Position Paper 3


Any school with an application will have to market themselves to get the word out. This is almost exclusively for colleges and universities, but I am going to talk about something a little different. The Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts is a residential public high school located in downtown Hot Springs, Arkansas. ASMSA is a school for “talented and motivated students who have an interest and aptitude for mathematics and science as well as a passion for creativity, humanities, and the arts.” It is one of 17 residential high schools in the United States and is a member of the National Consortium for Specialized STEM Schools (NCSSS). According to the ASMSA website, The Washington Post, Newsweek, and The Daily Beast (Matthews Challenge Index Public Elite) have ranked the school in the Top 25 public high schools in the country.  

ASMSA is a way for high school juniors and seniors to get a feel for what college will be like, at a much cheaper price. The entire year only costs $850 and there are fee waivers available. That $850 covers room and board and your meals. You live in a suite-style dorm for two years, and you get the opportunity to take a lot of concurrent credit courses to get a head start for college. Concurrent credit courses are free for the ASMSA students, and the class textbooks are provided. I attended ASMSA for my junior and senior years of high school, and I came out with around 60 college credits. When I started at SAU, I had almost all of my general education courses out of the way. ASMSA also prepares their students for research by having all students participate in a capstone project, that used to be Fundamentals in Research Methods (FIRM) or Research in the Park (RIP). As a junior, you come up with a project and present your completed project and findings in the spring of your senior year. I did a research project for FIRM, and it was something that has helped me all throughout college when I do research for papers and lab reports.  


Since it requires an application to get accepted into the school, ASMSA has to market themselves to high schools around the state as a place for students who  want a challenge in their academic lives. They have multiple outreach programs to promote themselves to Arkansas high school students. One of the ways they do this is “preview weekend” or a focus weekend. A preview weekend is when a high school freshman or sophomore signs up to attend a two-day “tour” of the campus. Students are dropped off on Friday evening, and they can stay with a senior Community Leader who will show them what dorm life is like. Then on Saturday, the students get up and go to a lecture or activity for a specific subject. I attended two preview weekends, one was a general ‘get to know the school’ preview day and the other was a computer science weekend. Now, they call their preview weekend the “Dolphin Experience” or Dolphin XPs (ASMSA Campus Events).  
Another way they promote themselves is “Summer at ASMSA,” which is a one-week camp that rising sophomores (students who just finished their freshman year) can attend and learn about things from microbiology to conservation with their newly added Research in the Park section. Students will live in the ASMSA dorms for a week and attend classes about the area they signed up for. If they signed up for the Research in the Park section, they would get the chance to go out in the Hot Springs National Park and learn about conservation.  

ASMSA also has field trip opportunities. Seventh and eighth grade teachers can go online and sign up for their class to go on a day trip to Hot Springs and see the school. On the website, teachers can get in touch with one of the ASMSA Outreach Coordinators and they will work together to customize a field trip to preview ASMSA for the day. Lunch is included with the field trip, and there is no cost for the field trip. That’s one of the great things about ASMSA – you don’t have to pay for those promotional experiences. Preview weekends are free, the summer at ASMSA is free, and field trips are free.  

One of the other things that ASMSA does is their Science and Arts Café, a lecture series that covers a wide variety of topics, from time travel to Mayan Culture (2020-21 lecture topics). They used to be held at Kollective, a coffee shop down the street from the school, but now they are held the ASMSA’s Creativity and Innovation Center. They also livestream the event on Facebook for people to attend virtually. Like the rest of the activities I have mentioned, this event is free to the public. It starts with a lecture from a guest or one of the ASMSA professors, then there is an open discussion to include the audience.

 

Another outreach program I participated in was one of their digital learning courses. As a sophomore, I took a Pre-AP Biology course and absolutely loved it. Coming from a small high school that praised sports over academics, I really loved taking a biology course that challenged me. The option at my high school was Biology with a teacher who made you clean out flower beds and color pictures. Any ASMSA online/blended course has zero fees for students, making it a great opportunity for students who want to see what level of learning they would be expected to achieve. 

Everything I have talked about so far can be easily found on ASMSA’s website. You could spend hours looking through all the information they make available on the site. They even have a Financial Transparency webpage as is required by the 88th General Assembly of the Arkansas Legislature. The information on this website is updated quarterly and is grouped into categories. The five categories are Maintenance and Operations, Travel, Capital Expenditures, Compensation, and Fringe Benefits. ASMSA also made the data from 2013 to 2020 available on the page.  


The News tab at the top right of the ASMSA page directs you to a newsfeed of the latest information from ASMSA. The articles are written by Donnie Sewell, the Public Information Specialist. On this page, there is an archive button where you can go all the way back to articles from December 2010. These articles cover all ASMSA news, from national and international recognition for teachers, to student awards. ASMSA is quick to spotlight their students to show how they have formatted their school to encourage creativity and academic excellence (Here is a link to an article about the time I won the Congressional App Challenge). Their tagline is “Igniting Arkansas’ Potential,” a motto that was introduced along with the completion of their Creativity and Innovation Center in 2018.  


ASMSA has extensive social media. They have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Vimeo. Their Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all have the same posts on it, they just get copied and pasted to each site. Their logo is the profile picture across all their social media. Essentially, those first three social media pages are the exact same, so no matter which one you prefer, you will see the same information. Their LinkedIn page also has the same posts from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The LinkedIn also lets you look at an Alumni tab so you can see where their graduates have started jobs. The Flickr site doesn’t have anything more recent than 2014 on the page, and the logo is the older version. They have not updated the site in years, and I think it detracts from the rest of their imaging. The Vimeo, however, has been maintained. On this page, you can find various videos from ASMSA, including a memorial video for one of the professors that died due to a terminal illness.  


Overall, I think ASMSA has a strong brand, and they have a clear goal for students. They have set up so many different opportunities for students to see the campus before they make a decision, and they have waivers for the semester fees. This school does everything they can to promote themselves to bright and creative students who will go far in life. ASMSA is continuing to update themselves, both in their campus and how they run classes. One of the things I always thought was creative about ASMSA was how every one of their students were ambassadors for the school. The students come from all over the state, from many different home schools and hometowns, so they can go back home on breaks or the weekends and talk about why they love ASMSA, which would encourage more students to check it out.   

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