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The Pine Bluff School District is preparing to absorb the Dollarway School District, with the deadline of July 1 for making that happen. The big picture purpose of the consolidation was made clear months ago when the state Board of Education made its decision. Mainly, the Dollarway district had fallen too far to be saved. What's left to do, however, is to put together two complex institutions and turn them into one cohesive, efficient school district.
Now, as the deadline is inching closer, officials are starting to work out many of the details. Running just one school district would be challenging from a variety of standpoints. Putting two districts together, well, the enormity of that task is daunting to say the least.
This week, faculty members, parents and students from the two districts put their heads together to try to work out the differences in the handbook. One administrator may have put it best in describing the exercise.
"The major challenge should be just making sure the kids are OK," said Willie Gulley, dean of students at Dollarway High School. "We both have ideas of how things should be, but keeping the kids' best interest and making it as easy on them as possible, making the transition as easy on them -- I'm not going to say that's the biggest challenge, but ... the biggest concern, is to make sure they're good with it, however it turns out."
Making sure the discipline codes that are used align with those from the state Education Department, e-school regulations, and the color of the uniform shirts that students will wear and in which grades they will wear them were just some of the topics addressed.
Other differences exist, as one might expect. Pine Bluff doesn't allow for makeup work in certain circumstances, for instance, while Dollarway does, and in Pine Bluff, no academic credit is allowed during an expulsion, while Dollarway does not have that policy. Corporal punishment is allowed in Pine Bluff but not in Dollarway. There was even one discussion about passing a cardiopulmonary resuscitation class and a civics exam before graduating.
This will not be easy, and Gulley made that clear.
"To be honest, everything stood out," he said, "because it's two totally different systems in trying to figure out what's the best for everyone involved, so you try to take the good from here and good from here and eliminate what they don't need. You want one system that works for everybody."
Yes, absolutely. But as the saying goes, the devil is in the details, and these patient folks are in the middle of it. We applaud their tenacity to get this done. Finding compromise, finding the best way forward will be crucial to the success of the new district. As we've said before, there's nothing easy about being an educator.
