District, school on probation for accreditation violation

The Arkansas Board of Education on Thursday placed one school district and one high school on probation for violating the state’s standards for accreditation during the past year and not making timely corrections.

The board voted 7-0 to accept the Department of Education’s accreditation report for the 2018-19 school year, which shows that 1,303 other schools and school districts — including state Department of Youth Services schools — met the standards for operating their campuses.

The accreditation of the Marianna-based Lee County School District and Lee County High, however, was placed on probation for violations that led at least in part, earlier this year, to the state taking control of the school district by removing the School Board and replacing the superintendent with a state-appointed leader.

Those violations included failure to maintain student records to the point that dozens of high school students were in jeopardy of lacking adequate credits to be eligible to graduate.

Deborah Coffman, the Education Department’s assistant commissioner for accountability, attributed the almost universal full accreditation of schools and districts to the agency’s new monitoring system that enables the state and the districts to check their compliance on a daily

basis. The system connects to and draws information from multiple other state systems — such as the eFinance and eSchool financial and student management systems — to determine whether a school or district falls short of operating mandates.

The accreditation standards, significantly revised a year ago, set requirements that include student-teacher classroom ratios, course offerings, teacher credentials, and requirements for employing principals, superintendents, and counselors.

“Our new system hunts all that out. It helps us find all that during the school year to get it resolved,” Coffman said. “Our system reads multiple systems and, if there isn’t a match, it flags it in our system and allows us to go in and investigate why.”

In contrast to past years, no Arkansas schools or districts had a citation attached to their accreditation for assigning teachers to teach in subjects in which they are working toward state licensure but do not have that licensure.

In past years, it had not been unusual for there to have been dozens of schools cited for the licensure matters.

Coffman said changes in state rules on additional licensure are considered an approved waiver of state requirements — as long as the teacher is within the approved time period for attaining the additional licensure for the subject being taught.