Springdale weighs options for next elementary school

NWA Democrat-Gazette/BEN GOFF  @NWABENGOFF Dr. Nile Blunt (left), head of school programs at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, leads a tour Tuesday for the Springdale School Board and administrators at the Bentonville museum.
NWA Democrat-Gazette/BEN GOFF @NWABENGOFF Dr. Nile Blunt (left), head of school programs at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, leads a tour Tuesday for the Springdale School Board and administrators at the Bentonville museum.

SPRINGDALE — The School Board must decide what kind of school the next elementary school should be — one that fits the traditional model, or one that offers something a little different.

Jared Cleveland, the School District’s deputy superintendent, explained the options for board members during a board work session Tuesday.

The traditional model would be much like the rest of Springdale’s elementary schools. It would require its own attendance zone.

The other option is a school of choice, one that’s open to students from across the district and one with its own style of delivering education, just as the Tyson School of Innovation has its own style. The School of Innovation serves grades six through 12.

The next elementary school will be the district’s 19th. Officials are planning to open it in August 2021. If the board sticks with that plan, it needs to decide within the next few months whether to go with the traditional or nontraditional model, Cleveland said.

A nontraditional model would take more time to plan and design than a traditional school, he said.

“You have to think about what’s it going to look like, what kind of staff will it have, how will the building be used,” Cleveland said after Tuesday’s board meeting. “So we’ll probably have to go look at a couple of schools out there that are sort of different from what we offer. You can’t afford to take a wild guess and be wrong.”

A few Springdale teachers and administrators were among a group of educators from across the region that traveled to New Zealand in 2017 to observe innovative techniques of teaching in that country. Experiences like that could inform the district on what an elementary school of choice could look like, Superintendent Jim Rollins said.

“The idea is to devise ways to better connect kids to learning so that it has meaning, so that it has relevance to them, so it’s fun,” Rollins said.

Another decision to be made on the next elementary school is location. The district owns three pieces of property where the school could go: one in Tontitown, one on South 56th Street, and one on Don Tyson Parkway, Cleveland said.

Before Tuesday’s regular monthly meeting, board members and district administrators traveled to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, where they held a work session and learned more about how the museum serves local schools.

They followed a group of school kids on a tour to see what students experience when they come to Crystal Bridges on a field trip. Nile Blunt, the museum’s head of school programs, also gave board members and administrators a private tour. The museum was closed to the public Tuesday.

District officials are trying to put a greater emphasis on arts education through partnerships with the museum and the Walton Arts Center, Rollins said.

“I think we’ll take a very structured approach of trying to make sure all of our kids are introduced to the arts through those two venues,” he said.

Dave Perozek can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @NWADaveP.

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NWA Democrat-Gazette/BEN GOFF @NWABENGOFF Dr. Nile Blunt (second from left), head of school programs at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, leads a tour for the Springdale board of education and administrators Tuesday, April 9, 2019, at the museum in Bentonville.

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