Our View ‘Distressed’ schools are, indeed, distressing

Our View

‘Distressed’ schools are, indeed, distressing

Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s proposed 2017 balanced budget calls for spending a whopping $2,188,136,184 of our tax dollars on the state’s public schools, among the highest expenditures in state government, and yet some schools are failing.

Just the other day, we’re told three more districts and 24 schools are now on the so-called distressed list because of chronically low student test scores.

In other words, these districts and schools are failing to do their job in educating the children that attend them. Furthermore, as we’ve pointed out, after just three years on the job, roughly 1 in 3 teachers leaves the profession because of what they claim as stress and unacceptable workload.

Two and two just aren’t adding up here folks. Here we are spending BILLIONS of our tax dollars to fund a system that is suppose to insure it can produce a successful product, which is quality education for our children.

We’re all too familiar with the term distressed schools as evident in the challenges West Memphis School District and the Marion School District have faced in taking in the scores of students from the now-defunct school districts in Hughes, Crawfordsville and Turrell.

Let’s be totally honest in our observation of this sad situation and say that the crux of the problem is these schools and teachers are burdened with the enormous challenge of working with children who are products of single parent homes, raised by grandparents or one of several children being raised in economically depressed situations. These teachers are often faced with dealing with children with absolutely little or no basic skills and are expected to form a basic foundation these children should have acquired from the time of birth to them being placed in public schools.

This situation makes it impossible for some school districts, particularly in the more rural and depressed areas of the state, to take on the vast number of these problematic children while also expecting to meet the high standards that have been placed upon them.

In the majority of these cases where the Arkansas Department of Education has either labeled these schools as distressed, taken them over or actually shut them down it must be said it isn’t altogether the fault of the dedicated teachers.

We are faced in this state with a poverty issue with over 260,000 Arkansans classified as “poor” and dependent upon everything from food stamps to government supported child care.

Besides the state’s public schools being faced with dealing with situations stemming from this poverty problem the state’s second largest agency, the BILLION DOLLAR Department of Human Services, is attempting to cope with everything from providing these children with free health care, nutritional aid and even foster care for the growing number of children being abused and neglected.

Oftentimes, it is the children from these situations and conditions that our public schools must attempt to cope with great difficulty, as evident in the number of districts and schools with chronically low student test scores.

This is an enormous problem that involves way more than what we are seeing in our public schools and an issue that must involved community leaders, churches and concerned citizens if there is ever a chance to see the results we are looking for, which is giving these children a fair chance at simply surviving in life.

We cannot depend or rely upon government to take on such responsibilities and expect anything other than what we are now experiencing.