrell said. "We want our kids to get some experiences that maybe sitting in an elective class they are not going to get."
As many as 65 percent of Bryant's high school juniors this school year will need only two credits in their senior year to be eligible for graduation, Kimbrell said. As many as 200 in the class of about 650 have already expressed some interest in the district's career-exploration and community-service program. The initiative, still in the development stages, would require students to do some kind of "capstone" or final project regarding what would be their nontraditional school work.
"We are just looking at what the possibilities could be," Kimbrell said, "and to do that, we need some waivers of seat time and the school day."
Twenty-two of the 25 districts making the waiver requests this month are working directly with the Plumerville-based Arch Ford Education Cooperative to provide alternative education and employee preparation programs.
Conway, Atkins, Guy Perkins and Hector are among the cooperative's member districts that are seeking waivers in order to provide services that can meet the needs of high school students at greatest risk of leaving school before graduation because of their economic or family demands.
Mena, Ashdown and Mount Ida, while not members, are also working with the Arch Ford co-op to provide similar services in their areas.
The districts are seeking five-year waivers of state laws and accreditation standards that set school-day hours and instructional time of at least six hours a day or 30 hours a week.
"The planned instructional time will average six hours per day or an average of 30 hours per week but will offer a flexible schedule to meet the expectation for students in grades nine through 12," the applications state.
The cooperative plan builds on the success of the already-existing but small Jobs for America's Graduates, or JAG, school-to-work consortium program that enables students to receive credit for their work experiences, said Jason Burkman, the cooperative's director of alternative education.
"We are going to provide these students who meet certain criteria -- who have specific needs that make them likely to drop out -- with options and resources so that they can gain employability skills during the day in a way that isn't a barrier to them. They won't have to be tied to a seat each and every day," Burkman said.
Those options would include attending career centers, shadowing employees at a businesses or learning a trade through internships, he said.
The program would also includes features to help students -- on more flexible terms -- retake courses they may have failed earlier in their high school careers. Some of the instruction for the students will be online, but there will also face-to-face instruction by teachers to students.
"We're not going to open the floodgates and say, 'Hey, come to school 21/2 days,' or something like that," Burkman said.
"We are going to have criteria. They have to have a career focus and work with JAG, but we want to give those kids some flexible options to get a high school diploma."
The districts working with the cooperative in seeking the waivers are Atkins, Clinton, Conway, Dover, East End, Greenbrier, Guy-Perkins, Hector, Mayflower, Mount Vernon/Enola, Nemo Vista, Perryville, Pottsville, Quitman, Rose Bud, South Conway County, South Side in Van Buren County, Vilonia and Wonderview as well as cooperative nonmembers Mena, Ashdown and Mount Ida.
The Nettleton School District in northeast Arkansas is applying for a waiver on maximum class size and teaching loads, which will enable the district to offer blended online and teacher-led courses that result in more than 30 students per class or more than 150 students per teacher.
The district is also seeking a waiver on school-day hours to provide high school students with flexible class scheduling that will allow for online courses, concurrent college courses and job preparation courses.
The Lincoln School District in Northwest Arkansas is seeking more than a dozen waivers that will provide the system with flexibility in regard to duty-free lunch requirements for teachers, daily planning periods, teacher licensure, career and technical education, and class size and number of students per teacher during the day.
School districts that have previously received state Education Board approval for waivers of some state laws and rules are Batesville, Bentonville, Barton-Lexa, Gentry, Helena-West Helena, Pangburn and Rogers, according to the Arkansas Department of Education website.
A Section on 04/08/2016