Green Forest school board planning for future

The Green Forest School District is looking to the future when it comes to potential facility projects.

At its regular monthly meeting held Oct. 15, the school board had preliminary discussions with an architect and district consultant Aliza Jones with the Arkansas Association of School Facilities Administrators regarding future needs as buildings continue to age and the district continues to grow, according to superintendent David Gilmore.

“We had some preliminary discussions on potential building plans for the future of the district here,” Gilmore said. “We looked at potential things like a new high school, which we are very much in need of, and maybe some other square-footage expansion with classrooms for other buildings. We’re just trying to keep up with the amount of students that we currently have, where we’ve really grown in the last five years and added about another 200 kids, so we’re just bulging at the seams and just trying to keep up our facilities and classrooms’ square-footage to accommodate those students.

“Some of our buildings are aging. Our high school is aging. At some point we would like to look at the consideration of replacing that building.” The district has land available for future projects, Gilmore said.

“We’ve got several options there,” he said. “We’ve got the piece of property south of the current high school and then we’ve got the big field right next to the intermediate building, but I’m not sure 100 percent on the buildability on that because it could be in a flood area. That’s something the architect would have to advise us on a little more. But, we do have the property. We would just need to develop a plan and make sure it’s what we need that would fit our needs first for our school for quite some time.”

Adjusting what grades are housed in what building and what exactly the priority needs are has also been discussed, the superintendent

“We’ve talked about shifting things a little bit,” Gilmore said. “A plan was submitted to the state department last year asking for partnership money and we have been approved for, they said, 44,000 square foot of space. We haven’t received a number on that, like how much money that’s actually going to equate for us. We should know by May 2025 and we can kind of go from there.

“The original plan was kind of a larger scale plan that included a seventh- and eighth-grade building, a high school and a performing arts center. But, with the economy, and the way things are, we know we want to be able to get what we need and maybe just kind of scale some of that back a little bit to get what we need and what we might be able to potentially afford here within the district without putting too much on the community.

“There’s still a lot of talk on that, exactly what our plans are and what we’re going to do. But, we do know we need a new high school and we do know we need some other square footage. We’ve talked about a couple of different options where we would shift kids around and make it more equitable between each building and so on.”

Gilmore said with enrollment in the district continuing to grow, having adequate learning space is becoming more challenging. “ “We literally have kids, some areas receiving some services in hallways,” the superintendent said. “We’ve taken over any little extra storage area and kind of made those into little small classroom spaces. It kind of reminds me of when I worked in Berryville and we were kind of packed at the seams at that time and then they were able to do some building and make some growth happen and allow us at the time to get kids back in the classrooms where they needed to be.

“We do have some portable buildings on the campus here, and kids are using those spaces, but some of them have been here for quite some time, I’m talking since the 1980s. Portable buildings that were intended to be a temporary fix have become more of a permanent fix and they’re aging.

“We’ve got some issues we’ve got to work on to get updated on our facilities and get back adequate classroom spaces for all the kids that we have.”

The board also approved one-time bonuses for all employees, that could be renewed next year, Gilmore said.

ATLAS TESTING RESULTS Results on the state’s new ATLAS testing for students in grades 3 through 10 were recently released and Gilmore said one website showed the district has improved in state rankings.

“This was a new test for the state across the board and was a new baseline for everyone,” the superintendent said of the inaugural year of the test that took place last spring. “The district did make some growth in some areas. I was looking at the site schooldigger. com and they strictly just put out test scores and don’t worry about other things like attendance or graduation rates and our district did show some growth there.

“I believe we came up in like 23 places as a district in the state. We still know there’s room for growth, but with it being a new test last year, the teachers didn’t fully know what to expect and the students were not used to it as well. We are taking steps this year to make sure teachers know which standards are going to be aligned to these assessments and make sure they’re teaching those standards … and prepare students for the format of the test.

Gilmore said he’s a fan of the new testing system, saying it’s more simplified.

“Before they used to use terms like unpacking the standards, and it was because standards were kind of complicated at times. You kind of had to dig into the standards and try to figure out what it was really trying to tell you. They’ve tried to simplify the standards and make it where the test does match more of what the standards you’re asked to teach.

“So, I think there’s a little bit more of a comparison there, or correlation there, to what they tell you you’re supposed to teach and what’s actually on the test. I do like those parts of it, and it is a rigorous test. I mean, it requires our kids to to put a lot of thought into it and to apply concepts at a rigorous level. So, I do see some different benefits to it.”

ATLAS, which stands for Arkansas Teaching, Learning and Assessment System, tests students in math, science and English language arts.

UPDATE ON GRANT BENEFITS

Gilmore said a recent grant the district received for high-impact tutoring is already benefiting students.

“It’s going really well,” he said. “We were able to hire five additional, very highly qualified teachers to come in and help tutor our students. They’re working with small groups of students throughout the day. I’ve personally observed a lot of that instruction going on where they are pulling kids out of the class and working with them in small groups during times that they normally wouldn’t have. Like extra math or extra literacy to those kids.”

Other times, the tutor will work alongside the regular classroom teacher with other groups of students, the superintendent added.

“I can’t imagine that it’s going to do anything but help our students show some growth. With our ATLAS testing data back, it shows us which students particularly had some struggles. We can use that data to group those kids with those tutors and get extra help for them.”