Group presses Beebe to rescue Weiner schools

Merger set; GOP rival faults law

— Supporters of the Weiner School District on Tuesday asked Gov. Mike Beebe to take action to stop the district’s merger into the neighboring Harrisburg School District.

At a news conference at the state Capitol organized by Friends of the Weiner School District, Republican gubernatorial candidate Jim Keet of Little Rock said it doesn’t make sense to consolidate the district only because it is short of the 350-student requirement set by state law for a district to operate independently.

He later said he probably supports repealing the 2004 law that set the requirement.

That measure was allowed by then-Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee to become law without his signature because he viewed it as too weak. Huckabee preferred to require districts to have at least 500 students.

Beebe, who was not at the news conference, said there’s nothing he can do on his own to change the Weiner district’s situation because the law requires districts that average fewer than 350 students for two years to be annexed or consolidated.

Repealing the law, he said, would invite a lawsuit by the districts that have already merged under the 2004 law. He said he doesn’t believe that voters want to see the state thrown back before the state Supreme Court as it was in a lawsuit that began in 1992 after being filed by the now-defunct Lake View district, which won a verdict that the state was not adequately financing public schools.

In May 2007, the high court approved the state’s system of financing public schools, ending several years of off-and-on court supervision that frustrated legislators, educators and governors.

This March, the state Board of Education approved the annexation of the Weiner district into Harrisburg, which has an enrollment of slightly more than 1,000. Weiner’s is 323.

At the news conference, Greta Greeno, co-chairman of Friends of the Weiner School District, said the group has “confidence that Gov. Beebe is capable of structuring an immediate and appropriate resolution.”

She declined to say what step that would be. She said the group is willing to file a lawsuit in an attempt to halt the annexation if necessary. Kim Kelley of Heber Springs, an attorney who formerly worked for Court of Appeals Judge Karen Baker of Clinton, said she has been hired by the group to explore options.

Beebe said the annexation law “is the law.“

“There are no steps I can take unless I want to violate the law,” he said. “That’s the part of the job I hate. Having to tell people the truth and enforce law.”

Keet said he attended the news conference to support the Weiner district, “not to lambaste the governor.”

What would Keet do?

“I don’t have the specific solution right now,” he said.

Keet said he probably supports repealing the enrollment requirement. “We need to understand the ramifications on it,” he said. He said he would rather have a district with 342 students doing an excellent job than a district with 400 doing a poor job.

Keet said he favored judging districts on their academic performance rather than an arbitrary enrollment level. The state does evaluate districts on the basis of academic performance as well as financial performance.

Asked about Keet’s probably favoring repeal of the 2004 law, Beebe said, “I don’t want to get back into [the] Lake View [case]. I don’t want to get back into the court,” adding that he doesn’t want “to reinstitute what it took us 10 years or longer to get out of.

“Do I think they’d be back in a hurry in front of the Supreme Court? You bet,” he said.

Last year a bill aimed at keeping the Weiner district intact failed to clear a Senate committee after clearing the House 89-8.

The measure by Rep. Buddy Lovell, D-Marked Tree, didn’t make it out of the Senate committee after Assistant Attorney General Scott Richardson told the panel that the Legislature made numerous changes to education law in response to the Supreme Court ruling. Any exemptions to those laws would have to be “evidence-based” and any exemptions would “put me at a disadvantage” defending the state in court, he said.

Beebe opposed the bill, saying exemptions to the law “run the risk of creating another” lawsuit.

At Tuesday’s news conference, Lovell said he would resurrect his bill next year. He scoffed at the idea that the bill, if enacted, would cause legal problems for the state.

Beebe said he won’t support anything that tends to have a reasonable chance to getting the state back into court and reopening all the constitutional questions that have been resolved in the Lake View case.

Arkansas, Pages 10 on 06/24/2010

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