She Makes the Best of What's Around

I suppose I should let you guys know what I've been up to in the last few days! I'm currently heavily involved in the effort to save Weiner School District. Yes indeed, after years (literally; there were rumors when I was in high school) of rumors that we'd be shut down, the state has finally opted to shut down Weiner, and for extremely pitiful reasons at that.

In fact, I'll just let you read what I wrote on Facebook, which is what I'll be editing and then sending on to any newspaper I can get my hands on.

It's rare that I get worked up enough about something to write about it here. I am a passionate person, but I've never really felt like people needed to be passionate about the same things I'm worked up about. Everybody's got their things, and I just don't feel the need to be righteously indignant all the time in an attempt to get everyone else worked up over my own "things".

This, though. This has been bothering me. Which surprises me, because I don't have any nostalgia for high school. When I graduated in 1997, everyone asked everyone else "Awww, aren't you going to miss high school? Isn't this going to be so sad?" and I was like "Nope. Bring on college, 'cause I'm blowin' this popsicle stand." And I did. I still don't have any sense of "Man, those were the days". What I do realize, though, is that even though it was tiny, in the middle of nowhere Arkansas, and had a funny name, I went to a really good school! Weiner High School, with its incredible teachers and its tiny class sizes and its out-of-the-box thinking was every bit as good as going to some major private or charter schools.

As some of you (and ALL of you from Weiner, I bet!) know already, Arkansas is having more than a few problems with its educational system right now. The biggest one is this: $$$. Too much money is being spent on an educational system that is cranking out unprepared kids. "Unprepared" is a mark of test scores, of course; don't get me started on what I think about using pure testing to judge whether a person is prepared to do ANYTHING or not. That's neither here nor there. What's relevant is that Arkansas is closing down schools left and right in an attempt to save money. A school might be closed down for one of three reasons: financial difficulty, low test scores, and pure size.

Guess which one of the three Weiner meets? Size. Weiner has fewer than 350 students. Their test scores are great, and they have no financial difficulty.

"Close it down," they said, and Weiner began looking for consolidation partners. That's fraught with problems anyway, as everyone in a district is going to have different opinions on whom they should consolidate with. The two major problems are the size of Weiner's district (yeah. Go ahead and laugh at that...GET IT ALL OUT, you jokers), and the wealth index.

Harrisburg & Valley View were always the front runners based on geographical distance, but that offers the first problem: Weiner School District is enormous. You see, most of the district is rural farmland. When both my siblings and I were in school, we were often the only kids within 7 miles who were going to school. No, wait, there were the Johnsons, too. So, for those of you who've been out here on the farm, as far as you could see when you look in any direction from my house, there were only 2 other kids. And that's the way MANY kids in the Weiner school district lived: in extremely rural areas on very large farms. Because of that, the Weiner district is very far reaching. Any school who consolidates with Weiner has to figure out how to get those children to the new school via bus. With Weiner's district covering everything from Fisher to Grubbs to Pumpkin Center (*waves from Pumpkin Center*) to Waldenburg, somebody is going to have to bus kids more than an hour and a half no matter who Weiner consolidates with! If Weiner went with Valley View, the kids from Fisher and beyond are going to have one heck of a commute. If it went with Harrisburg, the kids from Grubbs would have the longest. On the other side, there's the Newport district, but Bryan works there and he has a 40 minute commute driving himself straight there. A bus route would easily take more than an hour & a half with all the stops it had to make. So no matter which school Weiner goes with, some kids would be riding the bus for FAR too long.

The other problem is the wealth index. Weiner has very few people in it...and a great deal of money. If they were to consolidate with any other school, that school district's population of kids would only increase by what? 330 kids, right now? But Weiner has so much money in relation to the number of kids in the school that a school might actually find its state funding CUT while they received more kids. Now, I'd like to think that's unlikely; it's a bit of a no-brainer to think that the state would send less money and more kids to a school like Valley View. But the fact remains that because Weiner is in such a high tax bracket (so to speak), that the number of kids would almost certainly outstrip the increase in state funding that came with them. Valley View & Harrisburg are both bursting at the seams despite recent building projects in both. Now you're going to send them 330 more kids, very little extra money, and tell them the wear and tear on their buses is about to go sky high from driving miles and miles over more horrific gravel farm roads? Yeah. No wonder they're not jumping at the chance, right?

But Weiner is nothing if not creative, and with another school district called Delight, they formed a plan. Most of the money in a school district is tied up in administration. It takes a great deal of money to run a school, and that's entirely apart from teachers, facilities, etc. Superintendents cost money. Secretaries cost money. It costs money to have a school board meeting. So what if we could do something similar to what Texas does: keep the small schools, but consolidate the administrations so that we save most of the money? Sounds pretty smart, right?

The out-of-the-box bit here is that Delight is 200 miles away. Once upon a time, that would have been the killer: no way would that work if someone was having to drive that every other day. But that was when I was a kid. You know what we have now? We have cell phones. We have the internet. I, as a private citizen, can fire up my Macbook Pro, flip on the webcam, and have a chat with my in-laws in Frisco, Texas so they can see their grandbaby. Major corporations have employees that don't come in to a central office: they telecommute. In fact, it saves the corporation money; they don't have to provide a physical space for that employee every single day. How many times have you picked up the phone to call customer service and gotten someone in an entirely different region, or even country? More times than you know, probably! Given all that, surely 2 school districts in the same state could manage. Many of the things a superintendent does could be managed via cell phone or email, drastically decreasing the driving requirement.

