CONWAY — Having been brought in from recess early just so a visitor can take some photos of the new classroom iPads, St. Joseph School first-grader Vincent Pham feels entitled to an explanation. “I’m writing a story for the newspaper,” the visitor said. Vincent furrowed his brow. “What’s a newspaper?” the Conway student asked. The march of technology into diocesan classrooms is definitely well under way. Computer labs are a fixture in Catholic schools, and some have been More...
Elementary classrooms are lacking male teachers and nowhere is that more pronounced than in Arkansas’ Catholic schools. Over the past decade, the percentage of lay male teachers in the diocese never exceeded 7.9 percent and hit a low of 6.4 percent. The situation is the extreme example of what is a national shortage of male teachers, particularly among primary grades. According to National Education Association statistics, less than 25 percent of all elementary and middle school More...
The religion curriculum for the Diocese of Little Rock’s Catholic elementary schools was updated this fall. A 15-person committee of principals and teachers met with associate superintendent Theresa Hall this spring to review the curriculum and prayers taught in pre-kindergarten to eighth grade. It was the first time since 1996 that the curriculum has been revised. “They are just guidelines,” Hall said. Hall said the curriculum only needed to be updated slightly, changing the wording in some places More...
Not too many things predate Judy Davidson at St. Theresa School in Little Rock. When you’ve spent the entirety of your 42 years in teaching at a school founded just 54 years ago, there’s not much you haven’t seen firsthand. “When I first started teaching kindergarten, we just taught the letters and the sounds,” she said. “Now, I’m teaching reading and addition and subtraction. It’s almost like kindergarten has come down to being first grade. “When I More...
Over the past three years of attending the Catholic conference for superintendents, there seems to have been more emphasis in presentations on assessing the viability of Catholic schools. Dioceses seemed to be moving toward more data-driven information and developing matrices to determine the ingredients for viability. Capturing data in the following eight key areas seems to help decision making about strategic planning for schools: enrollment trends, administrative costs, revenue versus expenditure, affordability, tuition, instructional cost, facility costs More...
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