DHS property sale to UAMS approved
An arm of the Department of Human Services gave the final OK Thursday to sell four properties to the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
The Human Services Department State Institutional Board approved the sale of four pieces of property in Little Rock, a total of 11 acres, for $2 million. Mark White, the department's deputy director and former general counsel, said he expects the sales to close in early May.
The acreage includes an electrical substation; a parking lot near the American Red Cross at 401 S. Monroe St.; the Fullerton Building at 4601 W. Seventh St., which is now vacant because of disrepair; and Ricks Armory, which was vacated by the Arkansas National Guard in August after a storm damaged its roof.
UAMS plans to place all of its support services -- including human resources, the finance division and the information technology department -- in the area, officials have said.
The board's approval Thursday came after the University of Arkansas System board of trustees gave the green light during its quarterly meeting in March.
UALR law student lands fellowship
A University of Arkansas at Little Rock law student was named as one of 61 postgraduate Equal Justice Works Fellows for 2015-2017.
Mary Claire Hyatt was selected from a pool of candidates nationwide and is the first W.H. Bowen School of Law graduate to be named a fellow in this program, according to a news release. She will start the fellowship program in fall 2015.
Under the fellowship, Hyatt will work with medical staff and social workers at Arkansas Children's Hospital to make sure that low-income families with special education needs get the necessary services, the news release said. Her tasks will include developing a screening system to find patients with unmet special education needs.
Those patients' families will receive aid including self-help tools and direct legal representation by Hyatt and pro bono legal teams from the fellowship's sponsors, Wal-Mart and Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.
"In a state with so much need, projects such as Medical-Legal Partnership are essential to ensuring that struggling families get access to basic services," Michael Hunter Schwartz, law school dean, said in a news release. "Mary Claire's choice to pursue this kind of work is a wonderful demonstration of how Bowen graduates live our core values of public service, access to justice, and professionalism."
UALR panel to air race-survey report
The University of Arkansas at Little Rock will celebrate diversity with events connected to its 12th annual Racial Attitudes Conference on Monday.
The conference will include a panel discussion on an annual report on racial attitudes in Pulaski County, according to a news release. The forum is from 9 to 11 a.m. Monday at the Donaghey Engineering and Information Technology Building auditorium at the university.
The report comes after interviews with more than 1,800 survey respondents representing five geo-racial groups: Little Rock Whites, Outside of Little Rock Whites, Little Rock Blacks, Outside of Little Rock Blacks and Hispanics, according to the news release.
Those surveyed opined on subjects including gay and interracial marriage, police and community relations and quality of life in their neighborhoods. The "most striking responses" were those interpreting the Michael Brown shooting death in Ferguson, Mo., last year, the news release said.
The full report will be publicly available after the forum at ualr.edu/race-ethnicity.
Metro on 04/11/2015