State lists PB district as in intensive need
Official: 5 of 6 schools got F ratings
The Arkansas Board of Education has added low academic achievement, overstaffing and a litany of other problems to its reasons for assuming control of the Pine Bluff School District.
The Education Board voted unanimously Thursday to classify the 3,189-student district as Level 5 — Intensive Support, a category indicating the highest priority of need in the state’s school accountability system.
As a result of the Level 5 classification, Arkansas Department of Education staff members — headed by Mike Hernandez, state superintendent for the Office of Coordinated Support and Service — will audit all aspects of the district’s operations to determine how the state agency can best help the district in the district’s support of its schools.
Early findings in those audits show that academic achievement has declined in the district between the 201617 and 2017-18 school years, hundreds of students have left the district and dozens of employees were working without contracts on file.
The Level 5 vote and a subsequent vote confirming state authority over the system on the basis of the Level 5 classification comes on top of the Education Board’s
Sept. 13 decision to take control of the district for fiscal distress — spending practices that threatened to deplete or nearly deplete all of the district’s revenue before the end of this school year.
The Education Board at the September meeting removed the locally elected Pine Bluff School Board and acting superintendent. Jeremy Owoh was subsequently named superintendent. He operates under the direction of Arkansas Education Commissioner Johnny Key.
Hernandez reported Thursday that five of the Pine Bluff district’s six schools recently received F ratings from the state for the 2017-18 school year and the sixth school received a D.
The school letter grades are based on a numerical “ESSA School Index” score, which takes into account student scores on last spring’s ACT Aspire tests and any gains students showed on the tests since 2017. Also in the calculation of the index score are school quality indicators such as student attendance, graduation rates and reading proficiency.
The overall ESSA index scores at five of the six Pine Bluff schools declined, as did the achievement scores and scores for school quality and student success. The academic growth score improved at three schools.
“The Pine Bluff School District currently has 5 out of 6 schools that are performing in the bottom 5 percent of all Title I schools by grade span,” Hernandez told the Education Board.
He also noted that the reading proficiency levels — indicators of school quality and student success in the ESSA index calculation — had dropped for each of the five schools that had two years of scores available.
Those grade-level reading scores ranged from 12.45 at the Thirty-Fourth Avenue Elementary School to 16.09 at W.T. Cheney Elementary School. Pine Bluff High School had a grade-level reading score of 14.23, down from 16.43 the year before.
In contrast, Don Roberts Elementary School in the Little Rock School District, a state-rated A school, had a grade-level reading score of