By John Lyon
Arkansas News Bureau

LITTLE ROCK — The state Board of Education voted today to deny a request to expand the Arkansas Virtual Academy in Little Rock.

The school sought to raise its enrollment cap from 500 to 1,500. The state board voted 7-1 to deny the request after several members expressed reservations.

Jerry Jones, board chairman of the Arkansas Virtual Academy, speaks Monday at a state Board of Education meeting. (John Lyon photo)

The academy, known as ARVA for short, is an open-enrollment charter school that offers instruction over the Internet to students in grades K-8. It is affiliated with Virginia-based company K12, which provides most of its software.

Jerry Jones, chairman of the academy’s board, told the state board the school currently has more than 600 students on a waiting list, and typically about 1,000 students are on the list. He said the school seeks to counter the disadvantage that students in rural areas can face in getting a quality education.

The Fort Smith and Charleston school districts and the Arkansas Association of Education Administrators notified the state board by mail that they opposed the request. They did not have anyone present to speak at the meeting.

Jones said critics call the academy just another form of home schooling, but it is not.

“We’re not really home schooling. Why? We have a tremendous amount of accountability. We have a tremendous rigor and intensity to our curriculum,” he said.

Several parents of academy students urged the board to approve the request, saying the academy provides a needed service.

“ARVA has been wonderful to her,” Deborah McClintock said of her daughter, an academy student who has cystic fibrosis and can face hospitalization for a common cold.

McClintock said her daughter has to be hospitalized about half as often as CF students in brick-and-mortar schools.

Board member Ben Mays of Clinton said he was convinced of the need for the school but not convinced it was spending money efficiently. He noted that its administrative costs amount to 15 percent of its budget, compared to an average of 5 percent in traditional public schools.

Scott Sides, the academy’s director, said that by its nature the school needs constant software updates and a large amount of support “from a distance.”

Board member Brenda Gullett of Fayetteville said she was not impressed with the school’s test scores, which were near the state average in many areas and below the state average in some.

“In my mind we don’t grant a charter so that you can be close to the state average,” she said.

Jones said later that academy officials were “disappointed as a result of the education opportunities that will not be available for an expanded population of people in Arkansas.”

He said the officials would regroup and develop a new strategy for expanding.