Barbaree speaks at chamber dinner
Merchants and community leaders attended the annual Pine Bluff Regional Chamber of Commerce dinner Thursday night because of progress, Jennifer Barbaree reminded the crowd.
The second-year Pine Bluff School District superintendent used her keynote address at the Pine Bluff Country Club to highlight feats told and untold in a district that was just granted local control after five years under the Arkansas Board of Education’s watchful eye.
“You come to a district that has not had local control, and there is such an amount of mistrust, and there is such an amount of the community not supporting the district because of that,” said Barbaree, who previously helped the PBSD while working in the state Education Department’s Office of Coordinated Support and Services.
She stepped into the superintendency last January with “guns a-blazing,” by her account, but with a just-appointed seven-member board that now has full authority over a district of more than 3,000 students.
“It’s interesting working with them, and — again — they’re different than a board I had in the past because they ask the questions instead of letting it go by,” Barbaree said. “I have to realize that, no matter how prepared I am, I’ve got board members who are going to say, ‘Did you see this?’ or ‘Did you look at this?’ and I’ll say, ‘You know what, I missed that, but we’re going to work together and figure it out together.’”
Barbaree broke down a financial achievement for the district she first announced during a PBSD board meeting this week.
The district saw its bank
reconciliation variance dwindle from $3,125,061.44 last June, when a new business manager was hired, to $298.45 last month. A check for the latter amount was voided, and the balance is now zero, Barbaree explained.
“We had to balance our budget every month,” she said. “You balance your checking, right? Well, you have to balance that in a school district, and it wasn’t being balanced.”
PBSD officials concentrated on “right-sizing” the district to improve its financial health. The secondary schools last school year were merged, and some teaching positions were eliminated, but Barbaree also touted transparency in the process.
“We were over-sapped,” Barbaree said. “We still have a large amount of educators and a less amount of teachers. Well, we’re not funded that way.”
The “right-sizing” resulted in a savings of $3,935,932 for the district, she outlined. The PBSD also ended with $575,000 more than what state law allows in an operating budget, so extra funds were put into the district building fund.
The upward swings, Barbaree hopes, all lead to her ultimate goal for the district.
“We are going to be the school of choice,” she stated. “We want our students back, and we want to prove that we can do that. The way we’re going to do that is to continue to make progress toward our goal, which is to improve our academics and improve everything wrong that everyone says.”
Academic data she shared with the district, although far from her liking, also revealed what she called progress. No more than 14.2% of PBSD students met readiness benchmarks in reading over a five-year period before the 2022-23 school year, when that percentage increased to 15.4%.
The percentage of students meeting readiness in science dropped from 11.7% in 2021-22 to 9.8% in 202223, but the PBSD saw a gain in math readiness from 8.7% to 9.8% over the same period. (Only 5.7% of PBSD students met the benchmark during the 2020-21 school year.)
Barbaree illustrated on a graph reading growth in the district, from 56.3% from the fall of 2022 to 51.5% last spring, all the way to 62.8% this past fall. The state average growth, she said, is 80%, and three PBSD campuses scored above that mark this school year. The percentages do not represent actual test scores but indicate how much students have improved.
“We’re going to keep moving forward and we’re going to keep progressing, but we can’t do it without the support of our teachers, without the support of the colleges, without training,” Barbaree said. “Our teachers need to be trained. They come in and out. Sometimes, it’s a revolving door, but we’re working very hard to do recruiting things and initiatives.”
Also Thursday, Simmons Bank Community President Chad Pittillo gave a review of the economy in recent years, indicating consumer spending is up and so are credit card balances. The stock market, however, is seeing all-time highs this week, he said.
Citizens can use local resources to help the economy make an upswing in 2024, he suggested.
“Use your financial institutions who partner with our local businesses,” he said. “Use your local real estate experts. Also, talk to your financial advisors.”