PHOTO: Gary Arnold (left), former head of Little Rock Christian Academy, accepts the appointment from Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (right) to the State Board of Education on Friday, November 1, 2024. | Tess Vrbin/Arkansas Advocate
By TESS VRBIN | Arkansas Advocate
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders appointed former Little Rock Christian Academy administrator Gary Arnold to the State Board of Education on Friday.
“What I love most about Gary is his passion for education, his belief that every student can learn and his relentless commitment and pursuit of his faith,” Sanders said in a press conference announcing the appointment.
Arnold is an advocate for school choice and was a member of the “rules and regulations task force” the state used to implement the wide-ranging LEARNS Act of 2023, Sanders said.
“Through Gary’s careful stewardship, the first school year with Arkansas LEARNS was a huge success, and the second year is shaping up to be even better,” Sanders said.
LEARNS created the Education Freedom Account program, a taxpayer-funded school voucher system that will be available to all Arkansas students in the 2025-26 school year; 14,297 students are participating in the program this year.
Sanders said Arnold will represent the interests of EFA participants during his term on the board, which will expire in 2027. He succeeds Steve Sutton, who stepped down from the board last year in the middle of his seven-year term.
“The Governor wanted to find the right, experienced addition to the Board of Education who could help put every student on the pathway to success, and that’s exactly what Gary will do,” Sanders’ communications director, Sam Dubke, said when asked why the governor took nearly 11 months to appoint Sutton’s successor.
Arnold is Sanders’ third appointee to the nine-member education board, after Ken Bragg and Leigh Keener last year. Former Republican state lawmaker Bragg co-authored the LEARNS Act, and Keener participated in a LEARNS work group focused on early childhood education, which is her area of expertise.
The LEARNS Act also raised the state’s minimum annual teacher salary to $50,000 and required literacy screenings for K-12 students.
Arnold praised these and other aspects of the LEARNS Act and said he was honored to accept the appointment and “the responsibility of joining this team.”
He likened working in education to author Mark Twain’s experience as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River in his memoir Life on the Mississippi, which Arnold said he recently reread.
“The most important function and job of the boat pilot is to learn the river, Old Man River, because it changes every day,” Arnold said. “One day the currents will be this way, one day there will be a tree or shoal that wasn’t there before… Life in the schools changes every day. We just have to learn the river and have that growth mindset.”
Sanders said both Arnold and Education Secretary Jacob Oliva “think deeply and critically about how we can fix the areas of our school system that are broken.”
Arnold was head of school at Little Rock Christian Academy from 2007 to 2023. He is now the Director of Head of School Certification at The Council on Educational Standards and Accountability and the founder of the consulting company NextEd. Both organizations serve Christian schools.
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