School chief: Will leave if board directs

Jerry Guess, superintendent of the Pulaski County Special School District, said Monday that he “and my lawyers of choice” have “lost the confidence” of the district’s School Board and that he will leave the district’s employment if directed to do so by the board.

No special board meeting had been publicly called as of Monday evening on the employment of the superintendent or the lawyers. But School Board member Eli Keller, who represents a part of the Maumelle area, said he would like such a meeting, particularly on the potential dismissal of attorneys, as soon as possible, maybe today.

The School Board president, its secretary or three of the seven members of the board can call a special meeting with a minimum of two hours’ notice to the media.

Guess, 66, who has been the district’s superintendent since 2011, stated his willingness to step down — taking with him attorneys Allen Roberts of Camden and Whitney Moore of Little Rock — in an afternoon email to the board and top-level district administrators, including school principals.

“The board has lost confidence in me and my lawyers of choice,” Guess wrote. “A school district cannot operate successfully without the

school board having confidence in its superintendent. Once the board tells me to go, Allen and Whitney will, of course, go with me.

“I will continue to work in the best interests of the district, particularly its students and employees. And when the board sends me home I’m willing, if and when asked, to come in during the following six months to help you find my successor, as well as helping that successor become oriented and make the transition.”

Guess’ contract, which was actually between him and state Education Commissioner Johnny Key, is good through June 30, 2019. Key was Guess’ supervisor until the district was released from state control for fiscal distress and a new seven-member School Board was elected and trained to take over the district in late 2016. Guess’ salary is $215,000 a year.

The superintendent’s contract language states that it can be terminated by either party with or without cause. If the contract is terminated by the district, it can be done effective immediately or upon a stated date no greater than 30 days in the future. The district shall continue to compensate Guess for six months. If Guess terminates the contract, he is to continue working for 30 days. He will not be compensated after the date of termination.

Five of seven members of the School Board are attending a multistate education leadership conference in Hot Springs this week.

Keller, when contacted while attending the conference, said he and Guess had spoken earlier in the day while at the conference.

Keller said he told Guess that he had “zero confidence” in the superintendent in large part because of Guess’ use of the two attorneys as his personal assistants, giving them tasks in the district for which they bill the district when, instead, Guess or other district employees could do those jobs. That includes actions such as reprimanding employees or assisting with technology.

The School Board member also has pointed to correspondence in May between the attorneys for the district and for the black students known as the Joshua intervenors that makes it appear that the Joshua attorney — Rep. John Walker, D-Little Rock — had a key role in deciding who Guess was to hire, dismiss, or investigate among top-level district administrators.

Keller said Monday that it is his intent to ask the attorneys to be dismissed and that if Guess resigns, “I’m okay with him resigning.”

In response to accusations that attorneys have too much of a role in the district’s operations, Guess said later: “Different board members have different thoughts.”

Guess said that the district has accomplished much in recent years, including the 2014 settlement agreement that ended much of the 1982 school desegregation case, and the detachment of the Jacksonville area to form a new district, which had not been done in the state in modern times.

Most of Guess’ email Monday is an effort to explain to the board and district administrators the Pulaski County Special district’s participation last week in a motion sent to a federal judge.

The district’s role in that motion — in a case that does not directly involve the Pulaski County Special district — brought to the forefront a rift between Guess and at least some of the School Board. That first became apparent in June when a divided board voted against Guess’ recommended selection of Janice Warren as deputy superintendent.

Last week’s motion asked for a delay in a trial of a lawsuit that was filed by some Little Rock School District residents against Little Rock and state education leaders over allegations of racial disparities in the city district’s operations. The 2015 case is referred to as the Doe case because several of the plaintiffs initially identified themselves by the last name of Doe and not their real names.

The motion to U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr. said that many of the issues in Little Rock’s Doe case could be resolved through school district boundary changes between the Little Rock and Pulaski County Special school districts. But — before any boundary changes could be contemplated — the Pulaski County Special district must be declared unitary and released from federal court supervision of its desegregation efforts.

A 2014 settlement in a decades-old federal school desegregation case protects the Pulaski County Special district boundaries while the district remains under court supervision. The only exception to that was the detachment of the new Jacksonville/ North Pulaski district that became independent a year ago.

