White Hall High School has been selected among five Arkansas schools to participate in the schoolwide transformation pathway of Phase II of Forward Arkansas’ LeARner Collective with each receiving a $50,000 grant.
The initiative is focused on empowering schools in the Arkansas Delta and Northwest Arkansas to enhance student learning. Forward Arkansas executive director Ben Kutylo said he hopes to extend the program to all of the state.
“Why we launched this program and what’s different about it, we acknowledged that while there are common and shared challenges, every community is different and has different needs,” he said. “Parents, family, educators and local school leaders know them best.”
White Hall High School, along with Bentonville’s Grimsley Junior High School, Rogers’ Lowell Elementary, Pea Ridge Intermediate and Marvell-Elaine School District, will receive individualized support and on-site visits for what is considered a deeper, comprehensive experience in Phase II, as part of the schoolwide transformation pathway. According to a news release, the group will begin with a community-wide visioning process in August to gather feedback from stakeholder groups and determine their greatest needs and priority areas.
Each school in the schoolwide transformation pathway will receive a $50,000 grant to support its work.
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“In White Hall, the culture is shifting rapidly into school choice and a change in demographics,” said Charity Hart, a family and consumer science teacher at the high school involved in the LeARner Collective. “We learn and shift with the culture to better serve the needs of our students.”
According to a presentation White Hall’s Collective team made, the “problem of practice” is to create an environment where students and staff feel valued and heard, which is essential for fostering a positive and productive school culture, while also making progress toward a unified vision among all stakeholders.
The team found that if teachers and students feel valued, they will value learning and teaching.
“We ask kids what incentives they would like for attendance and grades,” Hart said. “Some ideas we have is that the homeroom with the highest GPA will get to have an ice cream truck come out and we can give Sonic gift cards to students of the month.”
Two Pine Bluff schools, Pine Bluff Junior High Academy and Explore Academy, are among schools selected for the continuation pathway and will each receive an $8,000 grant.
These schools will extend their work from Phase I and be grouped in teams based on focus areas, as well as participate in monthly virtual sessions by Forward Arkansas and its national partner, 2Revolutions. According to the release, the gatherings will build participants’ capacity, foster collaboration among schools and provide professional development.
“One thing with the LeARner Collective, the students implemented the ideas,” said Kendria Jones, a ninth-grade English language arts instructor at PBJH Academy. “The LeARner Collective didn’t come in and tell us what we were going to do. For someone out of the area to come in and let us lead the way, that was a breath of fresh air.”
Among the ideas, the PBJH Academy has a student-led initiative called SOS: Serving Our Students, in which the students conduct meetings with minimal adult intervention. Students at the school deal with losing friends and peers of their age, and social-emotional learning lessons are being implemented, Jones said.
Forward Arkansas was established in 2015 by the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation and Walton Family Foundation. The LeARner Collective is designed to empower teachers and administrators to develop solutions to challenges that create barriers to educational success, according to Kutylo.
“We work at this intersection of policy and practice, as well as with state leaders and directors,” Kutylo said. “We’re taking everything we learn and applying them to challenges and how best to solve them.”