School-choice exemption deadline April 1

Arkansas school districts are approaching an April 1 deadline for notifying the state whether they will claim an exemption for the 2014-15 academic year to a school choice law that enables students to attend schools outside their home districts.

A total of 23 of the state’s 238 school districts opted out of allowing student transfers for the 2013-14 school year, meaning students could not transfer into or out of those districts. Those districts include Blytheville in the northeastern part of the state and reach to Texarkana in the southwest and all seven districts in Garland County in between.

The 23 districts claimed exemptions - as is permitted in the Public School Choice Act of 2013 - based on the potential for the student transfers to conflict with various court orders on desegregation that apply to their school systems.

The School Board for the Little Rock School District, the state’s largest district and one of the 23 that opted out of the School Choice Law for the current school year, voted last month to permit interdistrict student transfers for 2014-15.

That’s a move that school choice advocate Gary Newton calls a “game-changer,” urging other districts to duplicate it.

“Now we have a district that says ‘We are ready to compete,’” said Newton, executive director of the Arkansas Learns school-choice advocacy organization. “It may not show immediate gain in the first year or two, but they are hedging their bets that it will over the long-run.

“To us, it’s a fundamental economic development issue, particularly in urban areas,” Newton said about the School Choice Act. “You’ve got a situation where the chamber of commerce or an economic development organization can say ‘You can come here and live anywhere you want to live and you can choose the public school that best suits your needs, whether it is in this county or the next.’

“That’s a great value.”

By participating in the state school-choice program, which Little Rock leaders say they are now required by law to do, the district could potentially increase enrollment and state aid, and give students living outside Pulaski County a chance to enroll in Little Rock schools.

Accepting School Choice Act transfers also gives the Little Rock district an avenue for offsetting the elimination of the long-standing interdistrict magnet school and majority-to-minority student transfer programs. A January settlement in the 31-year-old Pulaski County federal school desegregation lawsuit ends those desegregation transfer programs, although students already in them may continue in them.

The Little Rock district is serving 1,294 students from Pulaski County Special and North Little Rock school districts this year in the now-ending desegregation transfer programs. It sent to Pulaski County Special and North Little Rock a total of 756 students.

The Little Rock district will join the North Little Rock School District in allowing School Choice Act transfers. North Little Rock participated in Act 1227 of 2013 - the School Choice law - this school year. It never claimed an exemption.

Newton is critical of the Pulaski County Special School District for not participating in the state’s school choice program. He said North Little Rock was embroiled in the desegregation case last year but didn’t take the desegregation exemption allowed in the state law.

“If North Little Rock could choose last year not to do it and there were no repercussions, and they obviously believe they were in a better position not to exempt, then I think any district has to look at it,” he said.

He said the Pulaski County Special district decision not to participate has the effect of denying black and other minority-group students the opportunity to enroll in the district’s predominantly white schools in communities such as Maumelle.

Jerry Guess, superintendent of the Pulaski County Special district, said districts involved in desegregation cases “are not supposed to participate in school choice.

“We believe the first part of the act actually prohibits us from participating in the choice,” he said. “That’s because not only are we still under a desegregation order - even though it is phasing out - we’re not unitary. Little Rock and North Little Rock are both unitary.”

Guess said that by limiting transfers permitted by the January court settlement and not participating in the school-choice program, he hopes to “just settle the district down.”

“The history has been one of such instability. Kids with majority-to-minority interdistrict transfers, magnet-school transfers, intradistrict magnet transfers - what I hope to get back to is some stability within the district so that students can expect to go to school where they live,” he said. “We are working feverishly to address program issues in each of our schools. We believe we are providing a good product already, but we also believe it is going to get better.”

Guess said the district needs the stability and a baseline of student enrollment,which affects funding and staffing for the district. The district will budget “very conservatively” for the coming year because of uncertainty caused by the end of the interdistrict student transfer programs that were part of the decades-old desegregation case. Although students currently in those programs can continue in them, there won’t be new enrollees.

“We’re not going to have new kids coming in, nor new ones going out,” he said. “It’s going to be interesting to see how that is reflected in the numbers.”

