Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
School deal draws Sherwood concern
Concerns rose to the surface Wednesday from different fronts about provisions in a tentative settlement in federal court to the 31-year-old Pulaski County school-desegregation lawsuit.
Leaders of the Sherwood Public Education Foundation — an organization formed earlier this year to work toward the formation of a Sherwood public-school system — expressed their “dismay” and “profound disappointment” to the proposed settlement barring any new school districts in Pulaski County other than a new Jacksonville school district.
“We are not interested in derailing the progress toward the final conclusion to the desegregation case with the state,” Sherwood foundation
co-Chairman Linda Remele said at a news conference.
“However, we do not feel we can just sit silently by and just let this happen. We feel like we needed to express our surprise, and our extreme disappointment and dismay, over the unequal treatment of the communities in the Pulaski County Special School District to pursue a separate, community-based school district.”
The Sherwood foundation’s news conference came on the same day U.S. District Court released two letters it received from individuals, including parent Stefanie Moore, who said she feared educational opportunities for children — including her children who live in the Pulaski County Special district — will be hurt by the proposed agreement’s limits on interdistrict student transfers into Little Rock’s six magnet schools.
The other individual, Rizelle Aaron of Jacksonville, wrote of his concerns about the Jacksonville community’s ability to financially support its own school district. He also proposed that the Pulaski County Special district be obligated to make replacing Jacksonville schools a priority in the event a new Jacksonville district is not approved by voters.
Attorneys for the three Pulaski County school districts, the state and intervening parties representing teachers and black students reached a tentative agreement last month that would, among other measures, discontinue $65.8 million a year in state desegregation aid to the Little Rock, North Little Rock and Pulaski County Special districts after the 2017-18 school year.
U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr. tentatively approved the agreement Nov. 22 and scheduled a fairness hearing on it for Jan. 13 and 14, after which he will decide whether to give final approval.
The judge has directed people who want to raise objections to the tentative settlement to submit written statements to James W. McCormack, Clerk of Court, 600 W. Capital Ave., Room A149, Little Rock, Ark., 72201, by Dec. 23. In those written statements, the authors should indicate whether they want to speak at the fairness hearing.
The tentative settlement includes a provision that would permit the formation of a new Jacksonville school system apart from the Pulaski County Special School District in accordance with the requirements of state law. State law, for example, would require that the Arkansas Board of Education to schedule an election within the boundaries of a proposed district.
While allowing the Jacksonville plan to move forward, the proposed settlement also says “the state will oppose the creation of any other school districts from PCSSD’s territory until PCSSD is declared fully unitary and is released from federal court supervision.”
The Pulaski County Special district remains under court supervision for its desegregation efforts in nine areas, including student discipline, Advanced Placement and gifted- education programs, one-race classrooms and school facilities.
Becoming unitary in regard to the disparate condition of the district’s schools, in particular, is expected to take several years. The district’s schools range from the brand-new Maumelle High in the predominantly white and affluent Maumelle community to the much older Fuller Middle and Mills University Studies High schools in the district’s less affluent, predominantly black southeast area.
Sherwood Public Education Foundation leaders said Wednesday that they fully support Jacksonville’s efforts to form a district. But the sentence in the agreement banning the formation of other districts out of the existing Pulaski County Special district was added late in settlement negotiations and unbeknown to them, foundation members said.
Another foundation co-chairman, Beverly Williams, said that despite the disappointment over the provision, foundation members were undecided Wednesday about submitting an objection to the court. She said the foundation is seeking advice from Sherwood residents on how to proceed and could possibly submit a letter to the court by the Dec. 23 deadline.
“That’s an option that is still before us,” Williams said.
Remele said the foundation doesn’t want to stop the settlement from going forward.
“It’s a good deal,” she said. “It’s just a bad sentence. We’ve been told that if you change a comma or a period, they have to go back to the drawing board. They don’t want to do that, and I don’t blame them.”
The Sherwood foundation hired a former school superintendent, Norman Hill, to do a feasibility study on the establishment of a Sherwood school system, including the potential tax base to finance the system. His work on that will continue, Remele said.
So far, foundation leaders said, the study has shown that a proposed Sherwood district encompassing the city limits and the outlying McAlmont and Runyan Acres communities would constitute a nine- school district of more than 4,600 students, making it the 17th largest school system in Arkansas, falling between the Benton and El Dorado school systems in size.
Williams said the racial and economic makeup of a proposed Sherwood district would mirror that of the Pulaski County Special district, contrary to a public perception that a Sherwood district would be predominantly white.
The enrollment in a proposed Sherwood district, from 2013 data, would be 45.58 percent white, 43.92 percent black and 5.83 percent Hispanic, according to the foundation’s data. About 58 percent of students in the proposed district would qualify for free and reduced-price school meals, an indication of low family income.
The Pulaski County Special district is 44.38 percent white, 43.46 percent black and 6.55 percent Hispanic, according to the foundation. About 55 percent of the students qualify for subsidized school meals.
Sherwood Mayor Virginia Hillman, who appointed the education foundation members after the Sherwood City Council in April passed a resolution authorizing the group, said Wednesday that Sherwood is the state’s 14th-largest city and the largest city in the state to operate without its own school district. Jacksonville is the state’s 15th-largest city.
“We owe it to the future of our city,” Hillman said about efforts to form a district. “Good schools make good business, and good business makes good schools. For the economic growth of our city, we must have a district.”
Jerry Guess, superintendent of the Pulaski County Special School District, said after the news conference that while his district did not push for the language in the settlement to prevent the formation of any new school systems other than one for Jacksonville, he said he would be disappointed if the prohibition was stricken.
“If the statement were taken out, I think it would still be a long process for that to happen,” he said about a Sherwood system. “There would have to be state Board of Education approval for that to happen. I think I would embark on a course to demonstrate the danger to the remaining Pulaski County district if a separation were to occur.”
But Guess also said he is “absolutely committed” to resolving the desegregationcase issues and can’t imagine that anything would be a deal breaker to the “global agreement” that has been negotiated.
“Whatever barriers are to surface, we would have to find a way to deal with them,” he said. “It’s very much in our interest to get back to having school like other districts have school, funded the same way other schools are funded and operating under the same oversight of the state that other schools are operated.”
In her letter to the court regarding the tentative settlement, parent Moore said she wanted her child — now at a Little Rock magnet elementary school — to be able to attend magnet middle and high schools. She also wanted another child who will start school next fall to be able to enroll in Little Rock magnet schools even though the family lives in the Pulaski County Special district.
The settlement proposal, if approved, would phase out the interdistrict magnet school and majority-to-minority interdistrict student-transfer programs.
The districts would not take applications for new interdistrict transfer students to magnet schools, although current students would be allowed to remain until they complete all grades at the school, and the Little Rock district plans to continue to operate the special-program magnet schools.
The plan would allow 30 Pulaski County Special students to transfer to Little Rock and 30 to North Little Rock each year for a total of 150 to each district over five years. That would be done using the state’s legal transfer law that requires approval for each student by the school boards for both the sending and receiving districts.
“I understand that the point of this [agreement] is to relieve the state of their responsibility from the initial court case,” Moore wrote. “But these amendments are going to hurt the children in these programs and the families that have been able to find comfort in their children attending the right school for them.”