The start of a new school year means busy times for the Eureka Springs School District.
“Everything is going good,” Superintendent Bryan Pruitt said Wednesday. “Everybody is back in the groove.”
A new volleyball season and after- school program are underway, a Highlander youth soccer camp is just around the corner, the middle school held its annual parent meeting last week and the elementary school will host parents for informational meetings on Tuesday, Sept. 12.
“We went through a wave of sickness, which seems to always happen the first week or two of school, but we’re through that and on the mend and everybody is back and ready to buckle down and get after it,” Pruitt said. “We’ve been staying real busy.
“We’re getting back into the flow of things and everybody seems like they’re tickled to be here.”
Pruitt said district attendance has held steady since the school year started with around 650 students.
“We’re right about where we were on the first day of school,” he said. “I hope to keep that number.”
Enrollment numbers are a good indication of how business is going around Eureka Springs, especially with tourism being the city’s main industry, Pruitt said.
“You can tell the economy is good,” he said. “When the economy is fairly decent our numbers hang in there pretty good. When the economy goes to the tank we usually lose students. I can always kind of tell how business is going in Eureka Springs by our numbers. If the parents still have their jobs we still have the kids.
“It’s linked together.” The district’s after-school program, which is run through a partnership with the Eureka Springs Community Center, started the new year Tuesday.
“We started with about 35 kids and we’re excited about that,” Pruitt said. “We have a great partnership with the community center. It’s housed on our campuses but they run it for us. We always wait until after Labor Day to start it and it is a good service for our families.
“We can do remediation work, tutoring, enrichment. Whatever the student may need.”
The district announced this week that graduation ceremonies for the class of 2024 will be held at 10 a.m. Saturday, May 11, which is earlier than in recent years, Pruitt said.
“We normally determine when graduation is based on when our AP exams are given in May,” he said. “The seniors are excited and ready to get done so as soon as AP exams are finished up we have graduation. Also, we work around the end-of-the-year soccer state tournament and state trap shoot tournament.
“We coordinate around all of it but the main thing is the AP exams.”
The 2024 graduation will be a week earlier than in 2023.
“Sometimes we go about two weeks longer,” Pruitt said. “But it’s just the way it worked out this year. They’ll be ready to go.
“It’s kind of a two-way deal. It’s a good opportunity for the seniors to finish up and get the next part of their lives started and gives us a chance to finish the school year with the other kids in high school and end the year on a good note.”