Not to mention this could really be cutting edge on the technology facet. These two schools could use their technology to share resources. Kids having "classmates" they communicate with via email. Getting a guest lecture in chemistry from the instructor at Delight. Getting to share the wonder that is a Mr. Brown geometry lecture with another school district (those of you who didn't go to Weiner SERIOUSLY missed out! :D). Projects that cross schools. There is an incredible opportunity to increase technological literacy here. This could be something big.

But the state didn't see it that way, and when representatives from both eager districts presented all this information, it seems the Board of Education just shrugged & said no. Not with any real objections. Just no. I read in the Jonesboro Sun where one board member had said that distance learning would never be as good as teachers in the classrooms. I don't even understand that as an objection to this case. We're not talking about taking teachers out of classrooms. We're talking about adding distance learning to what's already going on! It seems these board members would rather bus a kid an hour & a half to put her in a classroom with 50 students to one teacher--because of course that's better than thinking outside the box to try something that's never been done before in this state.

And that's what it boils down to. The Arkansas Board of Education has really had its feet held to the fire in the last few years, and it's fearful. It's afraid to try something new, something that no one has tried before. I get where they're coming from, but look around us. Many are calling this the "Information Age". We have the tools to do this. Right now, in my pocket, there is a phone that works as a tiny computer, faster than the first laptop I ever worked with. This phone has access to the entire internet. I can communicate with nearly anyone I know with a few taps. Likely when you start commenting on this, I'll be checking those comments on that phone. To invent that, don't you think someone had to try something that had never been done before? To invent ANYTHING--the car, the plane, the internet itself, indoor plumbing!--someone had to try something that no one had tried before. Everything good that we have today is because someone didn't let that stop them. The people at these two school districts are passionate, and they have a plan, and folks, that's what makes big things happen. They have thought through this. They're prepared and they're not just willing to do this to save their schools--they're hopping at the chance. They are ready to make their own road.

I think these two school districts deserve the chance to try.

They really did dismiss us out of hand, honestly. Apparently there were things addressed repeatedly that were completely discounted at the end. They stressed "This is how this saves money, and how much money this will save." after EVERY point. Then at the end when the board members asked questions, one of them asked "But how is this supposed to save us any money?" The presenters from both school districts just gaped. It was like the board hadn't heard a word.

Thus far, I've tried to start a twitter hashtag: #standupforweiner. We think that using the town name for humor value will be helpful in getting outside-the-state attention, which is what we want, and why I'm letting you guys know about this. You see, Arkansas responds well to outside pressure. We have something of a complex about outsiders talking smack about our state. After all, how many of you have I met who went wide-eyed at my accent when you first met me? You already knew I was intelligent & well-spoken, and it clashed with an accent that's reserved for idiot rednecks on the television. Arkansans are sensitive about that, and we can use it. If any of you out-of-state would see your way to raising a fuss about this, I'd be in your debt. A wave of outside attention may influence the board of education when they re-hear our proposal on the Arcadia School District in two weeks. I've started a Flickr pool for photos of Weiner (you're all invited to join, PLEASE! Even if you don't have Weiner photos!). I've written to Steve Wozniak (yeah, I know!). I've friended just about every human being in Weiner who has a Facebook, & I'm pushing them to start Twitter accounts. People are asking ME for information and direction (that's unsettling). But whatever...our time is very limited, so I'll do everything I can.

That's the other problem: two weeks. We have VERY little time to kick up this fuss, and I'm using all of the means at my disposal, no matter how slim the chances. Am I going to be able to get #standupforweiner trending on Twitter? Probably not, but it certainly won't if I don't try. I wrote Steve Wozniak, for crying out loud. He's a major philanthropist and education is his forte. Is he going to write me back? Maybe not, but he certainly won't if I don't try. To that end, I directed all the gobs of Weiner citizens on my Facebook to his site and had THEM write, too. My father called me 5 times last night within 2 hours, all for my help in writing an email to the administrative assistant of Steve Wozniak. This whole thing has already made my life the Twilight Zone!

So here's our goal: in 2 weeks the State Board of Education will re-hear our proposal. By that time we want to have significant pressure on the board so they might actually LISTEN this time instead of dismissing us out of hand the way they did. If any of you are in a position to help kick up a fuss, ANY kind of fuss, I would really appreciate it. Letters to the editor, etc. Our biggest talking point is that Arkansas is refusing to allow us to do with technology what schools in Iowa & Indiana are already doing successfully. Just because it's never been tried, Arkansas is afraid to do it. That's what's going to pressure them: the idea that Arkansas is too backward to understand how technology makes this possible. Because it really is, and it's ridiculous. I love my state but I'm tired of us being so slow to adapt & so fearful of change. I guess this was the straw that broke the camel's back, for me.