Public to get say on school rules

Rules detailing success plans for Arkansas students, levels of state support for public school districts and revamped accreditation standards were released for public comment Thursday.

The items were before the state Board of Education during a regular meeting. The nine members voted unanimously to allow the community to comment, thus taking one step closer to getting the draft rules cemented into practice.

One set of rules handles Act 930 of 2017. The multifaceted law requires that “success plans” be created for every eighth-grader and above, regardless of the student’s academic standing, to prepare the student for college, career and beyond.

Under the old system, only students who were not achieving at their grade levels had improvement plans.

Now, beginning with the 2018-19 school year, every student who enters the eighth grade will have a student success plan developed by the end of the year, according to the draft rules.

The plan will be written collaboratively with school personnel, the parents and the student. Each plan will address the student’s interests and post-secondary plans. This could mean remediation of skills a student needs, or the inclusion of Advanced Placement classes, as well as apprenticeships, internships and career planning.

“It’s supposed to focus on the positive as well as those deficit areas” for students, said Courtney Salas-Ford, an attorney with the state Department of Education.

Act 930 also got rid of labels like “academic distress” that were attached to struggling schools and school districts.

“We don’t want a system that moves back to the labeling that was so prominent during the era of academic closures,” said Jay Barth, chairman of the state board. The aim was to take away “negative” impressions of a state’s involvement with a school district, he said.

Instead, districts with schools that previously held those labels like “academic distress,” “priority” and “focus” must work with the Education Department to develop “transitional support plans” so they can move into the state’s new accountability system, set up by Act 930.

Under the old system, the state Department of Education intervened directly in individual schools that had chronically low scores or achievement gaps between groups of students on state tests.

In the new system, the department will provide all school districts with support depending on certain criteria.

“It’s about working with the district and saying, ‘What does your district need?’ and really customizing that,” she said. That could be anything from human resources help to addressing fiscal problems and facilities assistance, she said.

Levels of support are broken into five categories: general, collaborative, coordinated, directed or intensive.