LRSD back on track with Fair High plans
School to teach kids through 8th grade
The Little Rock School District is moving ahead with plans to transform the vacant J.A. Fair High School into a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school that will replace Henderson Middle and Romine and David O. Dodd elementaries.
In what could be its final monthly business meeting, the district’s Community Advisory Board voted Thursday to support the campus changes.
That vote came in a meeting in which Superintendent Mike Poore said he will announce next week the district plans to institute a oneday-a-week virtual school day for the coming spring semester.
The plans for Fair were initially planned for this school year but were “‘paused for one year” by Arkansas Education Secretary Johnny Key in December.
Key has acted in place of a school board in the state-controlled Little Rock district, relying in part on the recommendations from the state-appointed seven-member advisory board.
The advisory board and Key’s role in the district
are coming to an end as the 21,000-student district is being returned to a locally elected nine-member school board in the coming weeks. Seven of nine board members were elected in the Nov. 3 general election. Two seats on the board remain to be filled in a Dec. 1 runoff election, following which the new board will be seated.
Fair High, along with McClellan High, was closed as a high school after the 2019-20 school year, and students from both campuses were assigned to the new Southwest High School.
The new high school and plans for converting the Fair campus into a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade campus — closing Henderson and Dodd, and making Romine an early childhood center to serve infants through age 4 — were all part of the district’s Community Blueprint Plan. The plan also calls for finding new uses for the Henderson and Dodd campuses.
The goals of that widely publicized blueprint plan, which also resulted in converting Rockefeller Elementary on the city’s east side into an early childhood center, were to improve learning environments, expand school choice options for families, and provide savings that could be used for raising salaries
Poore told the advisory board that the planned changes “are not all about saving a dollar.”
“Our most primary mission that we always have is that we do the very best for young people so they are prepared for their future and their transitions,” he said. “This is an education model that I hope that you will continue to believe in.”
Sadie Mitchell, a retired deputy superintendent of the Little Rock district and a leader a decade ago in the establishment of the Forest Heights STEM Academy for elementary and middle school grades, is assisting the district in formulating the plans for Fair and Romine.
“I’m so excited about another K-8 school in Little Rock,” Mitchell told the advisory board, adding that Forest Heights STEM Academy — modeled after a school in Hartford, Conn. — has been “a huge success story” for the district. The elementary and middle school combinations have also been successful, and have grown in numbers in places such as Milwaukee, Baltimore and Philadelphia.
Planning calls for pupils at Henderson, Romine and Dodd, along with the rising sixth-graders from Bale, Brady, McDermott and Western Hills, to be assigned to the reconfigured Fair campus, which has a capacity of 1,075 pupils, Mitchell said.
Middle school classes will be on the north side of the campus and elementary pupils will be on the south side, with a library, cafeteria and two gymnasiums between the two sections. Melinda Modica, the principal at Dodd, and Michael Anthony, the principal at Henderson and a former Fair High principal, will be co-principals at the newly reorganized school, Mitchell said.
The district’s elementary and middle school curriculum will be supplemented with the national Project Lead The Way hands-on learning programs that will prepare students for district high school programs in engineering, robotics and biomedicine. Other components of the school will be The Leader In Me that empowers students to be leaders, and the Jobs for Arkansas Graduates initiative that will include service learning projects, Mitchell said.
Modica and Anthony said that advisory committees of parents and others have been consulted about the changes. Modica said parents are pleased that the school will feature a seamless instructional program from elementary through middle school.
Anthony said parents also see as a positive the fact that siblings can be on the same campus for more school years. Students are excited about the prospect of being on a campus with high school sports facilities, he said.
Informational sessions for parents are being planned for early next week.
Tyrone Harris, the principal at Romine, will head the Romine early childhood center, which will incorporate the prekindergarten programs now at Dodd and Romine.
Some building alterations will be made at the Romine and Fair campuses to accommodate the new students, Mitchell said. Budgets for that work, as well as staffing plans, are still to be finalized, she said.
District leaders have said that Fair, originally built and opened in the early 1980s by the Pulaski County Special School District, is in good condition. That is unlike McClellan, which was closed and is to be demolished.