By John Lyon
Arkansas News Bureau
LITTLE ROCK — A month after rejecting a proposal by the Weiner and Delight school districts to merge their 200-miles-apart school systems, the state Board of Education today gave the districts approval to merge with neighboring districts.
The board approved annexing Weiner into the Harrisburg School District and merging Delight with the Murfreesboro School District to create the South Pike County School District.
Board members also approved a proposal to merge the Wickes and Van-Cove school districts to create the Cossatot River School District.
Both Wiener and Delight fell below 350 students for two consecutive years, so under Arkansas law they would have faced mandatory annexation into other districts if they had not received approval for voluntary mergers.
Harrisburg has 1,134 students. Murfreesboro has 545.
The superintendents of all four affected districts said the annexations would allow the districts to pool their resources and improve educational opportunities for students.
Murfreesboro was placed on the state’s list of fiscally distressed schools for the 2008-2009 school year but was removed from the list in October.
Last month the board rejected a proposal to merge Weiner and Delight with each other. Though they are 200 miles apart, the districts contended the merger could work with the help of long-distance learning.
Officials of both districts told the board in February that they had sought mergers with neighboring districts, without success. Today, board members asked Harrisburg Superintendent Chuck Hanson what happened.
“When Weiner approached other districts, I think our community got their feelings hurt, more or less,” Hanson said.
But since then, “the educational needs of the students rose to the top, and (hurt) feelings of the community that happened maybe in the past went way down to the bottom,” he said.
Wickes and Van-Cove did not face mandatory annexation because neither district has fallen below the 350-student threshold. Wickes has 726 students and Van-Cove has 435.
Wickes is on the list of fiscally distressed schools. Van-Cove is not on the list, but Superintendent Andy Curry said the district is projected to end the current fiscal year with a positive fund balance of $654,000, a $200,000 drop from last year.
“I guess you could say we’re trying to head something off before it happens,” he said.
State law authorizes the Board of Education to force the annexation of a school district that has been in fiscal distress for two consecutive years.
Speaking against the proposed Wickes-Van-Cove consolidation was Suzann Faulkner, a parent from the Wickes district. Faulkner said patrons of the district’s Umpire campus, which was annexed into Wickes several years ago, had not had enough say in the process.
Also today, education officials informed the state board that the School of Excellence in Humphrey, an open-enrollment charter school, is projected to have a negative fund balance of $128,000 by the end of the current fiscal year. The school’s director, James Young, has resigned, and law enforcement officials are conducting an investigation.
The board took no immediate action on the report but is expected to take up the matter at its next regular meeting in April.
The board also renewed the charters of two conversion charter schools: Mountain Home High School Career Academies and Ridgeroad Middle Charter School in North Little Rock.
State Education Commissioner Tom Kimbrell told the board the state Department of Education’s application for stimulus funding under the Race to the Top program was not chosen for the program’s first phase, but the department has until June 1 to apply for Phase 2.
Arkansas could have received as much as $374 million for education if its application had been selected.
