DATE=09/24/03

TYPE=English Feature

NUMBER=7-37881

TITLE=Arkansas School Crisis

BYLINE=Ted Landphair

TELEPHONE=619-3515

DATELINE=Marianna, Arkansas

EDITOR=Rob Sivak 619-2023

CONTENT=

/ / ATTN: EDUCATION, AMERICANA / /

INTRO: The U-S economy is strengthening, but recovery appears to be many months away for financially struggling states. In one southern state, Arkansas, weak revenues have helped fuel a growing education crisis. Arkansas ranks forty-sixth out of fifty in teacher salaries, equally low in spending per pupil, and near the bottom in student achievement. VOA's Ted Landphair just returned from Arkansas, where a teacher who has worked in one of the state's poorest schools for thirty-two years put a human face on the crisis.

ANCR Things are so dire in the home state of former president Bill Clinton that the state supreme court has given the governor and legislature until January to correct drastic imbalances in facilities, textbooks, and teacher salaries between relatively prosperous school districts and poor ones like Lee County, in the Mississippi River Delta region of the state. This is home to the blues; cotton and rice and soybean farms; and dusty little towns so bleak you're lucky to find an open store or to get a cell-phone signal.

CUT ONE classroom ambience

Establish -- take under but NOT OUT

ANCR Three-fourths of Arkansas adults have at least a high-school education. But in Lee County, where Nancy Blount teaches Spanish in the county's one public high school, only about half the students make it that far. Ms. Blount -- one of twelve children of an Arkansas tenant farmer and his wife -- says that for a poor girl, education was the only way out the fields.

Classroom ambience out

CUT TWO BLOUNT AND REPORTER :37 [:21 to opt]

I didn't like chopping cotton in a hundred degrees (Farenheit; 40 degrees centigrade). And I knew that if I did not get educated, that's where I would be the rest of my life -- or cleaning folks' houses for forty cents an hour. When I got out of the cotton fields, I promised the good Lord that I would spend my time and my life trying to help kids who are growing up pretty much like I did.

/////BEGIN OPT/////

[REPORTER] Does it break your heart, though, to see some of these kids -- where they live and how they have to get along.

[BLOUNT] Definitely. And also it breaks my heart when a lot of them won't take advantage of the education that's placed before them. We're teaching the kids of kids who had kids.

/////END OPT/////

ANCR Nancy Blount says Lee County is so bereft of industry, the schools are the second-biggest employer. That means there's almost no tax base to pay for them. Kids and families leave Lee County in search of work, and school enrollment typically drops by 150 or more each year. That means even less money from Washington and the Arkansas capital in Little Rock.

CUT THREE BLOUNT :20

They penalize us for having fewer students. Yet they hold us to the same standards. And because of the low salary base, we can't attract the young and bright [teacher] because they go someplace else. There is really nothing else to do here. They can go right up the road somewhere and make five, ten thousand dollars more.

ANCR Despite the low pay and generally bleak surroundings, a few bright, young teachers DO come to Lee County, and there are student success stories. Doctors and lawyers, a state appeals-court judge, and even a recent U-S transportation secretary went to school here. But true optimism is hard to find.

Nancy Blount can afford a comfortable home, many kilometers north of the depressed and depressing county seat of Marianna, only because she and her husband, Sam, operate a funeral home and small limousine service on the side.

Ms. Blount says she would love to see Arkansas' governor -- or even President Bush -- spend a week in her shoes, facing a classroom of what she says are mostly decent kids with grim prospects. But she says teachers themselves must share the blame for the schools' struggles.

CUT FOUR BLOUNT :28

We've made schools work that should not have worked -- should have been closed a long time ago. We've made them work at our expense, because we were concerned about saying, 'Let's do it anyway for the children.' So as a result, the state and the federal government have decided that, 'Well, when we do the budget, we can do everybody else, and whatever is left, we'll give it to education. Those educators are so dedicated, they're going to do it anyway.'

ANCR Two years ago, Congress passed President Bush's education initiative called the No Child Left Behind Act. It mandated a series of changes aimed at improving students' academic achievement. That makes great theory, Nancy Blount says, but she sees no sign of new teachers, better equipment, or additional funding in Lee County.

CUT FIVE BLOUNT AND REPORTER :35

[BLOUNT] There are a lot of mandates and ideas about how we're going to improve education, and what educators HAVE to do, what kids HAVE to be responsible for. But then, we don't have the money to fund it.

[REPORTER] I really don't understand how you can't be depressed by this.

[BLOUNT] Oh, it's depressing. But I keep saying, 'Something has to change.' If we continue doing the same things, we're going to keep getting the same results. As long as we're going along and letting them under-fund, under-pay, let our facilities fall in -- and we're still teaching in them -- they're going to continue.

/////BEGIN OPT/////

ANCR Ms. Blount knows that critics often say higher salaries don't equate to better teaching. Nonsense, she says.

CUT SIX BLOUNT :23

It's not just the money. But being able to afford a comfortable living so that you can spend your time preparing to teach and teaching. Teachers have to work more than one job -- two or three jobs -- to get the necessities and a few desires, not being extravagant. That's time that could be spent preparing to teach, to work with parents, with students after school, that teachers don't have.

/////END OPT/////

ANCR Ms. Blount sees the future as a stark choice:

CUT SEVEN BLOUNT :16

If things do not change in the way schools are funded, if the state and federal governments don't play a larger part, we're not going to make it. If you think education is expensive, try ignorance!

ANCR Facing that January deadline set by the state court, Arkansas' governor has called a special session of the legislature for December to try to, somehow, find more money to spread around, even to poor, rural areas like Lee County. Where that money will come from, nobody knows.

[signed]