EXECUTIVE SESSION with Laura Clark

with Laura Clark

By Steve Brawner Editor

Laura Clark has spent her life in McCaskill, a southwest Arkansas town of about 100 people, and now she serves as board president of the Blevins School District where she was educated.

A nurse by trade, she became an educator and eventually vice chancellor of academics at the University of Arkansas Hope-Texarkana. She’s responsible for everything directly related to academics, including college transfer courses, workforce certification, and concurrent credit. This past academic year, she served as interim chancellor.

Clark still considers herself to be a nurse and is a big believer in workforce education. Students with a skill can earn an income. That belief comes from watching her dad run a concrete business despite being unable to read.

Clark discussed her dad’s influence, her philosophy about education, and what happened when she and her daughter discovered a World War II-era bomb on the family’s property.

You’re from here?

“Yes. I moved to Arkansas when I was about five years old to a little town, McCaskill, which is about six miles west of here, and I have pretty much lived there my entire life since then. I went to school here at Blevins and graduated here. I was here when the new high school was built. I believe my daddy poured the floor of that new high school. I attended the high school here up until I think when we moved in ninth grade. This building remained abandoned for years and then it burned, but we do have the bell tower out of that building. I can remember being in that building. I remember the elementary, played ball in the gym, so it’s a hometown. It’s my hometown.”

Did you have an opponent when you ran for school board?

“Not the first time, no.”

Did you soon learn why no one else wanted the job?

“You know, it can be challenging, but it’s rewarding. I think the great thing about a board – especially if you’re diverse, and we have a diverse board in every aspect: male-female, gender, race, our jobs, our areas that we grew up in – we represent our students. We look like our students, or what they’re going to be. Some are going to go to college, and I feel like I’m great with that. I can make sure that we’re preparing students or be intuitive in the things that we’re doing for college preparation. Some [board members] went straight to the workforce. They’re intuitive about workforce skills and what you need to do and so forth. So I think it’s really good. We have an educator on our board, and that’s good because they understand public school education.”

Did you get a good education here?

“I did. I’m a first-generation college student. Many of our kids are going to

be first generation college students. I went off to, at that time, a four-year school clueless, didn’t know what I was doing. I just knew I needed to go to college. My dad was self-employed, and neither parent went to college. My dad didn’t even graduate high school. And so it was kind of a make-it-or-break it thing, and I learned kind of the hard way about college, but I was successful. I went to Henderson, graduated, got my nursing degree there, and started nursing then. It wasn’t until after I ended up teaching there that I thought, well, you know, maybe [I should further my education]. At the time a bachelor’s degree in nursing was really odd. It was rare. There were a lot of two-year programs but not very many four-year programs. And so I thought maybe I should go on. You know, you just never know what you might need. So I went on and while I was working at the college, I went back to school and got my master’s in nursing administration. And then because of that, an opportunity came up with being a dean and being a vice chancellor.”

How long did you practice as a nurse?

“Before I moved into education, about five years. I worked at Children’s Hospital in Little Rock, and I worked at Howard Memorial in Nashville. And then when I started teaching, then I stopped doing that. I also [earned] my EMT license, and I worked as a volunteer firefighter and a volunteer county deputy, Office of Emergency Management. … I was overseeing the EMT program.”

Were you part of the fire department as a medical personnel, or were you fighting fires?

“Both.”

You just wanted to do that?

“Well, we were small. They always gave me the easier job. I could run the machines, I would drive the tanker truck, but yeah, it took all of us.”

As a medical professional and a school board member, how have you approached COVID?

“We’ve approached it that we want to maintain as safe an environment as possible while not affecting the integrity of education. As far as the school district was concerned, you’re dealing with both face to face, so you have to deal with that, and that’s with distancing, wearing masks, the activities completely really going down. Then of course you have all the online learning, which has been a challenge. I think if a student says it was easy, I’m not sure if they were getting everything, or if it was offered because online learning’s difficult, and not just for the student. It’s extremely difficult for the teacher. I don’t know how a teacher handled both face to face and online students at the same time.”

What is Blevins’ mask policy now?

