The board of the Little Rock School District voted Thursday night 6-2 to move the West School of Innovation to Hall High School.
Because of the large loss of students from our district over the last few years, the district must cut about $16 million dollars from its 2024-25 budget. Combining these two small schools into one campus is the first of many difficult decisions that will need to be made in the coming months.
The West School of Innovation and Hall STEAM Magnet High School only have about 300 students each. Consolidating them would leave the LRSD with four high schools total, the others being Central (enrollment 2,260), Parkview (1,063) and Southwest (2,163).
The district is also building a new “West” high school on the current West School of Innovation campus, but it won’t be open until the 2025-26 school year at the earliest. When completed, the new high school will have room for 1,200 students.
Superintendent Jermall Wright has been discussing possible changes to the district’s high schools for weeks. He and his team made their recommendation last night after taking comments and proposals from members of the community.
The administration is pushing to consolidate Hall and the West School of Innovation for several reasons. First, the LRSD must decrease the number of high schools we now operate based purely on student enrollment and fiscal sustainability. Having one small high school, rather than two, will help unify operations and decrease costs.
The LRSD administration also says the new “West” high school now under construction should have a different identity than the current West School of Innovation. But the administration also wants to continue to meet the needs of the kids at the West School of Innovation. It wants to continue to support the programs offered there now and continue the school’s “innovation” status — a special designation from the state that gives it more flexibility in matters such as curriculum design. A school created by consolidating Hall and the West School of Innovation would have 500-plus students and staff from both schools, meaning the district could offer students much more than it does with two separate campuses.
The administration also believes this move has to be made to ensure the timely completion of the new West high school without the additional costs and safety concerns created by having school in session next to an active construction site.
A transition team will be put together to determine the name for the new high school. They will determine how and to what degree academic programming offered at West and Hall can be merged into one program and master schedule, and they will develop transition plans with activities for students, staff and families from both schools in the spring of 2024.
Some parents at the West School of Innovation will likely be unhappy with the move, in part due to negative perceptions of Hall.
Board member Ali Noland said Hall is a safe building. She asked Wright to address why it was important to make the decision now. Wright said it needed to happen quickly because of an upcoming board vote on the price tag of the new West high school construction. If they delay that vote, it would mean the building will cost more than we have budgeted.
Wright believes moving the West School of Innovation will give Hall a chance to survive. We need 500 students at Hall for the campus to be financially viable. Right now, Hall has fewer than 300 kids in a school building with a capacity of 1200. The school costs the district $5.2 million annually to operate.
The fact is, we can no longer sustain Hall as a traditional school. And we cannot afford to lose the building to a charter school.
Board member Greg Adams made a motion to support Wright’s plan. Adams said he respected the frustration that people were feeling. He recognized that parents out west have the right to feel frustrated. He also spoke highly of the teachers at Hall who have had to make many adjustments over the last few years.
But at the end of the day, Adams found the district’s plan compelling. It will save the district money and allow the district to serve our whole community. He said the status quo is just not sustainable.
Board member Evelyn Callaway said she opposes closing any school and said she believes the construction company building the new West high school has “their boots on our necks.” She said she thinks this whole decision is too rushed.
Board member Sandrekkia Morning expressed concern about staff being displaced. Wright said that if enough West School of Innovation students come to Hall to create a campus with 500 students, there should be no disruption of staff or programs. If they do not come, the district will have to move staff around between campuses.
Noland, Adams and Morning voted for the plan, along with board chair Michael Mason and Vicki Hatter and Norma Johnson. Callaway and Joyce Wesley voted against it.
After the special meeting, the board began its work session.
First up was a report from state Sen. Linda Chesterfield and former senator Joyce Elliott, both former teachers. Chesterfield stated that there are 23 charter schools around our district. She encouraged the district to make hard choices to make sure the district does not go back under state control. She said we need stability in leadership because the state wants Little Rock to fail.
Elliott encouraged the district to not simply focus on test scores. African American and Latino areas of our town have been left out and left behind for too long, she said, and the entire city will have to make sacrifices to build a word-class school district for Little Rock. We have to care about other people’s children and not just our own.
Elliott said we must learn there is a disadvantage to privilege. White families have been fleeing this district since 1958, she said, and this has hurt all of us. We must think about our whole city and commit ourselves to one another.
Next, the board heard a report on a problem created by the inane policies of Gov. Sarah Sanders and our state legislature. Arkansas LEARNS, the state’s new education law, says all students who are set to graduate in the 2026-27 school year or beyond — that is, current 9th grade students — are required to complete a minimum of 75 hours of documented community service before graduation.
The state made this policy, but districts are being left to implement it. In Little Rock, a team of administrators have created two options for the class of 2027 to obtain their community service hours. The team met with the counseling department heads of each of our five high schools and developed a plan in which students will earn their community service hours through pre-selected grade level courses and independent projects. The plan will put required community service learning hours in the required courses, allowing students to complete 25 hours per year. This will allow students to complete the 75-hour requirement by the end of their junior year.
Since the LEARNS Act includes no money to support this new requirement, the district will have to find a staff member who will take on the extra duty of being the School Community Service Learning Coordinator to work with students on independent projects after school. Teachers will have extra work added to their day and will need to keep up with community service hours in their in grade books. The district will also have to find money to transport kids to these community service opportunities during school.
This appears to be the district’s best option when faced with an unfunded mandate from the Republicans who run the state. Will the private schools who will be stealing money from our district in the form of LEARNS vouchers have a similar requirement? Will their students have to put in 75 hours of additional work? No, they will not. While our kids in the Little Rock School District are missing school to go do community service projects, private school kids will be in class, learning. The elitism of the Arkansas Republican Party is showing.
The board also heard a report on the district’s “Ignite Reading” program. When Wright was hired as superintendent, he made it very clear he would focus on the reading crisis that has plagued our district for generations.
The Ignite Reading program includes 1,842 students in grades 1-5 in 13 schools. Of those participants, 69% are African American and 19% are Hispanic. The initial diagnostic results were alarming. The overall average was 1.9 grades behind. First graders were 0.5 grades behind, second graders were one grade behind, third graders were 1.7 grades behind, fourth graders were 2.6 grades behind and fifth graders were 3.6 grades behind.
This is a crisis. Appealing to excuses like poverty, or saying that this pattern fits some version of a bell curve, is what we call systemic racism. These children deserve to be reading on grade level.
Wright has shown he is committed to working towards ALL our kids becoming readers with critical thinking skills, and the Ignite program seems to be working. It allows schools to identify the exact skills that individual kids are struggling with. According to diagnostics taken in mid-October, students using this program are growing at a rate of 2.6 weeks for every week of instruction. The number of students stuck at the kindergarten level of reading is shrinking. Since the launch of this program in August, 20% of all students who started out at kindergarten reading level have transitioned to first-grade reading level.
This program will not save all of our kids, and we must work hard in the classroom to assure that this growth is sustained. But it is clear to me that this one-on-one program needs to be extended to all schools and all students who need help.
The board also heard some distressing news on interim assessments. We have much work to do, but having this data allows us to see what we need to do to help students. Wright and his team are adjusting how we are delivering instruction.
I will conclude with what I’ve said many times before: This meeting was too long. The agenda had too many reports, and some board members continue to not use their time efficiently. No one will want to serve on this board if they are going to have to give up five-plus hours of their night for a meeting. The board must make these meetings shorter and more effective.
