LR school chief maps site options
Possibilities put forth for converting J.A. Fair, McClellan
Mike Poore, superintendent of the Little Rock School District, ticked through a list of options on Monday for re-purposing several of the school system’s properties — some in dramatic ways — over the next five years.
Poore offered the proposals — such as converting elementary schools into pre-kindergarten centers and establishing athletic complexes where a couple of middle schools now stand — in advance of next month’s series of five public forums on how best to use various campuses after the new Southwest High School opens in August 2020.
Southwest High will completely replace McClellan and J.A. Fair high schools and take at least 300 students from Hall High when it opens.
“It’s an opportunity that, as that happens, what do we do to purpose those facilities and also look at our district in a larger context and … think about how we can move forward,” Poore said at a news conference attended by city and state government leaders and business people at the Metropolitan Technical Skills Center.
“If we do anything with closing a facility, then we have to re-purpose the facility,” he said in introducing building options that touch every part of the school system, including northwest Little Rock — the fastest growing part of the
district.
He cited the district’s success in finding private-sector uses for the recently closed Franklin and Woodruff elementary schools. As a result, those buildings are not abandoned and vacant in their neighborhoods. The district is also in the midst of turning over the old Gilliam School to the Watershed Human Development Agency that has leased the site for decades.
Poore highlighted what he sees as growing community support and buy-in to the district, which he said is one of the city’s largest employers and economic engines. He also acknowledged challenges such as stagnant employee wages and the need to show that students are growing academically.
“Sometimes it feels like there is not enough time and resources to tackle all these challenges, but how do you start to eat an elephant?” he said. “Just take a bite and work on it and work on it and work on it. I hope that people feel that over the first two years of my tenure, and now, with this plan, we are continuing to capture additional things we can do to really move us forward.”
To this point, Poore said he developed school site possibilities and conferred with his staff about them in anticipation of
holding the public forums next month.
District leaders have for months committed to keeping the McClellan name but demolishing and rebuilding classrooms at the Geyer Springs Road site to house a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade campus. That would cost about $50 million and not be completed before 2022.
FAIR TO SURVIVE?
For the first time Monday, the district proposed converting J.A. Fair High into a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school. That would mean closing Henderson Middle School, Romine Elementary and/or David O. Dodd Elementary.
“Right now, that is not a quality academic facility,” Poore said about McClellan.
He added that Cloverdale Middle School is a likely candidate for being moved to the McClellan site because of the poor condition of the Cloverdale building and the land it sits on.
“It makes sense to say Cloverdale, but then you as a community must look and say how do we re-purpose Cloverdale? That is a neighborhood. What do we reconstitute for this area?”
One option is for the Cloverdale site to be torn down for soccer fields, he said.
A kindergarten-through-eighth-grade McClellan site would likely require reassignment of pupils from one or more elementary schools such as Baseline, Wakefield, Watson and/or Meadowcliff. Then those schools would have to have a new purpose.
One strong recommendation in any facilities plan for the district, Poore said, will be for expanded pre-kindergarten programs, including birth to pre-kindergarten centers in southwest and east Little Rock. The district’s pre-kindergarten programs are shown through test results to prepare children well — regardless of the socioeconomic status of their families — for elementary school work, he said.
IN GOOD CONDITION
In regard to J.A. Fair, one of the district’s better conditioned buildings, Poore said it could almost immediately be converted to a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade campus in 2020.
The Fair site is the better educational structure and has the potential to offer some academic program choice to families, which are among the goals the district has in developing its long-term facilities plan.
The 56-acre Henderson site on John Barrow Road could be sold because of its prime location, but it also could become a site for athletics and a disaster-recovery center, financed in part with federal grants.
Poore’s preliminary plans call for adding educational programming to Hall High School and to the Pinnacle View Middle School complex that currently includes an unused office building. Hall and the district’s popular Forest Heights STEM Academy for kindergarten through eighth grades could be more closely aligned in terms of science, technology, engineering and math instruction and career education.
Both the Pinnacle View office building in northwest Little Rock and the W.D. Hamilton Learning Academy west of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock campus are being eyed for use by independent charter school operators, Poore said.
Both he and Arkansas Education Commissioner Johnny Key — who acts as the school board in the state-controlled school district — want the Little Rock district to retain the space for district students, he said. That could mean making the Pinnacle View office building a small high school with a focus on technology and/or project-based learning.
Hamilton, which is adjacent to Bale Elementary, is a candidate to become a thirdthrough-eighth-grade school while Bale serves younger pupils, creating an “academic village.” Poore said there is some interest at the university in using the site as a laboratory school for the preparation of new teachers.
EAST LITTLE ROCK
The challenge in east Little Rock is that the population includes too few children for the available seats in traditional and charter schools.
One option is to convert Rockefeller Elementary into a schoolwide pre-kindergarten school for infants to 4-yearolds and to assign the elementary age children at Rockefeller to Washington Elementary on South Main Street.
“This gives you just enough, I hope, to get a taste and to say ‘I can’t wait to come back. I want to learn more. I want to hear more. I want to participate,’” Poore told his audience Monday.
Sen. Joyce Elliott, D-Little Rock, objected to the preliminary plans, saying that once again residents living south of Interstate 630 would bear the brunt of the school building changes proposed by Poore. She said that in the last round of school closures, public views expressed at community forums made no difference with the exception of Carver Elementary School, which stayed open.
Poore said that the public forums did result in plan changes and they worked to build public interest and familiarity with the district’s facility issues.
“That’s not reality,” Elliott responded.
Poore also told Elliott that he is proud of the district’s recent financial investments in building upgrades, including improvements to schools south of Interstate 630.
The community forums on facility planning will be held during the month of September, with each of the five starting at 5:30 p.m. There will be a tour of the hosting school and a presentation by Poore followed with small group discussions to respond to and generate ideas.
MEETINGS SET
The sessions will be held as follows:
Sept. 4, McClellan High School, 9417 Geyer Springs Road.
Sept. 10, J.A. Fair High School, 13420 David O. Dodd Road.
Sept. 17, Pinnacle View Middle School, 5701 Ranch Drive.
Sept. 20, Bale Elementary School, 6501 W. 32nd St.
Sept. 24, Dunbar Magnet Middle School, 1100 Wright Ave.
Members of the public will also have an opportunity to observe presentations made during the sessions through live streaming on the district’s Facebook page and will be able to provide input through an online survey, according to the district leaders.
Additional updates will be posted on the District’s website: lrsd.org/lrsdcommunity blueprint.