The Arkansas Board of Education on Thursday approved a new location for the Little Rock Preparatory Academy’s middle school for August operation and a new Haas Hall Academy campus to open in 2017 in Springdale.
The two-campus Little Rock Preparatory school and Haas Hall Academy, which has existing campuses in Fayetteville and Bentonville, are open-enrollment, publicly funded charter schools — and any amendments to their state-issued charters are subject to state Education Board approval.
The Education Board voted in June to hold hearings on the two proposals after the state’s Charter Authorizing Panel on May 18 voted to approve a new home for Little Rock Preparatory’s middle school at the former Lutheran High School at 6711 W. Markham St. in Little Rock and denied the Haas Hall application to open a school in the Jones Center for Families in Springdale.
The Charter Authorizing Panel decisions are subject to review by the Education Board, which can either uphold the panel decisions or make its own decision after a hearing.
Leaders of both charter systems were pleased by Thursday’s Education Board votes.
Tina Long, superintendent of Little Rock Preparatory, wiped away tears and accepted hugs from staff members and other school supporters after the board’s 7-1 vote to permit the move for as many as 180 students in grades five through eight.
“I’m overjoyed,” Long said, adding that the board’s action comes on top of the news that the middle school — classified as a priority school for being among the 5 percent lowest-scoring schools in the state in past years — scored on par or better than nearby Little Rock School District middle schools Dunbar, Henderson and Cloverdale on the ACT Aspire tests given this past spring.
The Education Board voted 6-2 for the opening of the new Haas Hall Academy for up to 500 seven-through-12th-graders. That vote came after a long discussion about concerns raised by Springdale School District leaders regarding the ability of the charter school to serve a student body that is as racially and ethnically diverse as the Springdale district’s enrollment.
The Education Board approved the plan with the condition that the leaders of the charter system report quarterly to the state on its efforts to recruit a diverse population of student applicants for the new campus and on its efforts to collaborate with the Springdale district.
“It’s a win for Springdale, it’s a win for Haas Hall, and it’s a win for the students,” said Martin Schoppmeyer, founder and superintendent of Haas Hall Academy.
“The most important thing is that it’s a win for students,” Schoppmeyer said about the approval. “We’re all trying to educate students. My goal is to educate more of them and still have a small, family atmosphere where I know who they are, they know who we are, and we can help them.”
Haas Hall Academy’s Fayetteville campus, which opened in 2004, has won state and national acclaim for high student achievement. The college-preparatory school has received grades of A from the state and is listed as the Arkansas No. 1-ranked school by U.S. News & World Report. Haas Hall Academy’s second campus is in Bentonville and has been open only a short time.
Jim Rollins, the longtime superintendent of the Springdale School District, sent a letter to Education Board members saying that “it is predicable that the opening of the … campus, given our diverse community and large population of immigrant families, will result in segregation.”
He included data showing that the existing Haas Hall campuses have no special-education students and no students learning English as a second language. The schools don’t participate in the federal school-lunch program and, as a result, don’t report data on the rate of poverty among their students. While the Springdale district’s enrollment of 21,260 is 46 percent Hispanic, the percentages at the two Haas campuses — which have almost 700 students altogether — are below 10 percent.
Overall, the Springdale district is 64 percent nonwhite compared with 22 percent at the Haas Hall campus in Fayetteville and 28 percent at the Bentonville campus.
Schoppmeyer and the charter system’s attorney, Mark Henry, told the board that school planners are anxious to show that the Haas Hall college-preparatory program will be successful with a diverse student population and that that is their reason for wanting to open at the Jones Center, which provides other community services to families and is easily accessible to public transportation.
Education Board Chairman Mireya Reith of Fayetteville, who is of Hispanic ethnicity and a community organizer, expressed concerns about what she said was a relatively short time period to familiarize immigrant families with opportunities for their children to go to the school. She said that in her work she has found that the families are largely unaware of Haas Hall Academy or its potential for their children.
Reith said she worried that the new school would be filled primarily from the overflow of students unable to attend Haas Hall campuses in Fayetteville and Bentonville.
