By Rick Harvey
PruittEureka Springs Times-Echo
Eureka Springs School District Superintendent Bryan Pruitt came away impressed with what he heard during a recent meeting with the state’s new education leader.
Pruitt was one of 16 superintendents who met with Arkansas Department of Education Secretary Jacob Oliva on Wednesday, April 5, at the Ozarks Unlimited Resources Education Service Cooperative in Harrison. Berryville’s Owen Powell and Green Forest’s Matt Summers also attended.
The stop was Oliva’s 17th as he has traveled the state laying out his roadmap for not only initializing the new LEARNS Act but also his vision for other changes within the state’s education system.
While the LEARNS Act, raises in teacher salaries and the voucher program were a hot topic, much of Oliva’s presentation involved the “educational side” of his department, including state testing standards, the local superintendents said.
One big change in the future will be in standardized testing, which currently is outsourced to out-of-state companies. Those standards eventually will be written by Arkansas teachers with the goal of developing more clarity for teachers and students.
“We’re going to try to have more clarity in our standards and our essential standards that our teachers use to teach with,” said Pruitt, who met with Eureka Springs teachers on Thursday, April 6, to go over the information that was presented in the meeting with Oliva. “They’re going to make them where it’s easier for people to understand, for parents to understand, for students to understand and for teachers to understand. When everyone understands them we ought to be able to teach them and then build a state test based on the clarity of those standards.”
When it comes to the LEARNS Act, funding was the most talked- about topic as the minimum salary for teachers in the state has been raised to $50,000. The possibility of not receiving enough funding is a concern for Pruitt, whose district relies on funding from taxation because of Eureka Springs’ tourism industry.
“We’re going to have to tighten up a few things and watch exactly what we’re spending things on,” Pruitt said. “And with this inflation, all the things that went up, from all of our consumables and things like that, we have to be a little more mindful and just be good stewards of the community’s dollar.”
