District hearing reviews job cuts, race disparities

Attorneys for the Pulaski County Special School District and Black students known as the McClendon intervenors returned Monday to the subject of racial disparities in student achievement in an ongoing federal court hearing on the district’s desegregation efforts.

Kicking off the intervenor’s case after the school district completed its case Friday, attorney Austin Porter Jr. questioned Assistant Superintendent Janice Warren about cutting the jobs of academic program administrators in 2018, and the achievement disparities on the ACT college entrance exam and on the Aspire exams given to students in grades three through 10 in math, literacy and science.

Porter also questioned Rep. Joy Springer, D-Little Rock, who is a longtime paralegal and school desegregation monitor on behalf of the intervenors. Porter asked Springer about her efforts over much of the past decade to get district leaders to incorporate desegregation-related goals for reducing the racial achievement disparities into individual school improvement plans and into the district’s annual Monitoring and Compliance Report.

“My concern is whether the district is actually committed and actually implementing,” Springer said about the absent goals, adding that educators are taught “that if it is not documented, you didn’t do it.”

U.S. Chief District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr. is presiding in the hearing this month to determine whether the 12,000-student district has met its obligations in its desegregation plan, Plan 2000, and related documents, and can be released from future court monitoring of its operations. At issue are student achievement, student discipline practices, the condition of school facilities and the district’s self-monitoring of its desegregation efforts.

The district’s desegregation Plan 2000 calls in part for the district “to implement plans designed to improve student achievement, recommended by Dr. Stephen Ross and shall work with Dr. Ross in their implementation.”

Ross at the time was affiliated with the University of Memphis. His 12-page education plan for the district, attached to Plan 2000, includes six educational goals, including one that calls for improving “educational achievement by all students, with special attention to African-American students and others who are at-risk of academic failure due to socio-economic disadvantages.”

Another of the goals in the Ross plan is to “decrease the performance gap between white students and African-American students through the systematic design, selection and implementation of intervention programs that provide effective remediation and/or adaptation to individual or group needs.”

In response to questions from Porter, Warren — now assistant superintendent for equity and pupil services — recalled how she as interim superintendent in the 2017-18 school year asked the School Board to eliminate five program administrator positions out of the district’s learning services department to offset a projected revenue shortfall.

“My recommendation to the board was that this will have an adverse impact on Pulaski County Special School District’s student achievement,” Warren said, adding that the employees provided support to schools in the teaching of the core academic subjects.

The five were replaced with two instructional strategists, the job descriptions for which she did not know, she said.

In response to questions from Jay Bequette, an attorney for the district, Warren said she did sign letters of non-renewal at the direction of the School Board for the five program administrators as she did not want to be insubordinate to the School Board. She also said it was a priority for her that expenses be cut at the central administration level and not in schools in ways that would directly affect students.

In response to questions from Porter about a persistent racial achievement gap on the ACT college entrance exams that are taken by high school seniors, Warren said it was “absolutely” concerning that fewer Black students are taking the test each year and that the Black-white gap increased 2.3 percentage points in 2013 to 2.9 points in 2019, when only 35% of the district’s Black students took the test. That was down from as many as 46% of eligible Black students, Porter said.

Every senior class is a different group of students, Warren said, so the comparison from one class to another is not an apples-to-apples comparison. She noted that there is a racial achievement gap in the state and nation, as well.

Porter asked whether those other districts had received upward of $20 million a year in special state desegregation aid like Pulaski County Special did for many years.

The Pulaski County Special district has taken steps to raise the college exam scores, in part through the formation of the $10 million Donaldson Scholarship Academy, a summer, after-school and weekend college-introduction program for district high school students. That includes ACT test preparation, she said.

Additionally, the district has initiated the Advancement Via Individual Determination program at the elementary, middle and high school levels to foster college attendance and success, said Warren, who coordinates that program.

Warren’s testimony Monday differed from that of Springer’s in regard to inclusion of Ross Plan student achievement goals in individual school improvement plans.

Warren said that when the state’s “IndiStar” format for the school improvement plans did not include a way to incorporate the desegregation plan goals, she personally called the U.S. Department of Education to get an added provision into the format for the district’s schools. That provision was referred to as the CL12 provision or cultural learning #12, Warren said.

“That is where we have the specific goals for the desegregation plan,” Warren said.