Reith said she didn’t want Northwest Arkansas to go down the same path as Little Rock in terms of contention between charter and traditional schools. Board member Susan Chambers of Bella Vista said it would be almost unconscionable to pass on approving a school of such high quality and wondered whether the proposed school and surrounding school district could be compelled to cooperate with each other.
Board members Diane Zook and Jay Barth voted against the new campus. Board members Chambers, Joe Black, Brett Williamson, Charisse Dean, Oida Newton and Fitz Hill voted for it.
LR PREPARATORY
The new Markham Street site for Little Rock Preparatory Academy’s middle school will replace the academy’s current sixth-through-eighth-grade school at 4520 S. University Ave., a space that is shared with a church. Additionally, the fifth grade now at the academy’s elementary school campus at 1616 S. Spring St. in downtown Little Rock will move to the Markham Street building for the coming 2016-17 school year.
Long, the academy’s superintendent, told the Education Board that the charter school is a college-preparatory program for underserved communities. The school year is 200 days long, compared with the 178-day minimum required by the state. The school day for students is nine hours, she said.
“Our purpose and mission will not change with our relocation,” Long said. The middle school serves a virtually all black and Hispanic student body, of which more than 80 percent qualify for subsidized school meals because of low family income.
Long said the new campus has science laboratories, a gymnasium, outdoor recreational space and other amenities that are not available at the University Avenue site. The features will promote school pride and help the school reverse a 30 percent student loss from year to year, she said. The school will provide bus transportation using identified hubs in the city as pickup and drop-off points.
The cost of the new, more spacious site is less expensive than the current middle-school location, she said. The rent for the new site would be $117,327 as compared with $136,200, Long said.
The building is owned by KLS Leasing, a Delaware limited liability company, according to documents provided by the academy to the state. Arkansas Charter Partners — a subsidiary of Exalt Education Inc. — is listed as the renter or the lessee of the building. Collegiate Choices, which is doing business as Little Rock Preparatory Academy, would sublease the building from Arkansas Charter Partners.
The school has an enrollment cap of 432 in kindergarten through eighth grade. There were 163 enrolled in fifth through eighth grades this past year.
The Preparatory Academy made its request to move to the more northerly and affluent part of the city earlier this year just after the Arkansas Education Board on March 31 approved the expansion of the eStem and LISA Academy charter schools by four new campuses and nearly 3,000 seats — all within the boundaries of the state-controlled Little Rock School District.
The Little Rock district is being run by the state — without a locally elected school board — because six of its 48 schools had chronically low state test results and were labeled by the state as academically distressed. One of the schools — Baseline Elementary — has since been removed from the list.
Baker Kurrus, the district’s state-appointed superintendent at the time, opposed the expansion of the charter school systems, arguing that the charter schools pull higher-scoring, more affluent students from traditional schools that are equally or better performing. The loss of students to the charter schools leaves the district with larger percentages of hard-to-educate students and fewer resources to do that.
Arkansas Education Commissioner Johnny Key has since replaced Kurrus with Mike Poore, who was superintendent of the Bentonville School District.
The Little Rock district — under Kurrus or Poore — did not take a formal position on the Little Rock Preparatory Academy proposal. Poore was to have surgery earlier this week and, as a result, did not attend Thursday’s state Education Board meeting.
During a public comment period, Nell Matthews of the League of Women Voters in Pulaski County and a member of the StandUp4 Little Rock grass-roots organization, urged against approval of the school’s move. She said the new location will undermine efforts by the Little Rock School District to improve nearby Henderson Middle School, which is classified by the state as academically distressed because of chronically low student test scores.
Reith questioned whether the approval of the address change was premature or detrimental to the work of a recently appointed Little Rock Area Public Education Stakeholders Group, which is to offer recommendations on how charter and traditional schools can work cooperatively in Pulaski County south of the Arkansas River.
Board member Zook, of Melbourne, compared the low teacher-absentee rate of Little Rock Preparatory teachers with higher teacher-absentee rates in the traditional districts and suggested that addressing the high rates could be an area of collaboration between the different school systems.
Board member Barth, of Little Rock, was the sole “no” vote on the location change. He said he was sympathetic to the stakeholders group that is having to deal with “a moving target” created by changing school locations south of the river.