District OKs expense for additions at Mills
The School Board for the Pulaski County Special School District on Tuesday gave the green light to construction costs for additions to Mills University Studies High that are meant to lead to the district’s exit from a 41-year old federal school desegregation lawsuit.
The School Board voted 7-0 in favor of a “guaranteed maximum price” of $37.8 million for the building and furnishing of a 2,200-seat arena, 10 classrooms, space for the school’s Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps and a softball field.
The additions, designed by a team from WDD Architects led by Brad Chilcote, are expected to take about 18 months to complete. Kinco Constructors is the builder.
Mills is at 1205 E. Dixon Road in Little Rock.
The price includes $1.87 million for design, survey and geotechnical report fees and $950,437 for furnishings and equipment.
Devin Bates, an attorney for the district in the long-running federal school desegregation case, told the board that he couldn’t promise that the construction plans will put a period on the district’s role as a defendant in the case but “it is my opinion that the plan … meets or exceeds what the district previously represented to the court that it would do to remediate the past desegregation issues.”
U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr., is the presiding judge in a lawsuit in which Pulaski County Special and the Jacksonville/North Pulaski school districts are the remaining defendants. The 1982 case started when the Little Rock School District sued state officials and neighboring school districts over racial segregation in the schools of Pulaski County.
In May 2021, Marshall found that the Pulaski Special district was unitary or had met its desegregation obligations in all areas of its operations except facilities.
Marshall directed the district to propose to him a plan to “square up” construction inequities between the Mills campus, which is in a more heavily Black residential section of the district, and Robinson Middle School, which is in a more affluent, predominantly white residential area.
The two schools were built at the same time and opened to students in August 2019, at a time when the district was obligated in the federal desegregation lawsuit to equalize the condition of its school buildings. Marshall found that both schools were excellent facilities but if Mills was an A school, then Robinson was A++.
The Pulaski Special district responded to Marshall’s order with plans to add an arena, classrooms, a softball field and new space for the JROTC program at Mills.
The additions were initially estimated to cost about $19 million. More recently, district leaders had warned School Board members that the price tag would be greater because of changed economic factors.