LITTLE ROCK — An attorney for black students known as the Joshua intervenors on Wednesday hammered North Little Rock School District administrators with questions about their choosing not to analyze or put into writing some of their practices on student discipline and financial assistance.
The questioning took place on the sixth day of a federal court hearing on whether the North Little Rock district has complied with its desegregation plan and can be released from years of court monitoring of student discipline records, school facilities, extracurricular activities, compensatory education programs, special-education services and secondary-level gifted education programs.
John Walker quizzed Bobby Acklin, assistant superintendent for desegregation,and Francical Jackson, director of student affairs, about why black students, particularly boys, are disciplined at greater rates than their white classmates and how students and parents are to know that the district will pay for field trips for students from poor families if those messages aren’t in writing.
U.S. District Judge Brian S. Miller, the presiding judge in the case, tried to get to the bottom line, noting that Walker’s examination of all district employees has centered on district record keeping.
“[Walker’s] question,” Miller told Acklin, “is why on something that is important, why not print out a document that explains that ‘If you cannot afford to go on a field trip, we will pay for it,’ and send it home with the kids? He is trying to get you to say why you don’t do it.”
Acklin said that the mes-sage is communicated to parents and students by teachers and principals. He also said the district is reluctant to “just have an open checkbook, so we don’t do it.”
Other questions to Acklin dealt with athletics and whether remedies have been proposed and analyses written about the fact that cheerleading, baseball and golf tend to attract white students while the school dance teams and basketball teams attract greater percentages of black students.
“Let me understand this,” Walker told Acklin at one point. “Your monitoring consists of going around and looking. You look at documents and talk. Is that right?”
Acklin said the district has complied with the desegregation plan requirements on extracurricular activities.
“I don’t have any writings,” he responded at one point to Walker, “but everybody knows who works for the North Little Rock School District that we are going to do it the right way and we are going to make way for disadvantaged children. We aren’t going to yell and scream about it, it’s just going to happen.”
The district’s desegregation plan requires the district to submit an annual discipline report to the School Board in July and that is typically done, district officials testified, although not always in July.
The report for the 2008-09 school year has yet to be published because of the district’s switching over to the Arkansas Public School Computer Network for student, employee and financial data.
Walker said the report in past years has been simply a compilation of statistics without any narrative analysis.
Jackson told him that she discusses the report with Superintendent Ken Kirspel and board members.
The district’s enrollment for the past several years has been 59 percent black. In 2006-07, 83 percent of 3,709 suspensions in the district were to black students. And 91 percent of the 1,079 out-of-school suspensions were given to black students.
“What are additional steps you’ve taken to ensure fairness and an absence of bias?” Walker asked Jackson.
Jackson told Walker that the district’s student handbook, which is compiled by a racially mixed group of employees and parents, sets out the penalties for rule violations.
She also said she reviews the case of each suspended student in grades kindergarten through eight and, when she believes it necessary, reverses or reduces the penalty against a student as a result of that review. Acklin take similar steps for high school students who are subject to discipline.
Jackson, who has worked in the district for 52 years, said she finds that principals cooperate with her better when her directives are not put in writing.
The district’s desegregation plan, which dates back to 1987 and was revised in 1992, calls for the district to develop plans for any school in which student race is a factor in its suspension rate.
Jackson said she talks with principals to determine whether students are treated fairly and, in the past, has called for principals to work with and even provide classroom-management training to individual teachers who refer large numbers of students for discipline.
Jackson said she has not found racial bias in the discipline recommendations from schools but, in response to Walker, she said she has not prepared any written analyses on that matter.
She said that black students “misbehave more often than whites,” and that playful roughhousing among black students can be misinterpreted by district employees as fighting.
Walker noted that the district at times assigns students with behavior problems to privately operated day treatment programs at a cost of $232,000 per semester. He questioned whether Jackson had determined whether those students, most of whom are black, perform better upon their return to the North Little Rock schools.
“The culture in North Little Rock is to not put anything in writing and you don’t do anything to remediate students,” Walker told Jackson at one point.
“We may not have it in writing but we are making progress,” Jackson responded, noting that the district has increased the number of alternative education services for students who are not succeeding in the regular classrooms.
In a moment of levity Wednesday, when Rosie Coleman, the district director of elementary education, was explaining how teachers check student records to determine whether their families can afford field trips, Miller interrupted to express amazement that “permanent records” actually exist for students.
“I remember when I was a kid teachers would say they were going to put something on your permanent record. I never paid attention to that. I thought it was a myth.”
The North Little Rock hearing, now in its second week, is expected to go into next week before it is completed.
Jones told Miller that he anticipates completing the district’s presentation by the end of the day Friday. Walker said the Joshua intervenors’ case would take up to another week.
Up to a dozen attorneys representing the three Pulaski County school districts, the Joshua intervenors, the state attorney general’s office, and the Knight intervenors, who represent teachers in the three Pulaski County school districts, have sat in on at least a portion of the North Little Rock hearing.
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 02/04/2010