Episode Details

Happy Friday!

I hope you have had a good week of return coming out of our Christmas Break! I trust that your time over the holidays was enjoyable and well spent with your family and friends. The first week of 2023 marks the beginning of the eighteenth week of the 2022-2023 school year and we have a lot of good work in front of us to close out this school year and reach our district goals.

This week also marks the beginning of a new gubernatorial administration for our state and this means a new educational vision, goals, laws, policies, rules, procedures, and leaders at the state level. This began right away today as Governor Sanders proclaimed four executive orders, one of them being the resolution for her LEARNS initiative. I want to use this Wrap-up to provide you with some insight into what this may mean for us educators.

The headline of this Wrap-up may be exciting to some of you and ominous to others. I think we will experience a little of both but, overall, if the goals of LEARNS are achieved it will mean good things for our state.

LEARNS

This stands for Literacy, Empowerment, Accountability, Readiness, Networking, and School Safety and Governor Sanders released an executive order today instructing our new Secretary of Education, Jacob Oliva, to carry out this initiative. We have not seen the bill or bills of new laws that will be enacted to carry out this order but Secretary Oliva emailed all superintendents on Wednesday explaining that our state department would examine current practices in education to determine whether or not they meet these ends.

One of the concerns of the initiative is related to empowerment, which is referring to school choice. Secretary Oliva did say that public schools should be the preferred choice for parents and that it is his focus to make that happen. However, another matter related to empowerment has been the potential for vouchers to be expanded giving parents taxpayer funds to help pay tuition for private schools and even use for homeschooling. We need to monitor how this develops and consider how it meshes with the accountability portion of this initiative because right now, there is no accountability for homeschooled students other than their own.

The whole LEARNS initiative is encouraging and legislators have reached out to superintendents and administrators to learn more about the rules and regulations that bog us down as a way to reach these goals without having to overhaul our educational system. As I communicate with our state leaders, I would like to give you the opportunity to provide me with input; so, please take part in this next Thought Exchange.

I should add here that Secretary Oliva was the senior chancellor for the Florida Department of Education and you may recall that in a past Wrap-up from February 25th, 2022, I mentioned how Florida was abandoning standardized tests to focus on progress monitoring. This could be an indication of things to come and it would be encouraging for this administration to do the same for the students of Arkansas.

What We Are Asking For

We have become very good at doing school but are we doing the most for student learning to happen and the most to give our local communities the workforce and entrepreneurs it needs to thrive? This is a question we have been asking for a while as the issue of school choice has become more popular. One of our conclusions has be