2 options put forth for name of school.
Southwest High or Academy pushed
Representatives of students, parents, teachers and community members in the Little Rock School District have settled on two possible names for the district’s newest campus — Southwest High School or Southwest Academy.
Superintendent Mike Poore will make his preference known at a presentation tonight to the district’s Community Advisory Committee — it meets at 5:30 p.m. — before sending a final recommendation to Arkansas Education Commissioner Johnny Key.
Key acts as the school board for the district that has been operating under state control without a locally elected board since January 2015.
The Community Advisory Board meets at the administration building, 810 W. Markham St. Meetings are broadcast on LRSD TV (Comcast Channel 4 or U-verse Channel 99) or can be viewed via live stream on lrsdtv.org.
The meeting will also include a presentation on the district’s Facility Master Plan that is due to the state early next year. The plan addresses converting the existing McClellan High into a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school.
District leaders had in recent weeks cast a wide net for names for the first high school built by the district since Parkview, which went up in 1966.
William Harry Fowler, Ernest G. Green, Milton P. Crenchaw and Edwin L. Hawkins, along with Southwest, were the top nomination-getters, according to a memorandum prepared for the advisory board.
A committee of parents and students working with Deputy Superintendent Marvin Burton selected the variations on the Southwest name to recommend to Poore.
Poore said he didn’t want to disclose his choice for a school name before the advisory board meeting. But Poore did say that the recommendation from the group of parents and students who worked with Burton and weighed all the proposals “certainly … means a lot.”
“What you are going to see is a recommendation that is pretty close to what they shared,” Poore said.
Poore said he will ask the advisory board to vote on his recommendation. The recommendation and vote will be forwarded to Key.
The four men whose names were top nominees all have or had a personal connection to Little Rock.
Fowler was a black assistant superintendent for personnel in the district beginning in the late 1960s.
Hawkins was a principal of four Little Rock schools over the 22-year span of 1952 to 1974, including 13 years at what was then Horace Mann High School, the largest black high school in the state, and then three years as the first black principal at Little Rock Central High.
Crenchaw, a Little Rock native, was one of the famed Tuskegee Airmen hired by the federal government as a civilian licensed pilot to train hundreds of cadet pilots at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute.
Green, the only one of the four who is living, is one of the nine black students who desegregated Little Rock Central High in 1957 and was the first black student to graduate from the school.
The new school is scheduled to open in August 2020 for as many as 2,250 students in grades nine through 12 . The new school, projected to cost $101 million, will replace both J.A. Fair and McClellan, built by the Pulaski County Special School District but later acquired by the Little Rock system as the result of a federal court order in a long-running school desegregation lawsuit.
The 55 acres of undeveloped land for the school is between Mabelvale Pike and Mann Road, south of the Home Depot store at 11 Mabelvale Plaza Drive. The school’s colors — green and purple — and the mascot, a gryphon with the head of an eagle and body of a lion, were announced earlier.