Beebe schools employee chosen Virtual Arkansas Facilitator of Year

Posted Date: 08/24/2023

A Beebe School District employee has been recognized as Facilitator of the Year for Virtual Arkansas.

John Ashworth, director of Virtual Arkansas, which offers supplemental online programs to the state’s school districts, honored Marie Ballinger with the award for the 2022-23 school year at Monday’s Beebe School Board meeting.

Ashworth said one of the most important aspects of the program is the facilitators. “So if you think about a normal classroom, that relationship between the teacher and the student is of the utmost importance, and for our program there is a third component of that because there is an adult in the room – they’re at the school – that helps us monitor, track, organize ... and we actually have a name for it: It’s a triad relationship, so it’s the student, the teacher and the facilitator.”

Ashworth said the Facilitator of the Year award given out each year “is what we would consider very prestigious because you may not know this but we have about 600 facilitators in the state and there’s only one that we give this award to.”

He said in selecting the winner of the award, “we want to get somebody that exhibits the core values of Virtual Arkansas, which includes keeping students the focus of what we do, relationships No. 1, and in her case, it’s the relationships between her and the students but also the relationships between her and the teachers that must be very, very important.”

He said the facilitator is selected for also “exhibiting integrity, collaboration and then exhibiting quality in everything that she does, so she exhibits all those characteristics and it’s well deserved.”

In addition to her award, Ballinger received a backpack full of “coveted things.”

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