Southeast Arkansas school district’s loss of students, revenue spark fears of closure

Norman Hill (left), financial consultant and former interim director of the Southeast Arkansas Education Service Cooperative, explains the Dumas School District’s budget cuts, which he recommended, to the school board, business manager Janice Stennis (third from right), Superintendent Camille Sterrett (second from right) and Board President Alan Minor (right) on Tuesday, August 27, 2024. (Tess Vrbin/Arkansas Advocate)

DUMAS — The Dumas School District’s steep enrollment decline is feeding local residents’ frustration with district leadership and raising fears they will lose their schools.

The district, which serves parts of Desha, Drew and Lincoln counties, counted 838 students as of Aug. 30, according to data provided by Superintendent Camille Sterrett. That’s a 13% drop from last school year and an 18% drop since 2021.

Dwindling enrollment also means lost revenue — more than $7,000 per student, according to the superintendent — to a district already struggling financially.

“If [the district] loses students at the exponential rate it’s losing them, we will not have a school system in five years,” local physician Dr. Sarah Franklin told the school board at its June 25 meeting.

Franklin is among the many local residents alarmed at the precipitous enrollment decline — which outpaces the city’s population decline — and what it portends for the future of the district and its students.

“Do you see that there’s a problem?” Franklin’s husband, AJ Franklin, asked district leadership at the June meeting. “Or do y’all just say, ‘Well, every day of the week, this is just going to happen [and] inevitably Dumas is going to fade to nothing?’”

“We all see that problem, and that problem is discussed at school board meetings,” Board President Alan Minor replied.

Dumas residents’ fears are shared by families in small districts across Arkansas that face consolidation or state takeover when they can’t find a way to survive. 

Arkansas’ rural schools struggle with a myriad of challenges, including attracting and retaining educators to regions with fewer economic opportunities and lower wages than more populous communities. Declining populations complicate district finances because most funding comes from the local tax base and per-student state funding. 

Dumas and the state’s southeast region have seen steady population declines for years, U.S. Census data shows, but changes in state law have also made it easier for parents to move their children to private schools and other public school districts.

While some former Dumas students have gone to private schools or been homeschooled thanks to the school voucher program created through the LEARNS Act of 2023, several have transferred to other public school districts bordering Dumas, including DeWitt, McGehee and Star City.

The LEARNS Act mostly eliminated a cap on public school transfers, which made it easier for families to put their children in school districts in which they do not live, Sterrett said.

According to data from each district obtained via the state’s Freedom of Information Act, DeWitt, McGehee and Star City enrollment numbers are similar or slightly higher than Dumas, but none saw a triple-digit enrollment drop in one year in the past three school years, as Dumas did. Star City has gained students every year for the past three years.

Enrollment declines also have made the Dumas district more racially segregated as white and Hispanic students have left while Black students remain, said Kitty Greenup, who was a paraprofessional in the district for 27 years before retiring this year. Greenup was appointed to the school board in July.

The district’s student population was 68% Black, 17% white and 13% Hispanic as of 2023. The remaining 2% were Asian, Native American and multiracial students, according to a district report. As of Aug. 30, the district’s students were 75% Black and 23% white with Hispanic students in both populations, according to enrollment data.

“[There’s been] not only white flight, but we’ve had brain drain as well, where it seems like everybody who could get out of the district did,” Greenup said. “This has been going on in earnest for probably the last five years.”

In a written statement handed out at the June meeting in response to pre-submitted questions, Sterrett and the board said they have “absolutely no control” over parents’ decisions to send their children elsewhere.

Such responses have not quelled public concern, especially in the wake of recent layoffs aimed at addressing funding shortfalls.

’A matter of time’

In April, the school board approved cutting 19% of district employees, closing its K-2 school (Central Elementary) and consolidating all elementary grades into Reed Elementary, which previously housed only grades 3-5.

