The Mineral Springs School District hoped to avoid the academic-distress label for its high school Thursday.
RELATED ARTICLES
http://www.arkansas…">State board lets pupils transfer http://www.arkansas…">Education notebook
But the state Board of Education denied the district's appeal and now faces a possible court challenge.
After an hourlong volley between the school district's attorney and Arkansas Department of Education legal counsel, the Education Board's vote means the high school is among 25 schools under academic distress -- fewer than half of its students scored at proficient levels on state exams in math and literacy in the three academic starting years from 2013-15.
The past three years of state exams included two years of students taking the Benchmark and End of Course exams and one year of the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career exams, or PARCC. The Education Department came up with a way to make Benchmark and PARCC scores comparable from year to year.
"I'm disappointed," Curtis Turner, superintendent of the Mineral Springs district, said referring to the Education Board's decision and the effect it will have on the school's reputation. "I think you can readily see that we're going to fight for our school district. My kids are worth just as much as anybody's. ... I'll go to any length to take care of them and protect them."
Continued academic distress opens a school or district to the possibility of takeover by the state.
The district's attorneys, state Rep. John Walker, D-Little Rock, and Omavi Shakur, said they will fight the Education Board's decision in circuit court. The attorneys had also asked the Education Board to temporarily hold off on giving the academic-distress designation to Mineral Springs High School, but the board said no. Once the case is assigned to a judge, Shakur said, he will ask for a hold on the classification again.
Earlier, Shakur had told Education Board members that they had no legal basis to classify the high school as academically distressed. The Education Department's rules on academic distress are defined on the basis of the Benchmark Exams, he said, and the Education Board cannot make academic-distress classifications if there aren't three years of Benchmark Exam results.
"Now, to hold otherwise, to use part data to classify a school as being in academic distress, then you have to adopt a new rule ... and you have to go through the process mandated by the General Assembly," Shakur said, adding that the process calls for public input, filing the new rule with the secretary of state's office and then having it officially listed in the Arkansas Register.
"The problem is the state Board of Education never adopted a new or amended rule," he said.
And the failure to re-establish thresholds of "proficient or advanced" for PARCC once it was fully operational, Shakur said, was unlawful. He pointed to an email exchange with the Education Department in which he sent a Freedom of Information Act request asking to see any documentation defining "fully operational."
He didn't get any records responsive to the request, but the Education Department included a snippet from Hope Allen, the department's testing specialist, that read: "... but what is meant by fully operational is the first year that we give (gave) the assessment to the entire state. That would have been last school year."
Lori Freno, the Education Department's general counsel, said the state did not need to immediately change the thresholds to determine academic distress until PARCC became fully operational. A test is fully operational, Freno said, after three years of scoring data is available.
"Even though she is a stellar employee, she's not a lawyer," Freno said, regarding the Education Department's email response. "And she made an interpretation. But it is of the opinion of ADE legal staff that advises this board on when a rule change needs to be made, that PARCC was not fully operational because a test has to be given for three years before it becomes fully operational."
Education Commissioner Johnny Key pointed to Arkansas Code Annotated 6-15-2009, which states that the Education Board "shall" determine the requisite scale score of student performance on college and career-readiness measurements in assessments for grades three through eight, which includes PARCC.
"You're right, commissioner -- 'shall,'" Shakur countered. "Now the question then becomes: How?"
He again pointed to the laws showing how an agency is supposed to add or change a rule.
Turner, the district superintendent, had pleaded with the Education Board to release the high school from the designation, saying it would only counteract the positive culture efforts at the local level have created.
The district has a new high school principal, a new district administrator, a curriculum coordinator and a math coach, he said. It has adopted strategies to improve classroom management and student behavior. Administrators monitor classrooms regularly and student outcomes monthly, Turner said.
They have battled staff turnover and even managed to give raises to retain employees.
"Placing us in academic distress at this time, with the programs that we have in place, won't do anything but diminish what we've already got going," Turner said. "It's going to diminish staff morale, it will affect our ability to maintain a high-quality teaching staff, and it will affect public perception, which possibly could cause us to lose students."
He said the high school missed the academic threshold by four students.
"All we're asking ... is to give us time to deal with what we already have in place and see how that grows over this next year," he said. "I can assure you we do have the staff and we do have the programs in place now where we're able to offer our kids the best possible education."
Education Board Chairman Mireya Reith of Fayetteville said she empathized with Turner.
Academic distress started "with the intention of not trying to give a name or any negativity for schools" but giving them "more resources, more focus, making sure school districts were not [falling] through the cracks, acknowledging that there were schools that were chronically along that borderline and that we had an obligation as a state board and as policymakers to take that next step and to do something about it," she said.
"This is a very important conversation, one that I think needs to be addressed. I do challenge all of us to revisit this because there is some undue consequences."
If the Mineral Springs district challenges Thursday's decision in court, it would be at least the second lawsuit the district has filed against the state.
The district -- along with its School Board -- has also filed suit in federal court against Key, the Education Department and the Education Board in regard to the state taking over the southwest Arkansas school district in 2013 for fiscal distress. The district was returned to local control in October 2014.
Walker has said in the lawsuit that state officials wrongly gave the fiscal-distress designation to the mostly black school district, causing white students and black student athletes to leave for the nearby Nashville School District and prompting a lower quality of education for the remaining black students.
The lawsuit includes an affidavit from Wendy Reed, a former Education Department program adviser who now works at the district. Reed testified that she and another Education Department employee had gone to Mineral Springs to review the school district's finances and within two hours found the district "had more than enough resources to have a positive fund balance at the end of the school year."
Walker is asking the federal judge to find that the Mineral Springs district was deprived of significant financial and educational resources that it was due between 2004 and now.
The school district is also hoping to have benefits restored, including reimbursement of about $210,000 in state funds that are given on the basis of the percentage of students who qualify for free and reduced-price school meals. The benefits also include tax revenue and revenue in lieu of taxes paid by the Southwestern Electric Power Co.-Turk Coal Plant in Saratoga that the lawsuit said were routed away from the Mineral Springs and Saratoga school districts between 2000 and 2013.
The Mineral Springs district currently receives between $3 million and $4 million from the plant in Saratoga, which began commercial operation in late 2012 and is in the Mineral Springs district.
The federal suit is ongoing.
Metro on 08/12/2016