Expansion team

Great potential for Fort Smith

President James Garfield may have said that the best education is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other. We all have favorite teachers. But since Professor Hopkins is no longer around, the rest of us are going to have to come up with better education solutions ourselves.

It’s not easy. The papers report that since students have gone back into the classroom, the number of fights has gone up. (Surely the kids haven’t gone feral since the height of the pandemic.) Nationally, the performance level dropped in many subjects last year when most education had to be done online. Some over-excitable parents made the news this year after shouting down school board members. Masks and vaccines have become political. Teachers have to keep an eye on the news to see what they can teach and what they can’t, depending on what state lawmakers, the feds and courts said the day before.

But there is good news in modern American education. Much of it has to do with charter schools.

Tomorrow, folks at Haas Hall Academy are scheduled to go before the state’s Charter Authority Panel to ask for permission to open a school at the Arkansas Colleges of Health Education in Fort Smith.

Haas Hall is a public open-enrollment charter school. Such schools are open and free to students from any school district. According to Mary Jordan’s article in Monday’s paper, the academy’s superintendent Martin Schoppmeyer said: “Only scholars from Arkansas will be able to attend. We will utilize a random, anonymous lottery for admission.”

First, we like the “scholars” part. Mark Hopkins would be proud.

Second, like many charter schools, this one uses a lottery to select students when there’s a waiting list. And there’s almost always a waiting list. Because parents are eager to get their kids into schools that are unburdened by the red tape and union rules that clog so many traditional public schools these days.

And because lottery selection ensures a random result, the complaints about charter schools “cherry-picking” the best students from the traditional schools just don’t hold up.

The Fort Smith campus would serve up to 500 kids and their families.

The plans are to put at least $1 million into the space planned to upgrade technology for the classrooms. The new school could open by 2023. According to the article Monday: “Students would be able to work alongside the college’s physicians and staff on real-world research to benefit their education in science, technology, engineering, art and math … .”

And this nugget from Superintendent Schoppmeyer: “I want to do a medical pre-med type school to where the scholars that would attend hopefully would major in something pre-med when they go to college.”

That’s not something that you hear from most superintendents in traditional public schools these days. Not that a principal or superintendent in a traditional school doesn’t want kids to go on to be medical professionals, but so many of them are trying to wade through the bureaucracy just to keep these kids on the path to graduation.

Haas Hall Academy led the state’s high schools in the 2021 Best High Schools ranking by U.S. News & World Report. The Fayetteville campus was named the No. 1 public high school in Arkansas, and the Bentonville campus was ranked No. 2.

If the charter board sees fit tomorrow, the Board of Education could schedule a review for Haas Hall in early 2022. Here’s hoping the state not only gives this charter a chance, but all the kids who’d sign up for it.

Potentially, this could be great news for Fort Smith. When the people running the No. 1 and No. 2 high schools in the state want to expand, let them expand. It shows how powerful charter schools can be when they are run well.