Very often bad news sneaks up on us like the proverbial thief in the night. That isn’t the case with the recent announcement that the Arkansas Education Board has decided to take over the Dollarway School District.
The board on Monday found that the district hadn’t done enough to solve problems in its administration or improve student performance. As such, the panel has fired district Superintendent Bettye Wright and dissolved the district’s elected school board.
No crystal balls were needed to see this coming. The district has been on probation for two years. While the board hired a new superintendent a year ago, the Arkansas Education Department says the district failed to take advantage of state resources that could have helped district performance.
Back in 2009, the Commercial reported on an Arkansas Policy Foundation study that listed Dollarway as an outright failure. In 2010, there was the protracted squabble centering on bad blood between the Superintendent Art Tucker and the school board. In March 2011, he Commercial reported on Tucker’s revelation that the district has lost more than 400 students over the past four years. That translated into a financial loss of just over $2.5 million from the district’s budget over the same period.
As Tucker told the board in 2011, this dip was compounded by a drop in total unrestricted funds from just over $12.5 million for the 2008-09 academic year, to just over $10.8 million for 2010-2011. Ongoing declines to the tune of half a million dollars were also predicted.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
As if this weren’t sufficient cause for alarm, district expenditures rose. As noted in 2011, the number of district staff rose from 282 in 2008-2009 to 302 for the 2010-2011 school year. It’s one thing to accidentally run the ship aground, it’s wholly another to square up on the iceberg and dare it to do its deed. Sadly, that appears to be exactly what has happened. The school board and administration were repeatedly given opportunities to correct the course. Whether it was through hubris, incompetence or mere indifference, like petulant children they chose to ram the prow of district’s collective future as destructively as possible into certain peril. At this point, it really does not matter what compelled their paucity of vision and acumen. The fact is they played fast and loose with the education of a generation of district children. What does matter is the potential of contagious spillover into the rest of the community. These children were callously robbed of their rightful expectation of a consistent educational environment. This theft undermines everything else to follow. Children will perform less than they might otherwise. Their under-performance circumscribes future opportunities and perpetuates the intellectual, academic and professional leg irons of the underclass. Multiply these losses across a community and it is small wonder we suffer so many social ills.
All that is past. Hopefully, this housecleaning will provide the residents of the district with some hope that things might improve. Among the improvements one might recommend would be a strong reconsideration of the people previously elected to the school board and those hired in the upper echelons of district administration.
Beyond that, we hope that state control of the district will ferret out other similarly entrenched bad habits. Underperforming faculty, staff and administration members should be encouraged to ply their trade elsewhere. High performers should be identified, rewarded and held up as standards for the future.