District’s suit prompts talk of settlement

LR schools, state step up charter-school negotiation

— The Little Rock School Board’s vote last week to authorize a court challenge to the state’s practice of giving unconditional approval to charter schools has prompted a last-ditch effort to negotiate an out-of-court settlement.

At week’s end, Chris Heller, an attorney for the Little Rock School District who had drafted an 80-page motion to file in court, was conferring with attorneys for the North Little Rock and Pulaski County Special school districts and intervenors about possible settlement terms to present to the attorney general.

In an e-mail message to the School Board on Thursday, Heller said “good progress” was made on a list of charter school and magnet school proposals.

“If the [attorney general] is serious about being open to charter school proposals, we may have an opportunity to reach a settlement,“ Heller wrote to the board.

On Friday, Heller said that he was working to schedule a meeting.

Aaron Sadler, spokesman for Attorney General Dustin McDaniel, said late Friday that state lawyers had received two e-mails from Heller but no meetings had been set.

“We look forward to substantive discussions with thedistrict and hope they take place soon,” Sadler said.

In a 4-3 vote Tuesday, the School Board directed its attorneys to take steps to enforce a 1989 agreement between the state and school district regarding the unrestricted operation of independently run public charter schools in Pulaski County. Eleven of the state’s 18 charter schools are in Pulaski County and a 12th is planned for August.

Case Timeline

District leaders have argued that charter schools are hindering desegregation efforts in violation of the 21-year-old agreement in the Pulaski County school-desegregation lawsuit. They contend that charter schools are drawing high-performing, affluent students from the district, leaving it with fewer financial resources to serve a greater concentration of poor and underachievingstudents.

That 1989 agreement includes specific language prohibiting the state from retaliating against the three Pulaski County districts for state desegregation funds they receive or causing “a substantial adverse impact on the ability of the districts to desegregate.” The districts receive nearly $70 million a year in desegregation aid.

Tax-supported charter schools are run by nonprofit corporations according to terms of their contracts - orcharters - with the Arkansas Board of Education. The schools, which have their own governing boards, are exempted from some laws and regulations that apply to traditional public schools.

The 11 charter schools based in Pulaski County have an enrollment of 3,678 this year, including 499 students in the Arkansas Virtual Academy that provides online lessons to students statewide.

A 12th school - the Little Rock Urban Collegiate Public Charter School for Young Men for nearly 700 students in kindergarten through eighth grades - is approved for opening in August.

Overall, this year’s enrollment in the 11 schools is 39 percent black, 50 percent white and 11 percent members of minority groups including Hispanics and Asians. The Little Rock district is 68 percent black, 22 percent white and 10 percent minority members other than black, according to statistics from the state Department of Education.

The charter-school issue has moved to the forefront in part because of Act 395 of 2007.

The statute directed the attorney general’s office to attempt to negotiate a settlement with the districts and intervenors - teachers and black students - that would result in the districts being declared desegregated and the state’s desegregation payments completely ended after seven years. Any settlement would be subject to federalcourt approval.

The attorney general’s office made an offer of a $396 million phase-out last year. The Little Rock School Board developed a counter offer of $430 million and coupled that with concerns about the charter schools.

McDaniel said last week that he has received no response to the state’s August offer.

Heller disputed that, saying he presented a counteroffer Nov. 24. The state response, Heller said, was that Act 395 does not authorize the state’s lawyers to make significant changes to charter school laws or to make special commitments to the districts that would extend beyond seven years.

Since that time, Heller put together the 80-page draft motion in which the district describes how the state’s practices regarding charter schools violated the 1989 settlement agreement.

The district isn’t seeking to eliminate charter schools, but to impose conditions.

In its draft motion to legally challenge charter schools, the district said it wants the state to seek federal court approval before authorizing new or expanded charter schools. The district also said it wants charters for existing schools amended to include conditions necessary to conform to the “terms and spirit” of the 1989 agreement.

The draft also calls for the state to pay the district retroactively for charter-school students the same amount it pays the district for each student who transfers from the Little Rock district to the North Little Rock and Pulaski County Special districts through the majority-to-minority transfer program.

In the draft motion, Heller argues that some charter schools have a preponderance of poor students, which expands the total number of public schools with predominantly poor enrollments. Those schools struggle to keep high-quality teachers and produce academic success, he said.

The attorney refers to other charter schools as “magnet charter” schools that have 50 percent or fewer black students. Those schools draw nonblack students from the school district who might otherwise attend the district’s magnet schools, Heller wrote.

The loss of nonblack students to “magnet charters” has the effect of denying black students the opportunity to attend district magnet schools, he said. That’s because the district’s magnet schools are supposed to have 50-50 black-to-white racial ratios.

Without white students to assign to magnet schools, the district is limited in how many black students it canassign to the schools to keep those schools close to the 50-50 racial ratio, he said.

Last fall, the district had 370 vacant magnet school seats and a waiting list of 3,028, of whom 2,658 were black and 370 were white, according to the draft motion.

On Tuesday, at the same meeting in which the School Board authorized a legal challenge, Assistant Attorney General Scott Richardson told the board that charter schools could be discussed by the parties. That revived the possibility of settlement talks.

Late last year, Heller and the district suggested conditions to be applied to the new Urban Collegiate Public Charter School for boys. Those conditions could be raised again in any talks with the state.

The district proposed that at least 80 percent of new enrollees at the school must qualify for free or reduced-price school meals, be performing at basic or belowbasic levels on state exams, or both.

Little Rock district leaders have complained that charter school planners initially state their intentions to target lowincome and low-achieving students but then abandon those goals once their charters are approved.

The district also recommended that the school provide transportation for students who qualify for subsidized school meals and for special-education students.

It proposed that parents be required to sign contracts pledging to keep their children in a charter school for an entire year. And it urged that the charter school provide an alternative education program for suspended or expelled students so students aren’t put out of the school.

Gary Ritter, director of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville’s Office on Education Policy, was co-author of “An Analysis of the Impact of Charter Schools on Desegregation Efforts in Little Rock, Arkansas” that was published in September.

The study concluded that the charter schools help rather than hinder desegregation efforts.

White students who transferred to charter schools in 2008-09 were more likely to come from schools that had white enrollments that exceeded the district’s overall white student average, the study’s authors said. Similarly, black and other students of minority groups who transferred to charter schools came from schools with above the district’s average minority enrollment.

“It would be difficult forthe charter schools to enhance segregation because the district - the traditional public schools - are just so darned segregated,” Ritter said.

He also said that charter school students make up only about 5 percent to 10 percent of the total public school count in Pulaski County and even then some of the students move from private schools or other settings besides the local school districts.

Ritter was skeptical of placing conditions on the charter schools and said restrictions could have unintended consequences for charter school opponents.

Requiring the schools to provide bus transportation, he said, could cause charter school operators to seek funding from the Legislature not only for buses but also for school facilities.

“I believe charter operators ... go into it with the expressed goal of serving poor and disadvantaged kids who aren’t being well served in the current system. But they would probably bristle at the idea of actual, binding restrictions,” Ritter said.

Arkansas, Pages 15 on 04/04/2010

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