The motion filed late Thursday night proposed that representatives of the Pulaski County Special district and the Joshua intervenors take up to 60 days to to reach agreement that the county district has met its desegregation obligations in regard to disparities in school building conditions, student achievement and student discipline practices.

Success in those negotiations would clear the way for talks on school district boundary changes, the motion for continuance indicated. That motion was granted by Marshall on Friday.

Guess said in his email and in an interview Monday that Pulaski County Special “has not yet agreed to anything other than to attempt to negotiate unitary status in facilities, student achievement and discipline. We have a 60-day window to reach an agreement with John Walker on all three subject areas. If prior negotiations are indicative, and they are, this will be no small feat.”

Walker is the attorney for the Doe plaintiffs in the Little Rock case as well as the Joshua intervenors in the much older school desegregation lawsuit in which the Pulaski County Special district remains a party.

Guess said in the email and interview that he has been directed since first becoming the superintendent of the district — which occurred when the district was taken over by the state for fiscal distress — to achieve unitary status. He said he and the attorneys believed it would take one to two years from now as well as some contested court hearings to finally be released from federal court scrutiny.

“Mr. Walker’s newfound openness to engage in discussions presented a unique opportunity for the district, in my opinion, and one with a rapidly closing window for seizing,” Guess wrote Monday and added: “I cannot, and will not, solicit the opinion of every board member at every point a decision must be made. Of course, Mr. Walker had to believe he had something to gain. It appeared to us that something was return to local control for LRSD.”

The Little Rock district has operated under state control without a locally elected school board since January 2015, when six of its 48 schools were labeled by the state as academically distressed because of chronically low student test scores.

“Since return to an elected school board for LRSD was in no way a negative for PCSSD, I directed the district’s desegregation lawyers, Allen Roberts and Whitney Moore, to do whatever was needed to get the trial in the Doe case continued so that we could begin negotiating unitary status in the remaining areas,” Guess wrote in the email.

“Their judgment, with which I agree, was that a continuance would not have been granted in that trial without an express statement to Judge Marshall that PCSSD was open to entering negotiations and considering alterations to its boundaries,” he said.

Keller said Monday that he met with Guess last week, at which time Guess conveyed that the Little Rock district and the Doe attorneys were talking about boundary line changes, but “at no point in time did he say PCSSD was also involved in those discussions” and that Pulaski County attorneys were involved in the talks. Keller said that he was against boundary line changes.

Guess said in his email that it is his “firm belief” that the Arkansas Board of Education intends to dismantle the Pulaski County Special district as soon as the district is declared unitary.

He cited the Education Board’s legal authority to alter school district boundary lines and its June 2015 unanimous vote accepting a report that recommended boundary changes that would dissolve the Pulaski County Special district by creating one district south of the Arkansas River and as many as four districts north of the river.

Currently, the Pulaski County Special district nearly surrounds the Little Rock district south of the river and encompasses Sherwood and Maumelle communities north of the river. The North Little Rock and Jacksonville/North Pulaski districts also operate north of the river.

Guess said he spoke against the boundary changes two years ago and believes the district can succeed as it exists now. However, he said he thinks there is significant support for boundary changes, even within the Pulaski County Special district, making the boundary changes inevitable.

Jay Barth of Little Rock, chairman of the state Board of Education and the chairman of the committee that authored the 2015 recommendation for boundary changes, acknowledged the support of the committee for altering boundary lines and “keeping communities of interest together.”

“That said, for two years now there has been no discussion about it because it really wasn’t an option,” he said, because of the need for the Pulaski County Special district to be declared unitary. “There has been significant change in the board’s composition since then.”

Barth said the committee in 2015 felt very confident in its proposal but that any final decision would be that of a future state board.

Guess said Monday that delaying the achievement of unitary status to delay boundary changes would be wrong.

“Without a doubt, nothing is going to change in the district until we are unitary,” Guess said. “I also believe we have a responsibility to pursue unitary status. You can’t look at people and say, ‘We don’t treat people fairly,’ and be proud of that. You can’t do that. You have got to convince the court that this district treats kids and adults and patrons fairly and equally.”

Guess said he had talked with board members individually in recent days about the possible delay in the Little Rock Doe case to give time for negotiating unitary status in the Pulaski County Special district.

“If it is not the will of the board to end the 35-year-old lawsuit as soon as possible, then a majority of board members should have said that when we discussed the issue during those meetings, or they should say it now,” Guess said.