“The board did vote to continue mask wearing through the rest of the year. I can’t speak for all board members, but I will speak for myself. Several reasons why I voted that way. Number one, as chancellor of the institution I work at, I voted to keep our masks on, so why would I vote for adult learners to keep their masks on and not for young children to keep theirs? Secondly, Blevins did a survey of approximately how many parents wanted it, just to try to get a feel for it. … There were 30% of parents that really wanted to keep the mask, and my vote went for them. It was because those are the parents who are likely to not send their kid to school because they’ll be fearful. Those are the parents who may have a loved one at home still who is not vaccinated yet. Those are the parents whose kids could be high risk. I said, listen, we’ve got five weeks of school left, and attendance has been an issue at most schools. … And I voted for those 30%. It didn’t hurt anyone to keep wearing a mask, but it could really hurt some for not, so we decided for now we would do that.”

“I think the best balance is science. What does science tell us? And science told us mask wearing and distancing and washing your hands. Those were the three things that science has told us. … I don’t know the statistics here on campus, but I know at our [college] campus where we have 1,500 students there was no spread on campus. It never happened on campus … and I believe it’s true for this campus as well. ... Every instance, it has been at a home, at a birthday party, or some-

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thing like that where masks weren’t being worn. So what that showed was that there was safety if we followed protocol, and that was the big thing.”

What is the University of Arkansas Hope-Texarkana’s focus?

“Our focus is community focused, so we do several different things. We do offer programs of study so students can transfer to four-years. We have a group of students that do that. They come to us, they get two years, and they’re going off to another four-year university. Then we have students who need a job skill, and we offer those courses, too. You want to work as an HVAC, you want to work in welding, you’re going to work as a nurse, come to us. When you graduate, you have a job skill to go into the job market. We have a power plant technology program, we have funeral service, lots of varieties. And then we also have the community education sides. Those who are already in the workforce, they already have jobs, but they need some supplemental assistance there, we do that.

“We work with our public school districts significantly – with Blevins as well – where we offer what’s called dual enrollment or concurrent credit. We have some faculty here that are qualified to teach college credit courses, and so we work with all of our school districts so the students can get their first taste of a college rigor course before transferring off to the real world where you’re doing high school one day, and then you wake up one day, you’re at a four-year university, you have a liquor store down the road, and you’re dependent on Bubba to wake you up every morning and go to class. ...

“In addition to the college side of it, the campus has what’s called a secondary career center so students who are in their junior and senior years can come to campus, take their welding classes, take industrial maintenance, CNA, those things. That way when they do graduate high school, if they want to go to college, fine, we’ll continue. But if that’s not their goal, they really have a job skill and they have a certificate that says, hey, I graduated high school, but I also have a certificate of proficiency in industrial maintenance, so I’d like to start here at this company. …

“We have one mission, but our goals are varied, and it’s for the community. It’s to help our students thrive and become hopefully better breadwinners for their families.”

What is your philosophy as vice chancellor of academics?

“I believe in group decision-making. Although I’ve been there 26 years now, and I have a lot of background and experience, and I’ve seen a lot, and I know processes, I do know that I have to use my people to help make those decisions. So my philosophy is that we do this as a group. We take the best and the brightest, we put them in a committee, and we look at what’s the best way to pursue this. I have academic deans under me, so one of my deans is over all the technical programs – the welding and all that. Any time we’re looking at a program there, I pull her into it and I pull her faculty into it and say, hey, what do you think about this? And she’ll do the same thing. What do you think about this idea? What are the pros of this? What’s it going to cost us? Will we have students? Will they get jobs? What’s the job market out there? That’s the big thing when we look at that. Are we training them for the jobs that they can get here or close by, and is it going to give them a good-paying wage? And then do students want to do that? We can have a great program, but if a student is not interested in it, it’s just going to fall by the wayside. So that’s kind of how we approach it.”

How does your job inform your school board service?

“I’m really focused on academics. I look at what are their test scores. What’s our percent of reading? What’s the average ACT? I want to push that. I want rigor. I want to give students a good education so they have the opportunity to use it or not. If they don’t ever get it, they don’t have the opportunity to use it, so it probably plays a very significant role. I’ll ask, can you send students to our [UAHT] campus? Who do you have qualified to teach a college course? Hey, can we do a course with your welding teacher that counts for you guys and us, too? I’m pretty heavy on the actual academic side of that. I want students to be pushed enough that they gain the education we’re supposed to give them. I think it’s a waste if we don’t do that.”

