Legislator’s testimony sought

Attorneys dispute Springer’s role in desegregation suit

Attorneys for black students in the Pulaski County Special School District are asking a federal judge in a long-running school desegregation lawsuit to deny efforts by the school district attorneys to limit testimony at a hearing next month from Rep. Joy Springer, D-Little Rock, on whether the district has met its school desegregation obligations.

Austin Porter Jr. and Robert Pressman, who lead the legal team that represents the students known as the McClendon intervenors, have also asked U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr. to deny other recent motions by school district lawyers to restrict testimony about the condition of school campuses and student discipline practices in the 12,000-student system.

Marshall, the presiding judge in the 37-year-old school case, has scheduled a hearing to start July 14 to determine whether the Pulaski County Special School District has met requirements for facilities, student achievement, discipline practices and self-monitoring of desegregation efforts, and can be declared unitary or desegregated and released from further federal court supervision of its operations.

The district’s team of lawyers — Sam Jones, Amanda Orcutt, Devin Bates, Jay Bequette and Cody Kees had earlier sent motions to Marshall asking for the limits on testimony from Springer, who has been a monitor of desegregation efforts throughout Pulaski County for more than three decades. The district’s team said in part that the McClendon intervenors missed a deadline for identifying her as an ex

pert witness for the upcoming hearing. The district team asked Marshall to prevent Springer from offering any expert opinions or any testimony based on specialized knowledge. That leaves her to be a “fact witness” who can only testify about her personal knowledge.

The intervenors acknowledge that Springer was not identified in pre-trial documents as an expert witness but that “is not the real reason” for the objection.

“PCSSD objects because it thinks Mrs. Springer is not qualified to testify as an expert despite — in PCSSD’s own words – “… [her] extensive training, higher education, and service as an elected official,” the McClendon attorneys wrote.

“At bottom, Mrs. Springer

is well qualified to offer useful expert testimony to the Court,” the McClendon attorneys wrote. “If PCSSD thinks otherwise, it will have a full and fair opportunity to cross examine her.

“The same goes for her methodology,” they added. “Rather than exclude the testimony altogether, the Court should hear it, allow cross examination, and decide for itself how probative or useful it is. What the Court should not do, however, is bar the testimony altogether because this Court is more than capable of deciding what to do with the testimony it hears, and it will not be swayed by extraneous matters having nothing to do with the issues it has to decide.”

In regard to the issue of equalized school facilities, the attorneys for the district earlier this month asked the judge to limit his focus as to whether the district constructed a new Mills High for $50 million and

converted the former Mills High into a middle school for $5 million.

The attorneys argued to the judge that the McClendon intervenors “conducted broad, unrestricted discovery that was at best a fishing expedition. The discovery goes way beyond the scope of the remaining issues to be tried,” the attorneys said.

The McClendon legal team on Tuesday called the Pulaski district’s arguments “preaching, or screeching.” And they said that the judge’s 2015 approval of $55 million replacement of Mills High and remodeled Mills Middle School was a supplement and not a replacement to the provision in the district’s desegregation Plan 2000 to provide equal school facilities in the district.

The attorneys noted that in recent years neither the judge nor school district had indicated that completion of the Mills projects was all that was required of the district in

regard to equal facilities. In September 2018 the judge — who has toured several of the district campuses and has a tour planned for this summer — said that replacement of the Harris and College Station elementary schools was undecided and that he would need proof about them.

“Case developments regularly involved facility issues, each occasion an opportunity to consider whether the issue remained open after the motion to supplement ruling,” the McClendon attorneys told the judge this week.

“If the matter is so clear that it justifies the angry tone of the PCSSD papers, it should have been pressed long ago. Both the Court and staff and Intervenors’ counsel have expended much time and effort since the Court’s ruling. An upshot of the current PCSSD argument is that much of this time was wasted, including that of its own counsel,” they wrote.