These are the Arkansans of the year

By STEVE BRAWNER

The town of Taylor is in Arkansas’ southwest corner near Louisiana and Texas. You have to make a special effort to get there. If you go, you might run into one of the Arkansans of the year.

LaJuan Cannon has been teaching math there for 49 years. In addition to her classroom duties, she arrives before classes start each day to tutor students. In a profession where full retirement is available after 28 years, she has no plans to stop.

“I’d like to go as long as I can. … I like it,” she said in a brief interview in the Taylor High School hallway in October. “I still like it really well. I’m pretty much a workaholic, so I’m not sure what I would do if I didn’t work.”

Two hours away, Beau McCastlain is a television production teacher at De Queen High School. He joined the teaching profession as a second career after first working for numerous Arkansas TV stations. On Oct. 9, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders traveled to his school to announce that he is the next Arkansas Teacher of the Year. His students were genuinely pleased for him, embracing him with a group hug and high-fives.

The Arkansas Teacher of the Year is a real award with a cash prize and other honors. The “Arkansan of the year,” on the other hand, is merely a creation of this column. Every year, I pick a person or persons who have made a significant difference in this state.

This year, that recognition goes to Cannon, McCastlain, and all of the state’s classroom teachers. 

This was the year that teachers’ importance was truly acknowledged. Sanders’ LEARNS Act raised the minimum public school teacher salary from $36,000 to $50,000. Add in retirement and other benefits, and teaching in an Arkansas public school has become a pretty good living. 

The pay raise was one of the more popular aspects of the far-reaching law. Democrats proposed doing it at the beginning of the legislative session. In a recent poll by ExcelinEd and Impact Management, 79.5% of Arkansans with children in school supported it.

Respondents also gave high marks to teachers, with 54% saying their children’s teachers in the most recent school year “appeared highly effective” and 36.43% saying they “appeared moderately effective.” Only 6.52% said teachers “appeared not to be effective.” 

The pay raise followed a challenging few years where teachers have displayed flexibility, resilience and physical courage. In recent years they have had to learn security protocols to protect students from rare but devastating attacks by deranged school shooters. At the beginning of the COVID pandemic in the spring of 2020, they switched from classroom instruction to remote teaching within days. The next school year, they used a hybrid model where some students were in class and others online. That was new. Teaching a classroom full of other people’s kids was already difficult enough. During the pandemic, teachers also were dealing with masks, quarantines, politically divided communities, and worries over their own and their families’ health.

If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that online learning is no substitute for in-person classroom instruction. Test scores fell significantly amidst all the disruptions, which was backed up by real-world observations. After somehow keeping schools running during the pandemic, teachers now are helping students make up for lost time.

With the acknowledgement of their importance, however, has also come increased scrutiny. The LEARNS Act repealed the Teacher Fair Dismissal Act, making it easier for school districts to fire bad teachers. 

Furthermore, its education freedom accounts will provide families with state dollars for private and home schooling. In the coming years, alternatives to public schools likely will spring up throughout the state. When families choose other options, public schools lose state funding, so the pressure on teachers to perform will intensify. Likewise, some private schools – and their teachers – will face increased competition, as well as increased accountability through tests required by the LEARNS Act.

The pay raise and the accountability measures are testaments to the classroom teacher’s importance. Few other professions have had to put up with so much these past few years, and no other occupation attracted as much attention these past 12 months. The fact that teachers didn’t leave the profession in droves during and after COVID is proof of how committed many are. 

So, thank you, LaJuan Cannon, Beau McCastlain, and the state’s other classroom teachers, public and private. For 2023, you are the Arkansans of the year.

Steve Brawner is a syndicated columnist published in 15 outlets in Arkansas. Email him at brawnersteve@mac.com. Follow him on Twitter at @stevebrawner.