This year’s first graders at Edgewood Elementary will stay at the campus for another school year.
The move of second grade from Coleman Elementary to Edgewood, which will take effect at the start of the 2026-27 school year, will free up room for more pre-kindergarten classes in the district. Pre-kindergarten is currently housed at a wing of the former L.L. Owen Elementary, but the vacancy to be left by the second-grade classes at Coleman will allow the Watson Chapel School District to serve more pre-K students.
“We want to build an early childhood center where we can take in more pre-K,” Superintendent Keith McGee said. “Right now we want to make sure that we’re partnering with our co-op (Arkansas River Education Service Cooperative), so we want to reach out to our families and say, ‘Look, we’ve got pre-K on our site at Coleman Elementary that will allow us to hopefully bring in some 3- and 4-year-olds to go into that early child center.”
McGee estimates about 75 pre-K students are served at the Owen campus. His goal is to house up to 150 at Coleman.
According to a district memo from assistant superintendent Aleta Posey, no additional costs are associated with the new alignment. Moving the second-graders to Edgewood, she said, is extremely important.
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“In those grade levels, students are learning to read, so when we think about prevention in the foundational skill sets that students need, they’re actually learning to read in that period,” Posey added. “So, by us allowing the second-grade students being in the same building, now we can specialize professional development and training to support teachers.”
Posey referred to McGee’s “prevention method,” or preventing students from falling behind in reading on grade level. Under the Arkansas LEARNS Act of 2023, starting this school, any third-grade student that does not master grade-level reading skills on the statewide assessment without a “good-cause exemption” will not be promoted to fourth grade.
“Don’t even let them get behind,” McGee stressed. “We want our kindergartners, when they leave kindergarten, to be already on the first-grade or second-grade level. When they leave first grade, we want them to be on the second-grade level. When they leave second grade, we want them to be on the third or fourth-grade level, so by the time they get to Coleman, they’ll either be at least on grade level or above grade level.”
The goals are the same for mastery in math, McGee added.
“There are a lot of benefits to having those students (at Edgewood) in the same building, and so forth for even third through fifth grade,” Posey said. “Now, that they know how to read, now I am reading to learn when I get to third grade. … It’s a good transition point for our students.”