And you push workforce.

“And I push workforce, yes. That’s what I tell people. I say I’m an educator. I have a master’s, but I’m a nurse. That’s my trade. My trade is nursing. I can go anywhere with that trade. I can’t go anywhere necessarily with education, but right now I can go anywhere with that. If you can plumb, if you can weld, if you can do something with your hands, you could probably go anywhere. If nothing else, you can be an entrepreneur, and you do it on the side.

“Those are some skills I think our students need to realize. Yeah, a degree is great. You can have a bachelor’s degree in business, but if you can’t do the accounting, if you can’t oversee people, those kinds of skills, you could run into a problem, so I’m big on it. Especially in our area where most of our population, we’re hands on. We’re skilled workers.”

That’s what I tell people. I say I’m an educator. I have a master’s, but “ I’m a nurse. That’s my trade. My trade is nursing. I can go anywhere with that trade. I can’t go anywhere necessarily with education, but right now I can go anywhere with that. If you can plumb; if you can weld; if you can do something with your hands, you could probably go anywhere. ”

Is being interim chancellor fun?

“I don’t know if I’d use the word ‘fun.’ I take this as, I don’t want to mess it up, and this is an opportunity for me to learn things I didn’t know. I’ve been on the academic side. I’ve not been exposed to student services side or the finance side. We’re building a onemegawatt power plant, and the process of getting that approved happened during this year. So there have been some things I’ve never done. I will never do it again because I won’t be a chancellor again, I don’t guess. It was an opportunity, and I just took it as, ‘Laura, this is an opportunity for you to be better at what you do when you go back to your job.’ And I hope I didn’t mess it up too bad.”

Tell me more about your dad.

“My dad had a second grade education. He was older and grew up in a time when education wasn’t thought highly of. And I’ll say my dad could not read or write, but he worked by the sweat of his brow. He and my uncle had a trade. They knew how to pour concrete, and they knew how to pour it really, really well. When he moved to Arkansas with him and my family, they started their concrete business here. And I walk around now, this school, other businesses, I see their slabs, and I remember my dad saying, ‘Hey, we poured that slab.’ So I appreciate those who have a skill.”

Your dad’s ability to provide for you has had a huge effect on your approach.

“Absolutely. My mother graduated high school, and she would take the really low pay. She would take jobs where she could carry insurance on us. My dad worked Monday through Saturday, and he would even have, he called them ‘scab jobs.’ He could do side jobs. He could do other things. He had other skill sets.

“We were poor. We just didn’t know we were poor. But we had everything we needed. We had a cow. I had food. We had a car. I mean, we had a house. We had everything we needed, and so that taught me how important having a skill is. When kids say they’re dating so-andso, even my kids, I say, well, what can he do? I don’t ask what degree does he have. It’s, so what can he do?”

Do you tell that story about your dad often?

“A few people know this story. I don’t know if a lot know it. But I tell it. I like to tell it to kids because people sometimes look at you and say, ‘Oh, well, I bet your parents are educated, and I bet you went to wherever. And that’s not it at all. … We moved from California when I was five years old. We were 30 days without electricity or water. I mean, we moved into the proving grounds, and my dad went to work the next day, and we started school that summer, and they started, really, almost like homesteading.”

What’s the proving ground?

“The proving ground was used [during] World War II to drop bombs and practice bombs.”

Was it safe there?

“Is it safe? They’ve tried to find them all even though we found a bomb last year on our land over there. We still have 10 acres. My daughter and I dug it up. (Laughs.) Little Rock had to come down and blow it up.”

Really?

“Yes! (Laughs.) We said, ‘What is this?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Looks like this.’ ‘I don’t know.’ We were kind of messing with it. I said, ‘It doesn’t look like a bomb.’ Doesn’t look like those big missiles. It was little. Looked kind of like a jack. I don’t know. We moved it around. We took some pictures of it and put it out on social media, and [respondents said], ‘Oh, you might need to see.’

“So we called and the police came out, and they sent pictures and said, ‘Yeah.’ So they had to bring down, I think, someone from the Air Force, and the police were there. I mean, it was kind of a big thing. We were metal detecting out there at our old homestead.”

Note: Executive Session is edited for length, style and clarity.

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