LITTLE ROCK — The state Board of Education on Monday approved for public comment proposed changes in the way schools are designated as academically distressed and gave final approval to a rule prohibiting the use of state early childhood education money to fund religious activities at preschools.
Currently, an Arkansas school district is identified as academically distressed if 75 percent or more of its students perform below the basic level on standardized tests. Under the proposed changes, a district would be classified as academically distressed if 49.5 percent or fewer of its students score proficient or better on standardized tests, or if any school within the district is a “priority” school that has failed to make the progress required under its improvement plan.
A priority school is one that has persistently low scores in math and literacy for three consecutive years and graduation rates of less than 60 percent over several years. Improvement plans will be tailored to fit each school, state Education Commissioner Tom Kimbrell said.
The 49.5 percent threshold is based on the test scores of the lowest-performing 5 percent of districts over the past three school years.
The Board of Education can take a number of actions against a district in academic distress, including placing it under state control or annexing or consolidating it with one or more other districts. A district in academic distress has two years to remove itself from that classification or face mandatory annexation or consolidation.
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Kimbrell estimated that 11 or 12 districts would be identified as academically distressed if the rules are implemented.
The Obama administration last month granted Arkansas a waiver from certain requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act so the state could have flexibility in dealing with academically troubled school districts.
“It’s really tweaking our plan to match what we feel like is more coherent for our schools, with individual targets versus state targets,” Kimbrell said while talking to reporters after Monday’s state board meeting.
The board also gave final approval to a rule prohibiting preschools that receive funding from the Arkansas Better Chance early childhood education program from using that money for religious activities during the “ABC day,” which is defined as seven hours beginning with the first ABC activity of the day.
State education officials drafted the rule after receiving a complaint that Growing God’s Kingdom preschool in West Fork, an ABC-funded school owned by state Rep. Justin Harris, R-West Fork, was using state funds to promote religion in violation of the First Amendment.
“I think it didn’t come as a surprise to anyone that we received quite a few public comments on this rule from all sides of this issue,” state Department of Education attorney Jeremy Lasiter told the board.
No one in the audience Monday asked to speak for or against the rule. The rule must go through a legislative review before being adopted.
The board also approved for public comment proposed rules allowing students who have completed the eighth grade to enroll concurrently in high school and college. If given final approval, the rules would allow schools across the state to take part in a program that was implemented as a pilot program at Southern Arkansas University Tech and Bearden High School during the past two school years.
State Department of Higher Education Interim Director Shane Broadway told the board the program was created to target students likely to need remedial courses in college and “try to get them through their remediation before they graduated from high school.”
The pilot program has reduced the percentage of Bearden High School graduates needing remedial courses in college by as much as 30 percentage points at four-year schools and 20 percentage points at two-year schools, Broadway said.
“Their chances of graduating have gone up exponentially,” he said.
The board also voted to retain Hendrix College in Conway as the site of the Arkansas Governor’s School, an annual program for gifted and talented high school seniors. Jay Barth, a newly appointed board member who teaches at Hendrix, did not participate in the discussion or vote on the issue.