This past month school districts have been making great progress in the development of the Local District and School Plans for having 100% of all classes taught by highly qualified teachers. During recent discussions between the Department and various Districts regarding some of the numbers provided on the website, it was discovered that three (3) areas of data should be edited on the spreadsheet provided on the Arkansas Department of Education's website. That has been done and the new spreadsheet was posted today which indicates it was updated on 1-10-07. Those data areas which were edited are: 1) teachers of Arkansas' virtual school, 2) teachers of concurrent classes, and 3) core academic courses which were on the master schedule but had zero students enrolled. With the removal of these three (3) sets of data from the spreadsheet, the data for all school districts, where these data sets existed, will be enhanced with regard to HQT.
Due to the editing of this data, the Department is extending the deadline for submission of the District's report until February 15, 2007. Since the ultimate goal is to have the data as accurate as possible, the Department wants to afford all districts an opportunity to review this updated spreadsheet and make appropriate changes as necessary.
Secondly, several districts have contacted the Department and requested directions on 'How to correct the local data entry errors in Pentamation?' After discussing this issue with Mr. Bill Goff, Director of APSCN, the following plan was developed. All Districts with HQT data entry errors for the 2006-2007 school year should immediately go into the Student Plus data base in Pentamation and make all Highly Qualified Teacher data corrections. APSCN is buildng a table which will be available to Districts on March 1, 2007, in which Districts are to correct individual teacher, school and district data. These corrections are to be completed by March 31, 2007. APSCN will provide specific directions to schools and districts on the completion of the table once it has been developed.
The cooperation and work by eveyone on this project is appreciated and through these efforts, the Arkansas Department of Education will utilize this table for the State's spring submission to the United States Department of Education on the percent of classes taught by highly qualified teachers. Again, a sincere thank you to all school and district staff members whose cooperation and hard work is evident in the submission of quality data on this project.