Assistant chief sues county district after being denied top job

Janice Warren, an assistant superintendent in the Pulaski County Special School District, has sued the district, its School Board members and its superintendent for declining to interview her when she applied in 2018 for the superintendent’s job.

Warren, assistant superintendent for equity and pupil services, filed the lawsuit this week in federal court.

In the suit, in which she’s represented by attorney Jessica Howard Jenkins, Warren contends she wasn’t interviewed for the top job in the district because of both sexual discrimination by board members and in retaliation for her disclosing the district deviated from its federal court-approved desegregation plan in regard to construction of Robinson Middle and Mills High schools.

Warren was made the district’s interim superintendent in the 2017-18 school year after the School Board’s July 2017 termination of then-Superintendent Jerry Guess for his refusal to fire the legal team representing the School District at the time.

Although Warren of Maumelle applied for the job on a more permanent basis and was one of 11 applicants recommended to the School Board to interview, the School Board chose to interview three men — each of whom worked outside the district and had less superintendent experience than Warren, according to the lawsuit.

One of the selected candidates withdrew from consideration before his interview.

Charles McNulty, an associate superintendent of educational services at the time in the Waterloo, Iowa, Community School District, was ultimately selected for the job and remains the district leader.

As the interim superintendent, Warren was the only woman to serve as the district’s superintendent in more than 30 years, the lawsuit states. Between 1984 and 2018, the district employed six white men and three black men for the top job — two of the black leaders were interim superintendents before becoming the more permanent district chiefs.

“Between August 2017 and September 5, 2017, thirty to sixty days after her appointment as interim superintendent, Dr. Warren, as interim superintendent, reported to the PCSSD Board and the PCSSD attorney that the PCSSD had violated the federal court’s directive regarding facilities and had engaged in discriminatory practices in [Derek] Scott’s development of the district facilities in predominantly white versus predominantly black communities, ” Warren said in the suit.

Scott is a former district executive director of operations in the school system from a time when the bulk of the planning and construction were done for the new Mills High and Robinson Middle school campuses.

The lawsuit states the School District’s attorney in turn reported the inequities in regard to the new campuses in a Sept. 5, 2017, status report to the federal judge presiding in the district’s long-running school desegregation lawsuit.

That is U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr.

One of the district’s obligations in the case is to equalize the condition of its school facilities so schools serving areas with high percentages of black students are comparable to the district’s newer schools in predominantly white areas of the far-flung district.

After a published an article on Warren’s findings of “substantial” disparate features in the two buildings, she said School Board President Linda Remele told her “We do not air our dirty laundry in public.”

Neither Remele nor McNulty would comment on the lawsuit Tuesday, saying it was an active case.

Jenkins, Warren’s attorney, also declined to comment on the case.

In the following weeks, the School Board selected Ray and Associates to aid in the district’s search for a permanent superintendent and subsequently selected McNulty without interviewing Warren or giving her a reason for not interviewing her. She also said she wasn’t evaluated for her work as the interim leader.

In the lawsuit, Warren states she had 11 years of experience as a superintendent in districts with enrollments ranging from 2,500 to 12,000 students. That included 10 years as superintendent in the Crossett School District placed in the state’s fiscal distress program eight months after she took the job there and was released under her leadership from that label two years later at a time of economic hardship in the local timber industry.

In contrast, McNulty had three years of experience as superintendent in a district of fewer than 1,000 students, the lawsuit states.

In addition to the School District, McNulty and Remele, the defendants in the case are School Board members Mike Kemp, Tina Ward, Shelby Thomas, Alicia Gillen, Eli Keller, and Brian Maune.

The lawsuit was initially assigned to U.S. District Judge Brian Miller.