Arkansas Study Circles Project Receives Two-Year Grant for Education Reform Conversations

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December 1, 2002 | | Little Rock, AR

The Arkansas Study Circles Project has been awarded a significant grant from the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation to continue its work in helping launch study circles on education in communities throughout the state.

The Arkansas Supreme Court recently upheld a lower court ruling that Arkansas public schools were both inadequate and inequitable in the delivery of education to the schoolchildren of the state. The Arkansas Study Circles Project is part of the Arkansas School Boards Association Educational Foundation. The organization has been the driving force for launching study circles to engage Arkansans in meaningful conversations about improving education for the state's 500,000 schoolchildren.

The grant, for nearly a quarter-million dollars over the next two years, will help the organization launch numerous study circles throughout the state to engage Arkansans in an effort to improve their public schools.

The organization used the model, with help from the Study Circles Resource Center, to help shape a massive one-night event last April to discuss the question: "What do we want our schools to do to educate our children." The event, called "Speak Up, Arkansas!" was developed between mid-January until April 4, when 6,000 people at 91 sites came together to provide their ideas for the legislatively-mandated Arkansas Blue Ribbon Commission on Public Education. The concerns that were articulated that night by Arkansans were collected and submitted to the Commission to help shape its recommendations on education reform to the state's General Assembly.

Members of the state's School Boards Association convinced the Commission that this type of public engagement would be far more meaningful than its original notion to conduct public hearings on one night in the state's 75 counties.

The collaboration that created the event included the Commission, the Arkansas School Boards Association, and the Arkansas Chamber of Commerce. It included unprecedented live media coverage, including a live two-hour broadcast by the Arkansas Educational Television Network, a half-hour of live, primetime coverage by the state's largest ABC-TV affiliate, KATV, and the Arkansas Public Radio Network.

"There was no way to know exactly how many people in our state were impacted by the event," said ASBA Executive Director Dan Farley, "because we will never know how many people watched it on TV or listened to it on the radio stations or followed it on the live webcast that night."

"After working very hard on the project for several weeks, it turned out that I would be out-of-state that night," Farley said. "Because of the media's participation, I was able to see and hear the event as it happened on my laptop computer in another state."

ASBA (with assistance from SCRC) trained the facilitators and then worked with the Arkansas Chamber in site coordination to prepare for the event. "We did it in an amazingly short period of time," Farley said. "It was monumental for our state."

Following that evening, the Arkansas Study Circles Project offered full-scale, four-week-long study circles this fall in a number of Arkansas communities, called "Speak Up, Arkansas! The Conversations Continue." The organization collaborated with the Arkansas PTA and Arkansas Advocates for Children & Families to sponsor the follow-up study circles. Data from all the sites' action forums are presently being compiled by the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and will be shared with the public and the state's General Assembly soon after the biennial legislative session convenes in January.

"We believe in citizen participation and the kind of civil, democratic dialogue so key to the beliefs of SCRC's founder, the late visionary citizen, Paul Aicher," Farley said. "After the April event and during the planning period for this fall's study circles, I and three of my staff spent time with SCRC staff in Connecticut designing the new conversations. It was one of the supreme moments of my life to have been able to spend a few minutes with Paul Aicher while we were there. Despite his illness, he met with me and further inspired me to continue our public engagement work."

"I look upon this amazing year as a tribute to him and his vision for re-energizing the true spirit of democracy in this country," Farley said.

The Rockefeller grant will aid the association in expanding its work to involve Arkansans to help reconstruct public education in the state to more adequately and equitably educate its public school students.

"We view this as an unprecedented opportunity to significantly improve and advance education in a state that historically has been near the bottom of the list in every educational statistic. We believe people tend to support what they help to build, and we have a chance now to validate that premise," Farley said. "Education is at the core of everything we aspire to—including the democracy we all cherish."

In 1974 the Trustees of Governor Winthrop Rockefeller's Estate endowed the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation to continue the work of The Rockwin Fund. Governor Rockefeller set up The Rockwin Fund in 1954 and, on an annual basis from 1956 until his death in 1973, funded projects and programs he believed were important to improving the quality of life in Arkansas.

The Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation is a private, nonprofit foundation whose mission is to improve the lives of Arkansans by funding programs and projects that improve education; economic development; and economic, racial and social justice. During the past 28 years the Foundation has awarded over $62 million in grants.

Additional information about the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation can be found on its website, www.wrfoundation.org.

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