Jonesboro, AR – (JonesboroRightNow.com) – Sept. 25, 2025 – Excitement filled the air Thursday morning as Jonesboro Public Schools held a special parade for Health, Wellness and Environmental Studies (HWES) Magnet Elementary School for earning a high rating in education quality.

HWES’s school letter grade for the 2024-2025 school year from the Arkansas Department of Education (ADE) was a B.

HWES Principal Shalon Tate said she was proud of the improvement her school has made over the past few years.

“This parade became a celebration because when I first started here, our school was a C, and we went down to a D, went up to a C, and we did not test one year so we maintained that C average with our ATLAS state testing, but we knew that we were not a C school. We were not average,” Tate said. “So, we put a plan in place last year and we became very intentional on our focus of what we were going to focus on. Our motto is ‘learning is required,’ and every teacher, staff member, and student took that to heart. They knew when they walked in Health and Wellness that ‘learning was required,’ and it paid off when we received our test scores last week.”

According to Tate said they were very excited and appreciative that the school district held the celebration parade for them and felt their students and staff deserved it.

“We are tickled. People are excited,” she said. “They [students and staff] deserve to celebrate because they worked hard. It’s the best feeling and it really feels good. I told them, ‘When we get to actually see the fruits of our labor,’ because we know we’ve worked hard… We worked very hard and now we get to see that hard work does pay off.”

Now, she said, the goal is to focus on tier one instruction to ensure all their students are on grade level.

“Our new goal is now to get our students on grade level. We want everybody reading on grade level. So that’s our new goal and if we focus on the students and continue the plan we have in place, we probably will next be an A school,” she said.

Because the ATLAS test scores come out before schools receive their grades, Tate said they already “kind of knew” based on the test scores about a month ago, but they didn’t know what their final grade was for certain until the state released it last Wednesday to the superintendent, who released it to the schools.

In a Sept. 19 press release, the ADE released the official 2024-2025 school letter grades, marking the first year of full implementation under Arkansas’ updated accountability formula. Statewide there were 122 schools that scored an A, 291 schools that scored a B, 352 schools that scored a C, 137 schools that scored a D, and 130 schools that scored an F.

“LEARNS is all about improving the way we educate kids in Arkansas, and our new letter grade formula, alongside the new ATLAS exam, allows us to do that with a better, more full picture of where each of our students and schools stand,” Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in the release.

In the previous year, ADE provided districts with simulated grades based on the first administration of ATLAS testing, so districts could understand how the new formula worked before issuing official grades.

For more information about Arkansas’ accountability system including a list of 2024-2025 school letter grades, click here.