LR district selects elementary leader
Yaa Dei Appiah-McNulty has been selected to be the principal of the Little Rock School District's Henderson Middle School, replacing Frank Williams who resigned at the end of the 2017-18 school year.
Appiah-McNulty is a former principal at Weber Elementary in Iowa City, Iowa.
Married to Pulaski County Special School District's new superintendent, Charles McNulty, Appiah-McNulty has a bachelor's degree in education from what is now called Clarke University in Dubuque, Iowa, and a master's degree in educational leadership from National Louis University in Lisle, Ill.
She will receive an annual salary of $80,172, according to a district spokesman.
Jacksonville board chooses president
Ron McDaniel has been selected as president of the Jacksonville/North Pulaski School Board.
McDaniel is a Crossett native who retired in August 2012 after serving as a commander of the 189th Maintenance Group of the Arkansas Air National Guard at Little Rock Air Force Base.
He is a successor to Daniel Gray, who has held the president's position since the establishment of the district's elected board in 2015 and remains on the board.
Both Gray and McDaniel were members of the district's interim board before the district's initial election of school board members.
State ACT scores dip slightly in '18
Arkansas' 11th-graders earned a composite score of 18.7 on the ACT college entrance exam given at no cost to them in the 2017-18 school year.
A total of 31,227 students were tested, which is consistent over the past three years that the state has provided the test for the 11th-graders.
The 2017-18 average composite score of 18.7 compared with 18.8 in 2016-17, according to the Arkansas Department of Education.
A total of 14 percent of the 11th-grade student test-takers met college-ready benchmarks in reading, English, math and science, which is unchanged from 2016-17.
Students can and do take the college entrance exam multiple times before graduating from high school in an effort to raise their scores to qualify for scholarships and to avoid having to take remedial college courses.
The exam is scored on a scale of 1 to 36.
The average ACT score for the graduating class of 2017 in Arkansas was 19.4. The national average for the same class was 21.0.
School foundation hires new director
Marta Collier-Youngblood is the new executive director of the ASMSA Foundation at the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts in Hot Springs.
Collier-Youngblood joins the foundation after serving as a corporate and foundation relations officer for the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in Lubbock, Texas. She previously served as manager of business development for the National Institute for Standards in Technology Manufacturing Extension Partnership Project in the Arkansas Economic Development Commission's Arkansas Manufacturing Solutions program.
As executive director, Collier-Youngblood will be responsible for operating the school's foundation, fundraising for the school and developing a robust relationship with alumni.
She succeeds Vicki Hinz, the former director of institutional advancement who retired at the end of June. Hinz led the school's Office of Institutional Advancement for five years, ending her tenure with the largest year of fundraising in the school's history -- more than $630,000 in gifts.
Metro on 07/08/2018