An Arkansas Department of Education panel approved on Wednesday the Exalt Academy of Southwest Little Rock charter school for opening next year but denied two other school plans proposed for North Little Rock and Springdale.
The new Charter Authorizing Panel - made up of six Education Department leaders and led by Education Commissioner Tom Kimbrell - also approved the opening of KIPP Blytheville Collegiate High School, which will start next summer with up to 90 ninth-graders.
The school is not considered a new charter school but rather an expansion of the existing Blytheville College Preparatory School, a middle school that is part of the KIPP Delta Public Schools charter system.
Four more charter-school applications are on the table for action today when the panel reconvenes at 8:30 a.m. Those four include a proposed school on Rahling Road in west Little Rock, as well as schools in Redfield, Osceola and Sunset, which is in Crittenden County.
Act 509 enacted by lawmakers earlier this year made the Education Department the authorizing body for publicly funded, independently operated open-enrollment charter schools.The state Board of Education served in that role for more than 10 years.
The panel’s decisions are subject to review by the Education Board if requested by charter-school planners or the leaders of school districts affected by an approved school.
Mary Perry, the Education Department’s charter-school liaison, said Wednesday that the Education Board has the discretion to decide whether to rehear any appeals. Any requests would be made to the board in December, and any hearing would be conducted in January, Perry said.
The panel voted 6-0 Wednesday to approve Exalt Academy of Southwest Little Rock over objections of the Little Rock School Board. The charter school will open to as many as 180 kindergarten-through-second-grade children at a former private school at 6111 W. 83rd St., just off Geyer Springs Road. Eventually the school will expand to the eighth grade and up to 540 pupils.
Exalt Education Inc., the sponsor of the school, already operates Little Rock Preparatory Academy, which has a kindergarten-through-fourth-grade campus at 1616 Spring St. in Little Rock and a fifth-through eighth-grade campus at 4520 S. University Ave ..
“Our mission is to prepare students from low-income homes for competitive colleges and advanced careers,” Exalt Education founder and Chief Executive Officer Benjamin Lindquist told the panel.
“We do that by providing them with a liberal-arts education, by enabling them to close the achievement gap with their more affluent peers by ensuring that they master the core subjects, and by helping them develop the key behaviors and attributes needed for success in their communities.”
Lindquist said the Exalt organization is young, but it is having a transformative effect on the lives of children.
Some features of the new academy include a 220-day school year as compared with the traditional 178 days. The school day for students will be from 7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Two teachers will be assigned to the core academic classrooms to create a smaller 1-to-15 teacher-to-pupil ratio and provide more individualized instruction to the children, some of whom are likely to be non-native English language learners.
Additionally, pupils will be tested every five to 10 lessons to determine whether each has mastered skills and concepts. A behavior-management system has been created that doesn’t punish pupils but affirms and rewards appropriate behavior.
The school plan also describes teacher training programs and an employee bonus system that is based in part on student academic growth as shown on Northwest Evaluation Association tests.
Dennis Glasgow, the Little Rock School District’s associate superintendent for accountability, relayed to the panel the Little Rock School Board’s conclusion that the school doesn’t offer any true innovations. He said the school application gave very little description about student use of technology, while the Little Rock district is working to provide laptop computers to all fourth- and fifth-graders in the district within the next two years.
The charter school’s proposed budget did not include an English-as-a-second-language instructor even though the school planners want to serve Hispanic children in the community, he said. The school doesn’t plan to hire its own special education faculty. It plans, instead, to contract with a private company to provide those services, Glasgow said.
He also said the school has not budgeted for school-bus transportation for students, possibly preventing low-income families from getting to school.
SCHOOLS DENIED
The charter school authorizing panel voted 5-1 to deny the proposed Capitol Lighthouse Charter School, planned for up to 750 students in kindergarten through 12th grades in a four-story building at 1800 N. Maple St. in North Little Rock.
It also denied 5-1 the Ozark College and Career Academy, planned for kindergarten through 12th grade in space leased at the Jones Center in Springdale. John Hoy, assistant commissioner for accountability, cast the sole vote against denying both plans.
The Capitol Lighthouse Charter School plan was developed by Lighthouse Academies of Central Arkansas Inc., which already operates two campuses in Jacksonville and a middle school in Pine Bluff. The Arkansas organization is an affiliate of a national charter-school group that operates about 20 schools in seven states and in the District of Columbia.
Kelly Rodgers, the superintendent of the North Little Rock School District, and his staff vigorously objected to the proposal, saying that the school plan - which calls for the infusion of the arts into the teaching of core academic subjects - promised little that would be innovative in the North Little Rock community.
Beth Stewart, the district’s assistant superintendent for curriculum, said achievement levels at North Little Rock elementary schools equal or exceed achievement levels at the existing Lighthouse charter schools in the state.
In denying the application, panel members said repeatedly that they would like to see stronger curriculum planning, particularly in mathematics.
Phillis Nichols-Anderson, senior vice president of Lighthouse Academies Region I, said after the board’s vote that she would consider asking the state Education Board to review the charter panel’s decision. She said the review was warranted based on a closer look at the achievement levels of the Lighthouse schools as compared with the North Little Rock schools.
“The achievement data for the current year shows that Jacksonville Lighthouse Charter School is outperforming NLRSD on 14 out 16 applicable areas including every math category,” she said in an email after the meeting. “We are confident that we can provide a quality educational option for children and parents in NLRSD. We look forward to working with the state department to provide this option for those children.”
Panel members urged Christine Silano of Springdale to return to the panel in another year with a refined plan for the proposed Ozark College and Career School. The school plan had called for offering grades kindergarten through second, and grades six through eighth in the coming school year.
The school - which would have been located in the Jones Center - planned to target 250 students in kindergarten through 12th grade from low-income families and children of families who are not native English speakers.
The elementary program would have been based on the Montessori model of instruction - which mixes grade levels - but it would have incorporated the teaching of new national standards for math and English/language arts.
The school would have featured project-based learning in areas such as video technology and computer programming. The teaching of Chinese and Spanish also was planned starting in the earliest grades. The school planned to rely heavily on digital resources, using online textbooks and instructional programs as well as teachers in the classrooms.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 11/14/2013