By John Lyon
Arkansas News Bureau
LITTLE ROCK — The state Board of Education voted today to remove eight school districts from fiscal distress status, reducing the list of financially distressed schools in the state from 12 to four.
Newly installed state Education Commissioner Tom Kimbrell predicted the list will never again include as many as a dozen districts at one time, thanks to legislation passed this year that requires early action to address financial problems.
Districts taken off the list Monday were Concord, Gentry, Hartford, Hermitage, Mammoth Spring, Mineral Springs, Murfreesboro and Westside Consolidated in Jonesboro.
The districts took a variety of steps to address their financial troubles, with assistance from the state Department of Education and their local communities, Bill Goff, assistant education commissioner for fiscal and administrative services, told the board.
Remaining on the distressed list are the Decatur, Greenland, Mansfield and Osceola school districts. The state has taken over the Decatur and Greenland districts because of severe financial problems.
Districts classified as being in fiscal distress must get out of that classification within two years or be subject to forced annexation or consolidation.
After today’s board meeting, Kimbrell told reporters that Act 798 of 2009 should help limit the number of districts that become fiscally distressed in the future. The law is designed to give administrators, schools boards and the public early notice when a district’s finances are on a downward trend.
“The department can look, and if there are at least two material indicators of fiscal distress, then we can step in and begin notifying that school board and that superintendent early, before they ever go into fiscal distress. The school board actually gets notified, and that school board is required by law to address that in an open public meeting,” Kimbrell said.
Before the law was passed, a school district was not required to report financial difficulties to the public until after it was placed on fiscal distress status, he said.
Also today, Naccaman Williams of Springdale, the board’s chairman, said he was considering inviting the University of Arkansas’ Office for Educational Policy to give a presentation to the board next month on a new report assessing the achievements of charter schools across the state.
Board member Brenda Gullett of Fayetteville asked if groups with different views on charter schools would be allowed to speak as well.
“I know that they are very pro-charter, and so their approach is very slanted in that direction,” Gullett said. “I just want to make certain that since we are responsible for the entire state (regarding) education, that information we get is very balanced.”
Williams said he is open to hearing other points view. Board member Sam Ledbetter of Little Rock noted that next month’s meeting, scheduled for two consecutive days, has a lengthy agenda, including consideration of eight charter school applications.
After some discussion, Williams said he might ask the Office for Educational Policy to make its report available to the members so they could read it on their own. If another organization has additional information, “maybe we can get the other organization to put that information out and make it available to us,” he said.
