Two districts ask federal judge for restraining order to halt student transfers.
Hope, Camden file motions
Two Arkansas school districts are asking a federal judge for temporary restraining orders on student transfers to and from their districts until court hearings are held on whether such transfers would conflict with desegregation obligations.
Attorneys Allen P. Roberts of Camden and Whitney Moore of Little Rock filed the motions for the temporary restraining orders and/ or preliminary injunctions against the Arkansas Department of Education and the state Board of Education on behalf of the Hope and Camden Fairview school districts.
In the alternative to issuing orders against the state, the attorneys asked that the judge enjoin the districts from complying with the Arkansas School Choice Act student transfer program as they have been ordered to do by the state.
In response to the Camden Fairview motion, U.S. District Judge Susan Hickey has scheduled a 9:30 a.m., Aug. 1 hearing in El Dorado on the Camden district’s request for a hold on student transfers.
Earlier this year, the Hope, Camden Fairview, Junction City, and Lafayette County school districts asked the state to exempt them from participating in Arkansas School Choice Act interdistrict student transfers.
The districts argued that allowing students to cross district lines to attend schools in districts in which they don’t reside will result in “white flight” and put the four school systems in conflict with federal court-ordered school desegregation requirements.
The Department of Education and the state Board of Education denied or partially denied the district requests for exemptions from the School Choice Act transfers.
The four districts followed up by filing motions in their federal desegregation cases asking that Hickey declare the School Choice Act program to be in conflict with the desegregation obligations of the school systems or to direct that the districts’ desegregation orders be altered to reflect the School Choice Act provisions.
The state earlier this month received permission to intervene in the three cases in which it wasn’t already a party.
Roberts and Moore wrote in the motion for a restraining order in the Hope case that 69 applications have been submitted by Hope residents for transfers out of the 2,247-student district that has a 45.5 percent black student enrollment.
Sixty-eight of the 69 are seeking to enroll in the 619-student Spring Hill School District, which has a 1 percent black student enrollment, according to Roberts and Moore. Of the 68, applicants, 67 are white.
Of a total of 15 students from the Camden Fairview district, enrollment 2,477, who have applied for School Choice Act transfers, 14 are seeking to attend school in the Smackover Norphlet School District, enrollment 1,111, and one to the 2,754-student Magnolia School District. All the applicants are white, Roberts and Moore wrote.
In arguing for the School Choice Act transfers in the Hope School District case, the Arkansas attorney general’s office told Hickey earlier this week that the act “fosters greater involvement in public schools by students and their parents, incentivizes teachers and administrators to improve the effectiveness of their schools, holds bureaucrats accountable for failing schools, and enhances the quality of public school education in Arkansas by giving students the opportunity to exit failing and underperforming schools.”
Roberts said Wednesday that he anticipates filing motions for temporary restraining orders — similar to the Hope and Camden motions — in the Lafayette County and Junction City cases in the coming days.