The reduction in force and school closure were recommended by Norman Hill, who until June 30 was interim director of the Southeast Arkansas Education Service Cooperative. The state Department of Education tapped him last year to review the Dumas district’s finances.

A comparison of the district’s active contracts for the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years shows a reduction of 39 positions, including 22 teachers, five paraprofessionals, four custodians and four food service workers.

Staff cuts saved the district $1.2 million in salaries and fringe benefits, Hill said, and closing the lower elementary school saved about $150,000. He also said some of the positions had already been vacant due to resignations and retirements.

Both elementary schools earned an “F” ranking from the state education department for the 2022-23 school year. The middle and high schools received a “D.”

Central Elementary School in Dumas on Tuesday, June 27, 2024. The school housed grades K-2 until the Dumas School District closed the school due to financial strain and moved all elementary grades into the building that previously housed only grades 3-5. (Tess Vrbin/Arkansas Advocate)

The school closure, employee cuts and poor rankings have prompted many Dumas residents to vent their frustration during board meetings and voice distrust of Sterrett, who became superintendent in July 2022.

Sterrett has defended the cuts and said they had been building for at least a decade.

“There should have been a change years ago,” she said in June.

The cuts allowed the district to keep what remains of a $2 million private trust fund to use as needed, Hill said. Without the layoffs and school closure, the district would have drained the remaining $1.2 million from the fund, part of a deceased Dumas couple’s multimillion-dollar estate, and had no operating funds left by the end of the school year, he said.

“If we hadn’t made the cuts, it would have been a matter of time before the state shut [the district] down because they didn’t have the money,” Hill said.

Hill told the public at the Aug. 27 school board meeting that the trust fund was the sole reason the district did not close last year.

Concerned citizen Lonzell Dodds said this was news to him.

“I don’t know why that’s been so hard to answer,” he said.

‘Blank check’ concerns

In June, the board authorized Sterrett to transfer an unspecified amount of money from the district’s building fund and the private trust fund into the net legal fund balance — the fund that covers district operations, debt service and teacher salaries — in order to balance district revenues and expenditures.

Audience members voiced discomfort with the board’s unanimous vote. The need for financial solvency doesn’t mean boards should give administrators “a blank check,” Dr. Franklin said.

Asked if the district has ever been audited other than by the annual required review by Arkansas Legislative Audit, Sterrett said, “We do what’s required.”

Allison Chambers, who taught high school science before resigning in May, stormed out of the meeting and later said she was upset that Sterrett and the board showed “absolutely no interest” in the public’s concerns.

“They seemed to be more worried about controlling their narrative and what they wanted you to believe about this district than actually speaking truths,” Chambers said.

An Aug. 21 email sent by education department fiscal services employee Jason Miller noted a “steady decline” in the district’s various funds since 2021. The district’s building fund and net legal balance dropped by $1.8 million and $1.5 million, respectively, from June 2021 to June 2024, according to the email. Meanwhile, the student population fell by more than 200 students.

“Looks like they have been making transfers to simply operate,” Miller wrote.

Sterrett’s “blank check” closed a roughly $1.16 million hole in the district’s budget, created when it spent that much more than it received last year, according to Hill. The superintendent transferred more than $357,000 from the building fund and about $800,000 from the trust fund to shore up the net legal fund balance, he said this month.

More cuts?

The LEARNS Act — which raised the state’s minimum teacher pay to $50,000 a year and guaranteed minimum $2,000 raises to those already earning above that — added to the Dumas district’s financial strain in the 2023-24 school year, Hill said.

The state helped districts pay for the salary increases, but it still wasn’t enough to stave off Dumas’ layoffs and other spending cuts, he said.

The Department of Education gave the Dumas district $1,075,667 for teacher salaries and benefits for the 2023-24 school year. Districts will receive the same amount for the 2024-25 school year they received the year prior.

Arkansas schools compress salary schedules in response to LEARNS Act

Hill said these amounts were based on the number of teachers in each district and their salaries before the mandatory raises: the less experienced a district’s teachers were, the more money the state provided to meet the increases.

