|
|
| |
| Sat, Nov. 22, 2008 |  |
 |
|
||
| |
Revenge of the small school districts Sunday, Nov 6, 2005 By John Brummett Gov. Mike Huckabee presented an award on live television Tuesday night that proclaimed the Valley View School District south of Jonesboro the very best in the state. Two years ago, with people like me cheering him on, this governor proposed to consolidate Valley View's administrative functions and high school because it enrolled fewer than 1,500 students. The rural-dominated Legislature wouldn't go along and compromised on consolidating only districts with fewer than 350 students. Since then, Valley View has grown by - you guessed it - about 350 students. It has gone from 1,450 or so at the time Huckabee proposed the 1,500 cutoff to nearly 1,800 now. New students have moved from other nearby districts. More have moved in because of jobs for their parents at the new Nestle plant and elsewhere. Nearly all these new students are middle-class whites whose families bought homes in new suburban Jonesboro subdivisions. These families didn't want to live in town, and they'd heard about this good school. Valley View, it turns, won this same award - the Golden Apple from television station KTHV, Channel 11, in Little Rock - a year ago. Even Craig O'Neill, the television station's unconventional sports announcer who emceed the televised announcement, seemed to pick up on some of the irony. He told me Wednesday that he had joked to the governor shortly before the live telecast that surely it would be great to consolidate all those districts represented in the assembly of 10 finalists into a lone super-duper one. He said the governor managed to appear amused. O'Neill had conceived of this award. He came back from broadcasts at high school pep rallies convinced from what he had been told that school districts labored under uncommon pressure through incessant student testing to produce scores that were ranked and publicized on a district basis. While local television stations elsewhere bestowed Golden Apples on teachers, as the name would suggest, Channel 11 prevailed on the state Education Department to compile criteria for an award honoring the entity being held accountable by published test scores. The chief criteria is the percentage of the student body performing at or above proficiency levels on benchmark tests. On Wednesday I asked Radius Baker, the Valley View superintendent, if he felt that his and other small school districts had been vindicated. Actually, yes, he said rather unassumingly. Six of the 10 finalists were on the smallish side, he noted. The key, he said, is parental and community involvement, which he said is more readily achieved through smallness. Actually, the underlying key is socioeconomic. Parents of a higher socioeconomic status value education more than those of a lower status, speaking in a dangerous generality. Probably more to the point: Parents of a higher socioeconomic status have more time and greater facility for involvement in their kids' education. Still, I called Baker's attention to the fact that his school district wasn't so small anymore - that it had outclassed the rest while growing by 350 students, nearly a fourth, in two years. In fact, Valley View had led the state while absorbing what amounted to another Arkansas school district. "You can argue it either way," Baker acknowledged. But he said he'd personally stick with the advantages of community involvement in smaller districts. Consolidation was never based on a stigma that all small school districts were bad. It was based on the state's perspective as it lived under a court order to improve and equalize educational opportunities for all kids. It was not to punish what was working, but spread what was working. It should flatter Valley View, not offend it, that I and others wanted to consolidate one or two adjoining school districts with it to deliver its acclaimed instruction to greater numbers of kids. Anyway, congratulations are due Valley View, not for vindication, but for doing right by its young people. Frankly, though, the better news next year would be for some poor Delta school district to nip Valley View at the wire. ------- John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699. |
