State board faces choice on Weiner High’s fate

LITTLE ROCK — The Harrisburg School District plans to close Weiner High School, but the decision will be left up to the state.

Harrisburg Superintendent Danny Sample proposed closing Weiner High, citing financial reasons. Under the plan, Weiner secondary-school students would attend middle and high schools in Harrisburg.

The Harrisburg School Board voted 4-1 last week to close Weiner High in June. But a unanimous vote was required. So the issue will be taken up by the Arkansas Board of Education sometime in 2013.

Sample’s plan doesn’t affect Weiner elementary-school pupils.

Weiner, which has fewer than 1,000 residents, is about 20 miles from Jonesboro and about 16 miles from Harrisburg in northeast Arkansas.

Weiner High became part of the Harrisburg School District after the Weiner School District fell below 350 students in 2010and the Weiner district had to dissolve administratively.

But Weiner High, a sevenththrough-12th-grade school, remained open after becoming part of the Harrisburg district in July 2010.

Weiner residents have fought for their schools before.

First, residents backed a then-Weiner district proposal to combine administrations with the Delight School District, which is about 200 miles away and the subject of another state-mandated merger.

When that proposal failed, Weiner residents pursued a federal court lawsuit against combining with Harrisburg that ultimately failed, too.

On Dec. 15, 2011, a threejudge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis affirmed U.S. District Judge James Moody’s November 2010 dismissal of the Weiner case.

In his Nov. 29, 2010, ruling, Moody wrote that the group,known as Friends of Weiner School District, could not prove the harms it claimed would result from the merger of the two districts.

The group had argued that attaching the Weiner district to the Harrisburg system posed a threat to agriculture in the rice-producing community and ultimately to the nation’s food supply and national security.

Specifically, the group argued that the merger would cause families to leave the small town of Weiner to be closer to their children’s schools, driving farmers to live away from their fields and removing them as the first line of defense against “agro-terrorists,” or those who would attempt to contaminate the country’s food supply.

Moody wrote in his 2010 ruling that none of Weiner’s schools had closed as a result of the merger.

Information for this article was contributed by The Associated Press.