The School Choice Act of 2013 was approved by lawmakers after an earlier 1989 school-choice law was declared unconstitutional largely because it included race as a factor to be considered in the transfers. A transfer was prohibited if it would promote racial segregation among districts.

The 2013 law will remain in effect through the 2014-15 school year but will be revisited and possibly revised by legislators in the 2015 session.

The Arkansas Department of Education is asking participating school districts for the numbers of students who exercised the School Choice Act provisions this year. That data are due by March 17, Deborah Coffman, the department’s chief of staff, said Friday.

To date, 192 districts reported that 3,947 students had transferred into their districts, Coffman said. Those districts had lost 2,900 students, she said.

Coffman declined to give numbers for individual districts, saying that the school systems still have time to check and adjust their numbers before the deadline.

Brian Golden, superintendent of the Malvern School District, said about 118 students who resided in the Malvern district transferred to other districts this year, although only about 40 of those were actually enrolled in Malvern district schools. Others were home-school students or enrolled in private schools, he said.

The Malvern district was a defendant in the lawsuit that resulted in the state’s original, 1989 school-choice law being declared unconstitutional.

“The overall effect was little to none,” Golden said about the impact of the change in the law on his 2,150-student system. “Our enrollment is up 20 to 30 students.”

Golden said almost all the students who left were white, but that didn’t really alter the district’s racial makeup, which is about 62 percent white, 32 percent black, with the remaining students being of other ethnicities or races.

The Malvern district could have claimed an exemption for desegregation-related reasons, Golden said. “We chose not to. We wanted to see the effects before we went that route.”

In regard to a district’s eligibility to claim an exemption, Arkansas Code Annotated 6-18-1906 states: “If the provisions of this subchapter conflict with a provision of an enforceable desegregation court order or a district’s court-approved desegregation plan regarding the effects of past racial segregation in student assignment, the provisions of the order or plan shall govern.

“A school district annually may declare an exemption under this section if the school district is subject to the desegregation order or mandate of a federal court or agency remedying the effects of past racial segregation.”

The districts that are taking the exemptions this year - in addition to the Garland County systems, Little Rock and Pulaski County Special - are: Arkadelphia, Blytheville, Camden-Fairview, Dollarway, El Dorado, Forrest City, Helena-West Helena, Hope, Junction City, Lakeside in Chicot County, Marvell-Elaine, South Conway County, Stephens and Texarkana.

The Little Rock School Board voted to participate in the School Choice Act transfer program on the advice of its attorney who said the district no longer qualifies for an exemption.

The seven school districts in Garland County last year took the exemption because they operate in accordance with a 1989 federal court-approved desegregation agreement. Superintendents wrote to the state that the 1989 desegregation agreement incorporated the original school choice law, making it necessary for them to be exempted from the latest school-choice law. However, six of the seven districts committed to seek clarification from the federal court about which state law to follow.

Steve Anderson, superintendent of the Lake Hamilton School District, said the districts followed through with the request to the court and were directed by U.S. District Judge Jimm Larry Hendren in a June 10, 2013, order to continue to comply with the desegregation agreement and its reliance on the original choice law with its restrictions based on student race.

“Accordingly, neither the judicial decision declaring the 1989 Act to be unconstitutional, nor the repeal of the 1989 Act, have any impact per se on the efficacy of the settlement agreement,” Hendren wrote in the case titled W.T. Davis v. Hot Springs School District, et al.

“It’s very confusing and frustrating for our patrons. We operate under a different system than the rest of the state,” Anderson said Friday.

Anderson said leaders in the different districts are exploring the possibility of asking to be released from the Davis case.

Little Rock district leaders, facing the prospect of opening school doors to students beyond Pulaski County, were scrambling during a snow-shortened school week last week to mail school assignment letters for district families who registered children in January and February.

The district will announce the registration period for School Choice Act transfers in the coming weeks, said Frederick Fields, the district’s senior director of student services.

School Board member Jody Carreiro said the district has features that should make the district attractive to outside students. “We have so many people who drive from outside the district to inside the district to work,” Carreiro said. “Having the opportunity to have the kids closer to where they work and with school programs that I think are superior to what is available in other places, we should have a net gain of students.”