It's not clear what the job is. But it's clear that Jay Barth is perfect for it.
Understanding that lack of clarity requires only familiarity with the maddening complexities of Little Rock city government and Little Rock public schools under state government's lingering control.
Understanding Barth's perfect fit requires only knowledge of his intelligence, sensibilities and integral background in those aforementioned complexities.
Mayor Frank Scott, who continues to nail most things, announced last week that, sure enough, he finally had money in the budget for his promised chief education officer in city government--though city government has nothing to do with the local public schools. He told a news conference he was hiring Barth to be that chief executive officer.
Here's the best quick synopsis I can provide on this odd circumstance:
City government has nothing to do with public schools under Arkansas law. Schools are state government's ultimate business as delegated to local school districts that bear not at all on city or county jurisdictions.
Under legal authority, the state took over the Little Rock district because a few of the schools met the legal definition of academically failing.
After five years of contention and little identifiable progress, the state is in the process of returning--sort of--the Little Rock schools.
Along the way, Scott stuck city government's nose into the matter by saying we can't make Little Rock great unless we fix the public schools.
Scott said city government would help with the idea of converting schools in failing neighborhoods to "community schools" meeting broader needs than traditional schooling--nutrition, health services, counseling, after-school programs, preschool programs, transportation aid, things like that.
The state liked that idea, which was hardly Scott's originally. Some of these community-school services presumably will be provided through existing city government programs.
Barth is an early-retiring political science professor at Hendrix--a serious scholar and author--who also has practical experience in the morass outlined above.
That's from his recently ended term on the state Board of Education, via former Gov. Mike Beebe's appointment, ending with a term as chairman.
Barth voted on that board against the state takeover and is identified with the left-of-center views underpinning the local resentment of lingering state control. But he's been long-engaged with the other side.
Only Baker Kurrus might have been as qualified a choice, but he'd be more polarizing, particularly with the state. Barth always seemed to keep a functioning peace with the school-choice conservatives that surrounded him on the state board.
Barth and Scott were in a group that met for years on how to attack Little Rock's problems. One thing they always kept coming back to was that the city's future was tied to the public schools' wellness.
Barth's assignment is to work with the state Education Board, state-appointed Little Rock school superintendent Michael Poore, city government service agencies and the local nonprofit sector to ... well ... get crackin' on identifying the schools that need to be community schools and what the services will be for each, and how to get them up and running.
Barth will start work Jan. 6 and toil by the hour, at least for the city. Ideally, a private foundation will match some of the city's funds and provide a base salary.
Barth told me over the weekend that the community-school concept took hold quickly over the last few weeks, which he said provided hope. He said it tended to cross ideological lines, blending the interests of those who believe in government services and those who believe in private nonprofit initiatives.
He said the community-school concept had been around long enough to produce successes, though those don't follow any template. They vary by circumstance from, say, Kalamazoo, Mich., to rural Georgia, to name two sites of good results.
The first job will be to settle on which schools are to be community schools and what the prevailing needs are, after which Barth presumably will be darting back and forth between city government, the state government and the local charity community to get the services provided.
The objective is to set up the infrastructure to serve unmet needs, mainly in health and wellness, that get in the way of receptivity to traditional classroom teaching.
That could be, and likely will be, a dentist and a breakfast program and after-school programs and parental counseling and countless other services not yet thought of.
We've tried a lot of things. This is the most recent thing.
But it's the first one in Little Rock in a good while, maybe ever, with willing investments by the city and the state--the city because its growth depends on school solutions, and the state because it needs to show that something constructive can come of its five years of control.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 12/10/2019