By DAVID NICHOL
T-H Staff Writer
The most recent "report card" for public schools in Arkansas was recently published, and raised some questions locally over its accuracy, and what criteria were used for the report.
Alice Barnes, deputy superintendent of the Forrest City School District, sat down and talked about the report card last week. She said any such report will have some confusion, mainly because of a a lack of standardized reporting.
"We don't have a standard accountability system," she said, saying that what she meant by that is that every school reports things in its own way. This makes it hard to compare different districts.
For instance, the simplest example, and the easiest to explain, that Barnes gave was on student enrollment. According to the report card, Forrest City High School has an enrollment of 815, while Wynne High School, drawing from a less populated area, has an enrollment of 850. The difference is all in who gets counted as a high school student.
"Forrest City High School comprises grades 10 through 12," Barnes said. "Wynne High School is grades nine through 12. If we were to count our ninth graders in our high school population, our number would be larger. We have about 330 ninth graders, who would be added to the 815."
More complicated is the reporting of ACT test scores, according to Barnes.
"ACT's are not required of every student," she said. "There is a group of students who choose to take the tests, depending on what they are going to do when they leave high school. Many schools test only those students who have the desire to go to college."
Forrest City, she said, has an open door policy, which naturally affects the grade average.
"Anyone who wants to take the ACT, we're allowing them to do that," she said. "We also accept walk-ins on the morning of the test. And naturally, that would be the students who decided at the last minute, and they may or may not know if it's something they want to do. And they probably will not do as well because they haven't gone through the practices or taken it seriously enough to study and try to do better on the test."
She said there is no standard on who takes the test.
"Some may use a screening process, others may not. Therefore, you're not getting a true picture of what the grades are."
The report card had Forrest City with a 17.1 on the ACT. Barnes said the statewide average is 20.
"If you go into college with 19 or better, you're exempt from taking remedial classes."
Even more complicated is the "difference from predicted" section of the report card. Barnes said such things as socio-economic status, benchmark test scores and SAT percentile are figured in. According to the report, Forrest City was more than 13 points below the prediction.
"The state has a statistician, who actually tabulates all the scores and comes up with the variables and margins of error," said Barnes.
When asked if quality of education can be reduced into statistics, she said, "I would say no. You can manipulate numbers to do or say anything your want. Yo can take that data and change it to say all kids are performing, or you can change and say no kids are performing."
She said again she believes standardization is the key.
"I think the key to the whole thing is to find a reporting system that is standard, whereby all schools are using the same procedures for reporting data," she said. "As it is now what they're trying to do is compare schools, district to district."
And with the race to look better than the next district, some people may use the way they report their data to make sure their school district looks better, she agreed.
"It's that competitive nature of education," she said. "Competition is good, don't get me wrong. Some competition, I think, is wonderful. But when we use competition in a negative way, in the end we hurt the students."
She said she is proud of the Forrest City School District.
"I'm not here to make excuses, because I think Forrest City is doing a fantastic job. I really do," she said. "I think if you take the top 10 percent of our students and match them up with the top 10 percent in any high school in the state, we would do very well. It has been proven time and again, when our mock trial team goes to competition, or our gifted and talented. We do well.
"But the data doesn't report it that way. Therefore we don't get the accolades we deserve."
Rainy weather kept some plungers away during Saturday's annual Polar Bear Plunge, but with over $4,500 in donations collected, Plunge coordinator Anita Vandiver said this year's event was once again a success.
Plungers from as far away as Cabot were on-hand Saturday at Lake Dunn at Village Creek to participate in the annual fundraiser for Special Olympics. According to Vandiver, donations for this year have matched the 2002 totals with more donations expected this week.
"We're really pleased with the turnout that we had and the donations that have come in so far. We're at $4,500 as of this morning (today) and we're expecting a few more donations to come in this week," Vandiver said.
According to Vandiver, there were fewer plungers this year, but she attributed that to the weekend rains.
"I know that we had a few people that didn't come out today because of the weather, but we will do this rain or shine, sleet snow or hail. I can understand why they didn't come out, but we thank those that did," she said.
Prizes were given in several categories Saturday with David Kennedy taking the prize for top fundraiser, Mike Peckham and Janet Peckam taking honors for Male and Female best costume and Keith Storm whisking away the prize for most scantily clad.