Phil Baldwin moved back to Arkansas from Atlanta in 2013, and he settled about 15 miles outside Batesville.
Every morning as he drives to work as CEO of Citizens Bank, the teenagers, mainly girls, he sees waiting for the school bus remind him that Independence County — while not nearly the poorest in the state — has persistent poverty.
“The girls look like they will fit in at school, but the houses they come out of are just in terrible shape,” he said. “One of them has a tarp for a roof.”
Per-capita income in Independence County in 2014 was $32,403, 14 percent below the statewide average, and unemployment in the county was 5.4 percent in July, well above the 3.9 percent rate statewide.
Three of the four public school districts in the county have higher concentrations of students whose family income makes them eligible for free and reduced-price lunches than the state’s 61 percent rate: Southside (63.5 percent), Midland (67 percent) and Cedar Ridge (68 percent).
In the Batesville School District, the largest with almost 3,000 students, a bit over 55 percent are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches. But the Batesville district, where fewer than 20 percent of students were non-white just 10 years ago, is now approaching 30 percent minority, and the number of students for whom English is a second language is growing with the local poultry industry.
Making sure the children of Independence County have the educational opportunities necessary to escape poverty is a cornerstone of the Impact strategic plan that Baldwin worked on when he was chairman of the Batesville Area Chamber of Commerce.
(Also see Batesville Impact Plan Living Up to Its Name.)
Those opportunities include a direct pipeline to a bachelor’s degree that passes from the four public school districts in the county through the University of Arkansas Community College at Batesville to private Lyon College.
Up to half of the transfer students who enter Lyon, enrollment about 700, come from UACCB, Lyon President Don Weatherman said. Lyon has long offered reduced tuition to students who complete associate degrees at UACCB.
That’s the path taken by Kyle Christopher, the chamber’s first tourism director: from Cave City (which straddles the Independence-Sharp county line) to UACCB to Lyon.
But college isn’t for everyone, and UACCB President Deborah Frazier praised the efforts of the 1,700-student Southside School District to introduce students to college-level classes at UACCB even before they finish high school.
“One of the unintended consequences is some students are learning that they don’t want to do the work they thought they wanted to do,” Frazier said.