Education Board OKs five charter schools

The Little Rock School District will be home to three new charter schools over the next two years, and Pine Bluff will see two new such schools as a result of state Board of Education action Thursday.

The Education Board voted to accept the recommendations of the state’s newly reconfigured Charter Authorizing Panel that last month approved the five school plans for Little Rock and Pine Bluff and denied four other applications for charter schools in Little Rock, McGehee, Weiner and Bentonville.

The Education Board accepted the panel’s recommendations without exercising its authority to conduct full hearings of its own on any of the school applications — despite requests that it do so from Little Rock School District Superintendent Mike Poore; state Sens. Joyce Elliott and Will Bond, both of Little Rock; and from Micah Cummings, a charter school planner whose proposal for a school in Bentonville was denied.

Poore told the Education Board before it voted that a more thorough review of the three charter school plans and their impact on the community was warranted.

Education Board member Charisse Dean of Little Rock said the charter applications were thoroughly vetted by the Charter Authorizing Panel in lengthy public meetings last month.

The newly approved applications are for:

■ Einstein Charter School, proposed by the Einstein Group Inc. of New Orleans, to start with 300 students in kindergarten through third grade, and grow through eighth grade at 3615 W. 25th St., which is the Little Rock School District’s former Garland Elementary School.

■ ScholarMade Achievement Place, proposed by ScholarMade Educational Services Inc., to start with 290 students in kindergarten through fifth grades, and grow to as many as 520 in kindergarten through ninth grades at 2410 Battery St., which is the Little Rock School District’s former Mitchell Elementary.

■ Friendship Aspire Academy-Little Rock, a 600-pupil program proposed by the Friendship Education Foundation of Washington, D.C., that is seeking a southwest Little Rock location to serve 600 kindergarten through fifth-graders.

■ Friendship Aspire Academy-Pine Bluff, proposed by the same Friendship Education Foundation, to serve 480 students in kindergarten through fifth grade, at 3911 S. Hazel St. in Pine Bluff.

■ Southeast Arkansas Preparatory High School, proposed by the Southeast Arkansas Preparatory High School Inc., to serve 220 students in ninth through 12th grades at 1501 W. 73rd Ave. in Pine Bluff, the former Ridgeway Christian School site.

All of the schools plan to open in the 2018-19 school year except the Friendship Aspire campus in Little Rock that is planning a 2019-20 opening.

The five newly approved charter schools will bring the total number of open-enrollment charter systems in the state to 29, which is the current cap on the schools that are taxpayer-supported but operated independently of their surrounding traditional school districts.

Charter schools are meant to be innovative and, as such, are eligible for waivers of some state rules and laws that apply to traditional districts and schools. In return for the waivers, the schools are to be held to stricter accountability standards.

Thursday’s actions by the state Education Board on charter applications for the 2018-19 school year were the first based on the recommendations of the newly reconfigured Charter Authorizing Panel, which is smaller and for the first time includes members from outside the Department of Education. The new panel, led by Ivy Pfeffer, the state’s deputy education commissioner, last month gave preliminary approval to five charter school plans and denied four others.

Poore, in his appeal for further hearings on the Little Rock charter plans, cited the loss of student population throughout all but the west and northwest parts of the city as a factor to be considered along with the recent call by a state-appointed citizens committee for collaboration between traditional and charter schools.

Poore described the Little Rock system a district “on the move” academically — being one of only 12 in the state that showed gains on the state’s 2017 ACT Aspire test at every grade. He also said the innovation offered by charter schools is already in evidence at Little Rock district schools, including the operation of a student bank at Stephens Elementary but the district is willing to do more.

“I’ve never been afraid of competition,” he said.

“There is an opportunity with charters to partner. What that might look like I don’t know,” he said. “But we need a pause right now to let things settle, to determine what is the right course of action and do it in a strategic way that I believe can be done together,” said Poore, who is the state-appointed leader of the district that has been operating under state control and without a locally elected school board since January 2015.

Dean said she understands that the Little Rock district is moving forward but sees the new charter school plans as accelerating the progress.

“When it comes to children and ensuring that they get the education that they need and seeing the numbers and the results in the Little Rock district: Yes, there are improvements and, yes, there is forward movement,” Dean said. “I say let’s move all our children forward. This is another opportunity to move the education of our children forward.”