Sharpen Your Pencils (Craig Douglass On Consumers)

Eberhard Faber No. 2. The pencil. Gearing up for back-to-school in the 1950s had its requirements. And a No. 2 pencil was among them. But not just any pencil. An Eberhard Faber No. 2. Had to have them. Lots of them. With the perfect angle and round-the-lead symmetry in the sharpening.

In 1861, the Eberhard Faber Pencil Co. was spun off from its German-family roots with a new pencil factory located in New York. E.W. Faber Co., the first American graphite pencil plant, was located where the United Nations stands today. The factory burned to the ground in 1872. Guess there was a plethora of wood on the premises. It relocated to Brooklyn, where it existed until 1956. And it was my elementary pencil of choice. No Ticonderogas for my Big Chief.

School supplies from pencils to backpacks to computers are on consumers’ August shopping lists. Whether its K-12, or college bound, spending on back-to-school should come in at $80.7 billion, according to the annual survey of 7,660 consumers conducted July 1-8 by the National Retail Federation. The total seasonal spending is down from last year’s record of $82.8 billion, “largely because of the decreased number of households with children in elementary through high school,” according to the NRF.

The survey’s multi-venue breakdown for K-12 consumers shows most of their shopping at department stores (53%), discount stores (50%), online (49%), clothing stores (45%) and office supply stores (31%). And they’re looking for deals, and waiting on sales.

Educators — teachers, administrators, support staff — are going back to school, too. So are members of school boards. Well, in most school districts. But some districts in the state currently are without local school boards because the Arkansas State Board of Education is running those districts.

As we know here in Little Rock, as do our friends in Pine Bluff, Earle, Dollarway and Lee County, the state has assumed and currently has authority in these five school districts over how they operate.

In Arkansas, as in other states, the state may take over a local school district, relieving the school board and superintendent of responsibility. Here that authority comes from various laws passed by the General Assembly and signed by the governor, laws dealing with quality standards, educational support and accountability, fiscal assessment and accountability, and facilities distress. The law requires that following the assumption of authority the state must take various actions toward resolving the issues that led to the takeover and return the school district to local control as soon as possible.

Since 2006, nearly a dozen or so local school districts have been stripped of their local authority and placed under state control for anything from fiscal distress, and that means any financial condition that, if not corrected, could have a negative impact on the continuation of education services by the district, to academic distress, which includes 49.5% or less of students in a district, any district, testing proficient on basic benchmark exams.

Most of the districts placed under state control have suffered from fiscal distress, even though the Arkansas Constitution requires the state to provide to all K-12 students an adequate and equitable education. The Arkansas Supreme Court also prescribed measuring that requirement by mandating the ongoing study of educational performance in the areas of facilities, student services, teacher salaries and transportation. There’s more. Public education funding receives priority from state revenue distribution, right off the top, before other state services receive money.

So why the problem? The simple, or perhaps oversimplified, answer is that money does not guarantee a quality public education. Now, appropriate levels of funding are vital for academics, along with facilities and equipment conducive to rather than distracting from learning; salaries commensurate with experience, training and results; and safe and efficient transportation. It all works together. And works best when local governments cooperate with school leadership, school families and the economic structure of the communities comprising each school district. School boards need not be estranged from city boards, county quorum courts or local chambers of commerce. Nor should they operate in a political and policy vacuum.

A new school year is here. Sharpen your pencils.