Watson Chapel district placed on probation

The Watson Chapel School District and its high school are the only district and school in the state to have their 2017-18 state accreditation put on probation.

The Arkansas Board of Education on Thursday afternoon voted 6-0 to approve accreditation ratings for the state’s 1,052 schools, including the Arkansas Schools for the Blind and for the Deaf, and the more than 250 school districts and charter systems.

The numbers of schools on probation or with citations for staff certification deficiencies is smaller this year than in past years.

Roy Causbie, Arkansas Department of Education manager for school support systems, attributed the decline to monthly notices from the Education Department to the school districts about potential violations of state standards.

He also said that a state law that has allowed school districts to attain state waivers of teacher certification requirements also has contributed to the decline in numbers.

Arkansas’ accreditation standards are important to school districts because a school or district’s failure to meet the standards in two consecutive years puts the district or school in jeopardy of a range of sanctions levied by the state Board of Education.

The sanctions include directing a district to replace its curriculum or its leadership. A school or district can be placed under “alternative public governance,” or the school or district can be closed down or annexed to another district.

A school’s accreditation status or lack of it also has the potential to affect a high school graduate’s ability to be accepted unconditionally into a college or university.

Lack of valid state licenses for a high school assistant principal and for a districtwide curriculum supervisor resulted in the probation status for Watson Chapel, Causbie told the Education Board.

The assistant principal had an expired state license and the curriculum supervisor had no license, Causbie said.

This is the first year of probation for Watson Chapel, and the district will have to publicize it in a newspaper and on its website, Causbie said. The stakes become higher if the school and district have subsequent uncorrected violations of state accreditation standards in the coming year.

The Osceola Stem Charter School, a conversion charter operated by Osceola School District, was initially recommended for probationary status for failure to have a library media specialist. The school, however, on Thursday received a state Education Board waiver of that requirement under Act 1240 of 2015.

The act allows school districts to petition the Education Board for waivers of state rules and laws that have been granted to open-enrollment charter schools that serve students residing in the traditional district. As a result of the waiver, the Osceola school was relieved of the probationary status recommendation.

In addition to the probation status in the Watson Chapel system, five schools in the KIPP Delta charter school system have a “cite” attached to their accredited status.