Dumas was among the minority of districts that received more than $1 million, and Hill said this was because it had more early-career teachers.

The LEARNS financial aid didn’t alleviate the district’s financial struggles last year, Hill said, but it should this year because the money now supplements fewer teachers’ salaries, allowing the declining state and local tax revenue to go toward operating expenses instead of salaries.

The district’s financial situation remains precarious but will become clearer as this school year progresses, Hill said.

“It’s going to depend on two things: whether our figures were correct and whether they end up losing any more students … If they keep losing students, they’ll have to make more cuts,” Hill said.

The layoffs and other financial cuts came as a shock to employees and parents, Hill said, because the district didn’t take the incremental steps needed to counter declining revenue and rising expenses during the eight-year tenure of Sterrett’s predecessor.

Sterrett and the board have attributed the loss of students and consequent drop in per-pupil funds to the declining population of the Arkansas Delta region as a whole. 

Community members say the enrollment drop has outpaced the regional one and the comparison is not fair.

U.S. Census data shows Desha County, where Dumas is the largest city, lost 12.4% of its population between 2010 and 2020, and Dumas lost 15% of its residents, leaving the city population just over 4,000.

Population declines tend to come with fewer employment, leisure and health care resources, which further discourage people from moving to the area.

Former school nurse Isierene Brown said Dumas citizens “don’t even have a Walmart” to draw people in.

’Too much division’

All the explanations have done little to cool long-simmering discontent or lessen the disconnect felt by employees and parents, who cited a litany of complaints. 

“I’m still just reeling that I’ve given 25 years of my life to this district and they can do me like this,” said Brown, who was three years away from qualifying for retirement benefits when the district laid her off.

Chambers and former high school English teacher Jala Patterson, who resigned in March, both said the district should have supported them enough to keep them from resigning. 

They said the district does not conduct monthly safety drills, which state law requires, and administrators do not observe teachers’ job performances. They also cited faulty intercom systems that jeopardize faculty and student safety.

Patterson noted the district failed to provide enough textbooks for an Advanced Placement class until the school year was almost over.

“We’re so concerned with raising test scores, but lacking essential resources,” Patterson wrote in an October 2023 email to Arthur Tucker, executive director of curriculum and instruction. “…Please. Please help me help my students.”

District leadership has “just written all of the kids off,” Chambers said.

“When I started [teaching there], I was told, ‘Most of these aren’t going to college, so don’t expect a lot,’” she said. “Instead of ensuring that kids are getting an education so that they can be productive members of society, with or without a degree, they are being dumbed down.”

The way the school board handles public comments at its meetings also feeds the dissatisfaction. 

Are’Osha Bynum, a mother of a kindergartener, told Minor after the August meeting that the board’s responses to public comment come off as “shutting down and having an attitude” and positioning themselves as “against us instead of trying to help us.”

The school board requires audience questions to be submitted in advance. Some audience members responded negatively in June when Minor asked for public comment to be limited.

“We can do that, but if you want to get to the bottom of this and get this thing back on the right track, I think you need to listen,” Dodds said.

From the second row of the audience, Brown added, “If you don’t want to listen, get off the board.”

Dr. Franklin said frustrations with district leadership led her family to remove their children from the district and homeschool them.

Dodds, Patterson and others have said Sterrett and the board don’t seem to understand the gravity of the district’s problems.

Minor said frustrated meeting attendees don’t seem to understand that “not everyone can get their way.”

“There’s too much division and not enough communication,” Minor said after the August meeting.

Sterrett declined an in-person interview about issues raised by others. She also did not answer an emailed list of questions.

Dumas resident Onie Norman agreed that the area’s overall decline is concerning, but unlike Brown, she said she believes Sterrett has done her job as best she can and the school district isn’t responsible for retaining city residents.

“They’re disappointed [in the district], but they don’t stay and try to help improve it,” Norman said.