Arkansas education leaders Thursday explored parameters for the future of online, remote K-12 schooling after a year in which the covid-19 pandemic pushed districts to set up an array of remote, digital instruction plans in a hurry.
Traditional school districts, open-enrollment charter schools and district-operated conversion charter schools have submitted to the state a total of 152 proposals for offering remote learning options to their students in the coming 2021-22 school year.
Of the 152, there are 138 proposals from traditional school districts and 14 are from open-enrollment charter schools that are operated by organizations other than traditional school districts. Some of the smaller districts have joined with regional education service cooperatives to have the cooperatives provide the digital instructional programs for their students who want the option.
The Arkansas Board of Education, which hesitated at its May 13 meeting to approve 10 of the first 11 proposed plans, met with state agency staffers for a three-hour work session Thursday to ask questions about the proposals and the waivers of state rules and laws that may be necessary to carry out the plans.
Leaders of the Trumann, Westside-Johnson County, Texarkana and Rogers school districts described their plans to the Education Board at the work session, during which the board made no decisions. The board will hold a special meeting May 27 to act on as many as 14 of the plans and schedule additional sessions to follow.
Typically, when school districts ask for waivers of state education rules and laws, districts make presentations to the Education Board to justify their requests, Stacy Smith, a deputy commissioner in the state's Division of Elementary and Secondary Education, told the board.
"With the digital applications, the department has tried to put a process in place to ask all the possible questions that you might ask them if we were bringing them forth," Smith said. "We tried to brainstorm all the different things that needed to be known ahead of time. That's the difference between the Act 1240 [waivers] from past to present."
Act 1240 of 2015 permits districts to seek waivers of some state rules and laws that typically apply to operating a school system.
Districts can ask for waivers effective for up to five years. Arkansas Education Secretary Johnny Key and Assistant Commissioner Deborah Coffman asked the board Thursday that any waiver approvals for digital learning academies be at least three years in duration to assure that sufficient data -- including results from end-of-year state-required standardized testing -- is available to evaluate the success of the digital academies.
Smith said as many as 83% of the proposed plans call for waivers of rules and laws that require teachers to take daily attendance and 34% request a waiver on limits to the number of students per class, which can vary from 20 to 30 depending on the grade or can be larger if the class is conducive to large group instruction such as physical education or band.
And 28% of the plans request a waiver of limits on a teacher's student load, which is generally 150 students in the secondary grades unless additional pay is provided.
Almost all of the plans, 90%, ask for relief from the requirement for a six-hour instructional day; 81% request relief from the requirement that there be 120 clock hours spent in a course; and 66% ask for a waiver of the recess times set in law for elementary pupils.
Sixty-seven percent of the plans call for synchronous instruction, in which teachers and students interact live with one another online. Ninety-five percent of the plans have asynchronous elements in which instruction is recorded for the student to view at a later time. Thirty-one percent of the plans require students to interact with digital learning on a daily basis; 80% require weekly interaction by the students.
As for teacher expectations, 26% of the plans call for teachers to interact with students on a daily basis and 76% require teachers to interact at least weekly with students, according to Smith's presentation.
Sixty-nine percent of the plans will rely on subject area content created by a third party vendor, 14.5% will rely on teacher-created content, and 16.5% will use a combination of teacher and vendor-provided content.
Smith emphasized that every proposal submitted to the state has been reviewed and sent back at least once to the school systems for revisions. She also noted that the state agency has identified parts of some plans at a higher risk and will be monitored more closely by the state over time -- such as reading instruction for kindergarten-through-second-graders.
Additionally, Smith said, not all of the proposals will be forwarded to the board with the state's recommendation for approval.
Education Board member Sarah Moore of Stuttgart told the agency staff that she was appreciative of the presentation but continued to be held up by the fact that state law permits 100% virtual classes to exceed the 150-students-per-teacher cap that is set for traditional classes for grades five through 12.
"What led us to believe we should have such large virtual classes?" Moore asked.
The Trumann School District initially asked for a waiver that would allow 250 students per teacher and planned to offset that by assigning employee liaisons -- state-licensed teachers other than classroom teachers -- to make daily contact with students and their parents. Each liaison would be assigned up to 60 students.
Trumann Superintendent Brandie Williams said Thursday that waivers of class size and teacher workload were no longer necessary as the student demand for digital option has declined for next year.
Brad Kent, superintendent of the Westside School District in Johnson County, told the Education Board that his district was motivated to work with the Guy Fenter Education Service Cooperative to provide a digital option as a way to ensure equitable instruction. This school year some teachers have been better at online instruction than others, he said.
Education Board member Ouida Newton of Leola questioned the cooperative's plan to rely on one teacher and paraprofessional to teach four elementary school subjects to children in as many as three grades. Cooperative representatives offered assurances that a coordinator and content specialists will be there to support the teachers and do what is right for students.
At the end of the work session, Education Board Chairman Charisse Dean of Little Rock expressed appreciation for the "phenomenal amount" of work that has gone into developing and reviewing the proposals.
The focus of the work on remote learning has to be on building relationships among teachers and students, she said, adding that the instructional option creates a more challenging long-distance relationship.
"It can work to have a long-distance relationship," Dean said. "However it takes a lot of creativity, a lot of work, a lot of sharing information to make it work efficiently."