Arkansas town starts scholarship program

SPARKMAN, Ark. — The signs of decline are everywhere in this tiny timber town. Most of the gas stations are abandoned metal skeletons left to rust under the Arkansas sun. Empty storefronts and vacant lots mark the graves of other long-gone businesses.

Sparkman has been dying for decades, losing more than half of its population since 1950. It has virtually no jobs. And its lone school is on the brink of closing. Now the community is trying to save itself by tapping into the economic-development potential of its most precious resource: its children.

Parents and teachers have launched a scholarship program that goes beyond offering money for college. It also aims to draw new families to town to keep the school system alive, and with it the once-thriving village 90 miles southwest of Little Rock.

“We know there’s not much here to bring people into our town,” said fourth-grade teacher Stephanie Harmon. “We just want to keep our school so that our town can stay.”

The idea is not entirely new. Other districts have waged similar campaigns to stir interest in their schools. But Sparkman’s efforts and those of other Arkansas towns have taken the practice to a new level, with communities practically competing for each other’s children and the state revenue that comes with them.

When nearby Arkadelphia announced plans last fall to help its high school graduates pay for college, the news reawakened fears in Sparkman that surrounding towns would steal students away, perhaps forcing the school to close and dealing the town a final, fatal blow.

“We’ve already lost so many kids to other schools,” Miss Harmon said. “This was going to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

So Sparkman residents passed around the collection plate and scraped together thousands of dollars to counter Arkadelphia’s millions and launch scholarships of their own.

With their first scholarship recipients preparing to leave for college, both communities are writing checks — and praying that the kids return with degrees, but not requiring them to.

Arkadelphia, a growing town of 11,000, wants to use the scholarships to attract even more people. Sparkman would settle for keeping its population stable at slightly above 400.

Since its early years, the U.S. has had a long history of offering incentives to people willing to settle in specific places. One of the most notable examples was the Homestead Act of 1862, which offered vast amounts of cheap public land to families who would improve it.

In Sparkman, prospects weren’t always so dim. The town boasted nearly 1,000 people in its heyday in 1950. You could buy clothes, a car or a ticket to watch a Western at the movie theater. Sawmill jobs were as plentiful as the trees that fed the lumber industry.

Then more people abandoned rural life for larger cities, leaving crumbled buildings behind like cicada shells stuck on a screen door. Now the town has been reduced to a sit-down restaurant, a small grocery store, a handful of churches and the school.

Surrounded by forests, the town’s lone industry is still timber, and the air smells like Christmas year-round as trucks piled high with tree trunks rumble down two-lane highways.

Of the 13 high school seniors who graduated from Sparkman this past spring, only eight pledged go to college. Kathryne Bosley was one of them. She says her father, who works at one of the three sawmills, wants her to get out.

“He doesn’t want me living like the rest of everybody else, living from day to day,” Miss Bosley said. “He wants me to have something.”