Input sought on LR schools’ fate
Survey ends Friday on closing, melding, reusing campuses
Responses to a community-wide, online survey regarding the proposed re-purposing, combining and closing of some 20 Little Rock School District campuses are due at midnight Friday, survey coordinators for the district said Wednesday.
The 16-page, online-only questionnaire seeks input from parents, community members, business people, faith-based organization representatives, elected officials, students and school district employees to the Little Rock district’s “starter ideas” for altering the use of schools.
The open-ended questionnaire also asks for new or alternative ideas.
The “starter ideas ” — presented by Superintendent Mike Poore at five community forums and at other venues last month — include:
Opening two or three kindergarten-through-eighth grade schools at the existing McClellan, Fair and Bale Elementary/Hamilton Learning Academy sites.
Closing the Henderson and Cloverdale middle school campuses.
Opening one or more early childhood education centers.
Closing or combining multiple elementary schools such as Rockefeller, Booker, Meadowcliff, Carver, Dodd, Romine and Watson.
Those who want to complete the district survey
must request it through the district’s website: lrsd.org, or more directly: https://bit. ly/2PWlRGX.
The survey will be emailed back to the requester within 24 hours, said Marla Johnson, a partner in ActionCraft, the company that is coordinating the Little Rock district’s development of the Community Blueprint Design Plan. That plan is to be crafted and submitted later this year to Arkansas Education Commissioner Johnny Key, who acts as the school board in the state-controlled Little Rock district.
Johnson said Wednesday that the survey takes about 15 to 20 minutes to complete.
It cannot be filled out and submitted anonymously but individual responses will be kept confidential, Ken Hubbell, ActionCraft partner, said.
As of midafternoon Wednesday, a total of 576 requests had been made for the online survey, Johnson said, and 138 people had submitted completed questionnaires.
Many of the early responders have been district employees, Johnson said. She urged community members, including business people, along with representatives of faith-based organizations, medical facilities, higher education institutions and Hispanic community members, to also weigh in on the school facilities plans.
“The entire community is very vested in our public schools, and we are all going to need to find ways to rally and support students in the schools in order for the Little Rock district to be what we need it to be,” Johnson said.
“It is really important,” Johnson said. “The superintendent and his cabinet are truly looking for suggestions and recommendations and for the things that parents want and teachers want to see. They are serious. They want to get input and it’s important that we have a lot of people giving that input.”
Documents regarding the different possible uses for the schools are available in Spanish on the district’s website. The survey is not in Spanish, but any responses written in Spanish will be translated and included in the results, Johnson said.
The results of the survey will be combined with the information gathered at the five community forums held across the Capital City last month that were attended by about 500 people.
The survey recaps and even provides more details on those district-generated ideas for six areas of the district. The facility planning is in large part prompted by the plans for opening the now-under-construction Southwest High School in August 2020 as a replacement for both McClellan and J.A. Fair high schools.
The planning is also the result of enrollment declines and enrollment shifts throughout the city, and the high maintenance and repair needs at some of the district’s older schools.
“The opportunity before us is to use the next 3 to 5 years to accelerate the improvement and remodeling of buildings across the district, and expand quality choices for our parents,” the survey begins. “We don’t have the $300 million to repair all the schools that we need today, so we have to take fair, smart and sensible steps, and we need everyone in the community to help us solve this puzzle so every student can succeed.”
The survey goes on to describe the planned features for the new high school and asks for reaction to those plans, which call for modern technology and sciences labs, career and project-based learning space, state-of-the-art sports facilities and an extensive performing arts complex.
In light of the new school, plans are being developed to make the current McClellan site and possibly the J.A. Fair campus into kindergarten through eighth-grade schools. Cloverdale Middle School would be closed and students assigned to a nearly all newly rebuilt McClellan site, along with pupils from one or more elementary schools — Baseline, Meadowcliff, Wakefield and/or Watson elementaries.
The survey then asks for responses to ideas for alternative uses for the Cloverdale site and the elementaries. Cloverdale, for example, could become a bio-research center connected to the city’s medical community, or an environmental science facility. Suggestions for Baseline Elementary include a birth to pre-k center. Meadowcliff is proposed as a youth day treatment center, and Watson could be a dental and health clinic or a welcome center in partnership with a Mexican consulate.
In addition to southwest Little Rock, the facility planning and survey target northwest, central and west Little Rock. Survey participants are asked for and about ideas for the largely unused office building attached to Pinnacle View Middle School, and about ways to enhance the academic and technology programs at Hall High, possibly by pairing the school with the nearby Forest Heights STEM Academy and/or with the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
Henderson Middle School is suggested as a sports complex or as the district’s administrative headquarters. The former Southwest Middle School/Hamilton Learning Academy is a possible laboratory school for the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and/or a school with separate classes for girls and boys.