Judge: Desegregation decision won’t be rushed

LITTLE ROCK — Chief U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr. said Friday at the end of a two-week hearing on the Jacksonville/North Pulaski School District’s desegregation efforts a decision on the matter can’t be hurried.

“This is not something that needs to be rushed,” Marshall told the attorneys for the Jacksonville and Pulaski County Special school districts as well as for the intervenors who represent the class of all Black students in the two districts.

“It’s too serious a business, these children’s minds and lives that are in our hands,” Marshall said. “The issues are serious. There is legal complexity here that I need to sort through.”

Both districts have asked Marshall, the presiding judge in a nearly 38-year-old federal school desegregation lawsuit, to find the school systems have met their desegregation obligations, declare them unitary and release them from further court monitoring of their operations.

Attorneys for the McClendon intervenors — the class of Black students formerly known as the Joshua intervenors in the lawsuit — have argued the two districts haven’t complied with the provisions of the desegregation Plan 2000 and related court orders and, as a result, shouldn’t yet be released from court monitoring.

Marshall held a threeweek hearing on the Pulaski Special district’s unitary status motion in July.

The Jacksonville/ North Pulaski district was carved out of the Pulaski County Special School District and began operating on its own in 2016 — with the condition it meet the same desegregation obligations Pulaski County Special district had yet to meet.

Each of the two districts is independently responsible for its compliance with Plan 2000, and the obligations the districts have to meet are slightly different. The Jacksonville district seeks unitary status on staffing incentives, student achievement discipline practices and self-monitoring of desegregation efforts. The Pulaski Special district seeks unitary status on equitable school buildings as well as student achievement, discipline practices and self-monitoring.

However, the two cases are heavily intertwined, so much so an attorney from one district has attended and participated in the other district’s court hearing and vice versa. Additionally, the representatives of the districts and intervenors are under court order to meet regularly on the desegregation obligations.

“I want counsel to know and be assured that I have treasured my time in the courtroom with you on this,” Marshall said. “Each side has worked very hard putting the case together, and I admire the disagreements that counsel have had — and there are disagreements — and the cooperation that I have seen. Both are in the finest tradition of what it means to be a lawyer, and of course y’all have done all of the hard work and pulled things together for me, educating me about this. I will do the best I can in due course.”

The judge said he has a number of criminal and civil trials scheduled in the coming months in which he will preside while also working on decisions or orders in the school desegregation cases.

Marshall has been the presiding judge for nine years in the lawsuit that was first filed by the Little Rock School District in 1982 against the Pulaski County Special and North Little Rock districts and the state of Arkansas. The Little Rock and North Little Rock districts and the state were released from the case in past years.

Each of the former presiding judges — U.S. District Judges Henry Woods, Susan Webber Wright, Billy Roy Wilson and Brian Miller — and one or more of their orders came up during Friday’s lengthy closing arguments.

In his arguments to Marshall, Scott Richardson who represents the nearly 4,000-student Jacksonville district, recalled that Miller asked attorneys at a hearing in the case whether a Black child must sit next to a white child to learn. All the attorneys said “no,” Richardson recalled.

Richardson highlighted the recent testimony from school district administrators and principals on the initiatives to raise student achievement and eliminate any discriminatory discipline practices, as well as offer incentives to people to become state-licensed teachers.

“It’s a continual process of strategic planning, leadership teams, PLCs and RTI teams,” Richardson said. “All these educators are all in it together to look at the data continually to improve instruction, to improve discipline process.