Elkins School District’s grade-point average is on a tear.
In Arkansas, individual schools, but not districts, are assigned letter grades in the state’s evaluation system. So, Superintendent Jeremy Mangrum and his team determined the district’s yearly GPA based on the grades given to the rural district’s four schools. Over the last five years, the 1,400-student district has soared from 12th to second place for GPA in its cooperative areas in northwest Arkansas.
“The thing I’m most proud of is the work ethic and culture we have with our students and our staff,” says Mangrum, who was recently named the Arkansas Rural Ed Association’s 2023 Superintendent of the Year. “We really have honed in on ‘What do we want our students to know?’ and ‘How are we going to know when they know it?'”
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Academic achievement, implementing common assessments, and measuring student growth have been priorities for the Elkins School District’s professional learning communities.
“We’ve put a lot of effort into making sure those essential standards are identified and are taught and are learned,” Mangrum continues. “And we’re doing everything we can, if we assess those students and they show us they don’t know it, we’re using that to drive instruction and drive remediation to get those students to where they need to be before they finish the year and go onto to get to next grade level.”
Elkins School District faces change and challenge
Enrollment has increased by 20% over the last five years in the rural community that sits on the edge of some of the state’s largest school districts. Elkins, officially designated as a “rapidly growing district,” is currently building a multipurpose, extra-curricular activity center that is set to open in November and has additions to its middle and high schools in the works.
In the 2023-24 school year, change and challenge will be big themes after Arkansas approved one of “the biggest education legislative package anybody’s ever seen,” Mangrum says. The bill, known as the LEARNS Act, raises minimum teacher salaries to $50,000 per year, provides more resources for literacy instruction, establishes a voucher program, sets new safety standards and bans critical race theory, among its other regulations.
“I’m excited about the change but with that, there are challenges with implementing some of the things,” Mangrum explains. “The exciting part for me is the challenges of trying to make sure we’re doing everything we’re supposed to do with fidelity, and trying to get it from the lawmaking process to the classroom and making sure we’re doing it in a way that benefits students.”
Unfunded mandates—and unintended consequences—are one challenge that tends to impact small and medium districts disproportionately any time new legislation is passed. “After we live through this for a year, you always find things that come up that nobody thought about on the front end, but man, it’s a problem, and from a funding standpoint, we have to have adequate dollars to give a good solid education to our students,” he adds.
Meanwhile, the community is “beyond excited” about the multipurpose center the district will open this fall. It will host athletic events, graduation activities, and band and choir concerts. Small districts tend not to have the resources to build single-purpose facilities, such as a dedicated basketball arena. “When you’re in a small town, the school is the center of the community, and we like that,” he explains. “We want to be the straw that stirs the drink.”
When he was a teacher and basketball coach earlier in his career, he was attracted to K12 administration by the opportunity to make a big difference outside the classrooms. “You can impact an entire community, an entire city, with good school leadership,” he concludes.
