LR district aims for innovation

The Little Rock School District is taking steps to establish one new high school and revamp another.

And neither school is the district’s much-discussed new Southwest High School that is under construction for opening in August 2020.

The district’s Community Advisory Board is sending to Arkansas Education Commissioner Johnny Key a recommendation that Hall High become a magnet school that would not only provide a special academic program with math, science and art to students from its attendance zone but also to students from across the school system.

At the same time, the district will be creating a still-to-be-decided type of “school of innovation” for high schoolers in the city’s northwestern section — starting with the ninth grade this coming year — at what has been the sixth-through-eighth-grade Pinnacle View Middle School, if the advisory board’s proposal to Key comes to fruition.

Jay Pickering, the principal of Pinnacle View, said this week that the ninth grade that will start in August for up to 100 students will be traditional in its operation. However, any extracurricular athletic activities will be available to the students only at the high school they would attend if there was no ninth grade at Pinnacle View. Transportation will be provided for those students, Superintendent Mike Poore said.

A task force of district leaders, parents and others are working to submit to the Arkansas Department of Education by a March 12 deadline an outline for an innovative means of serving 10th-through-12th-graders in the years to come. The task force is looking at models that focus on project-based learning and/or a combination of online and classroom instruction.

The Fayetteville School District’s Virtual Academy for grades four through 12, Springdale’s Tyson School of Innovation and Rogers’ New Tech High School are among the models getting consideration, Pickering said.

If the submitted school-of-innovation concept receives state approval in April, planners can finalize the details over the course of the school year, he said.

Jeff Wood, chairman of the advisory board and the parent of Pinnacle View pupils, is supporting the school-of-innovation initiative but said this week that such a proposal doesn’t satisfy the appetite that people in the northwestern part of the city have for a traditional brick-and-mortar high school with a football field. He said he will continue to advocate for that.

Wood also said he appreciated that Poore, Key and Pulaski County Special School District Superintendent Charles McNulty are exploring options for cooperation in the northwestern part of the city and county, particularly between Pinnacle View and the Robinson High School campus that is just west of Pinnacle View but in the Pulaski County Special school system.

Key acts as the school board in the district that has operated under state control without a locally elected school board since January 2015. The state-appointed, seven-member community board makes recommendations to Key about the operation and staffing of the school system.

The discussions of changes at both the 826-student Pinnacle View Middle and the 945-student Hall High are the result of the districtwide facility plan that calls for the closing, consolidating, expanding and/or repurposing of about a dozen of the district’s campuses over the next few years.

Key approved the district’s facility plan in early January with special directives that a ninth grade be added at Pinnacle View in the coming school year and that plans be explored for additional high school grades.

At the same time, Key supported the district’s advisory board call for greater enhancements to the Hall High academic program so as to be more attractive to parents and students.

Hall is scheduled to lose about 300 students to the new Southwest High and its attendance zone will be reconfigured, but not until Southwest opens in August 2020.

Melanie Fox, a member of the advisory board, on Thursday called for adding to Hall — already approved as a school of innovation — a magnet component that would rely on preparation for medical professions and “STEAM” subjects — science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics — to draw students living in what will be Hall’s reconfigured high school attendance zone and from throughout the city.

Fox said she has really struggled with how best to enhance the program at Hall, where there has been a dramatic improvement in the climate.

“It is night and day,” she said. “It is fabulous right now. I want the right curriculum. I want the right thing for the parents — the west Little Rock parents who are zoned there so that if they want a different option they can go to Hall.”

“I’ve decided that the overarching goal needs to be something you all can take and run with and create a great school with great academics,” she said in proposing that Hall be a STEAM school with an attendance zone and a magnet component.

Poore said he appreciated the flexibility of the proposal that would allow for both the engineering and math focus as well as a medical professions factor.

Wood agreed, noting that an emphasis on science, math and engineering “makes the most sense to me. There is a fantastic STEM school sitting across the street,” he said about Forest Heights STEM Academy for kindergarten through eighth grades. He also noted the “overwhelming” public support given for STEM program at Hall during a series of district-hosted public forums last fall.

Community Advisory Board member LaShannon Spencer urged that preparation for medical professions be emphasized at the school because of the need for medical personnel in the state’s workforce.

Deputy Superintendent Marvin Burton said his meeting with the city’s medical institutions — particularly the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences — on how best to prepare students, starting as early as seventh grade, to be on a pathway that will lead to associate and bachelor degrees in health fields.

Burton also urged that the arts component continue to be emphasized at Hall.

“When you walk through the hallways and in the library, you see the amazing artwork these students are producing today,” he said. “We would be remiss if we did not consider the art, which fosters creativity.”

Mark Roberts, Hall’s principal, has led efforts at Hall to use the the High Reliability Schools framework for school improvement. The model that is advocated by longtime national education researcher Robert Marzano provides a means of assessing how instruction and other practices in a school are working as a system to produce permanent and positive benefits for student achievement.

He described that for the advisory board this week as well as all the social work and mental-health services being provided to about one-third of the Hall student body, the makeup of graduation credits by students and the increase in the number of students taking high school and college credit courses at the same time

Roberts also announced that the school’s alumni organization — The Tribe — and Poore have provided the school with $10,000 for a school marketing campaign conducted by Mangan Holcomb Partners of Little Rock.

A Section on 03/02/2019