Black-teacher push outlined
Staffing expert tells of effort to hit 25% goal in new district
A leader in the effort to staff the new Jacksonville/ North Pulaski School District urged principals to employ at least one black teacher for every core academic subject area — math, English, science and social studies — in the middle and high schools.
Beverly Williams, a longtime human-resources director in public education, testified Tuesday in federal court that she also had pushed for a classroom teaching staff of at least 25 percent blacks in the district’s six elementary schools — all in an effort to comply with the system’s desegregation obligations in regard to school staffing.
In response to questions from Rep. John Walker, D-Little Rock, an attorney for the class of black students known as the Joshua intervenors, Williams said the racial makeup of the district staff remains short of that unwritten goal.
Williams, a human-resources consultant to the new district from January 2016 to June 2018, was a witness in a hearing being conducted this week by U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr. to determine whether the nearly 4,000-student Jacksonville district has met its desegregation requirements on staffing and is entitled to be released from court supervision in that area.
The district also has asked Marshall, the presiding judge in what has become a 35-yearold Pulaski County school desegregation lawsuit, to rule that the Jacksonville district’s plan for replacing nearly all of its schools by the early 2030s will result in the district’s meeting its obligation to equalize its school buildings with new schools in predominantly white, more affluent parts of the Pulaski County Special School District.
The Jacksonville district was carved out of the Pulaski County Special district and began operating on its own July 1, 2016. As a condition of that detachment, the Jacksonville district is obligated to comply with the Pulaski County Special district’s desegregation plan, Plan 2000, in the same areas of operation in which Pulaski County Special remained under court monitoring at the time of the separation. Those areas are staffing, student achievement, student discipline and school buildings.
The Pulaski County Special district was declared unitary and released from court supervision on staffing last year.
The Joshua intervenors are opposing the Jackson-
ville North Pulaski district’s request for unitary status, saying that the move is “premature” at best in a district in which the number of state-licensed staff members who are black is at 20 percent this school year, according to district figures sent to the judge by Scott Richardson, the district’s attorney.
Williams — like the district’s former assistant superintendent Jeremy Owoh did on Monday — described for the judge the processes the Jacksonville district has used to recruit, interview and select teachers using biracial interview panels and standardized questions and scoring methods.
Pictures of the wall charts on teacher hiring tasks that papered Williams’ office walls were shown as exhibits in the Tuesday hearing.
“We lived and breathed Plan 2000 every day,” Williams said about how the charts were meant to track the district’s desegregation efforts in regard to staffing.
Williams emphasized that the 25 percent goal for black elementary classroom teachers and for core academic subject area teachers at the middle and high schools “was a start” for a district that had no teachers and couldn’t contract with prospective teachers until July 1, 2016 for the school year that started the following month, in August.
The 25 percent goal was not a cap on the percentages of black teachers at a campus, she said, adding later that the district had the authority to move teachers from one position to another in an attempt to get closer to the goal.
Williams also described the efforts the district leaders had gone to help individual teacher candidates achieve credentials to become Jacksonville teachers — only to have them in at least one case choose to work in another district. Additionally, the district
also passed a policy to enhance the district’s black teaching staff by providing college tuition reimbursement.
Tammy Knowlton, the district’s new human-resources coordinator, testified later that four people have indicated interest in the reimbursement program but none is black.
Walker asked Williams why the new district as part of the detachment didn’t retain more of the Pulaski County Special district teachers who had worked in the Jacksonville area schools. Williams said the new district couldn’t match the salaries that the Pulaski County Special and other districts were paying to experienced teachers. As a result, the district was targeting early-career teachers and new graduates of colleges of education.
She also said that the district was attempting to hire teachers who were black from a statewide labor pool of just 8 percent black teachers.
Walker however argued that the nearby Little Rock School District had a black teaching staff in excess of 35 percent. He questioned whether the new district had approached Little Rock and other nearby districts to gain access to the teacher job applicants in those districts as a way to shore up the percentages of black teachers in Jacksonville.
Walker told the judge that the district’s claims of hiring staff of nearly 500 licensed and support personnel using the protocol they described would be “impossible.”
He also objected to the district’s hiring central office administrators who do not have college degrees — including the superintendent’s executive assistant — but are earning salaries greater than the annual salaries paid to the highest-paid teachers.