3 on voided board for LR schools sue state over takeover

Three members of the recently disbanded Little Rock School Board sued Arkansas Education Commissioner Tony Wood and the state Board of Education on Friday to undo the state's immediate takeover of the Little Rock School District.

The suit seeks an initial restraining order or preliminary injunction against the state leaders.

"We are alleging that the state acted outside of its authority," Willard Proctor Jr., one of three attorneys for the plaintiffs, said about the state Board of Education vote Jan. 28 against the Little Rock School District. The takeover included removing the seven-member board and making Dexter Suggs an interim superintendent under the direction of the education commissioner.

"They didn't have the authority to take over the school district," Proctor added. "We also argue that they were arbitrary, capricious and acted in bad faith. We don't even know if they have a plan yet for the district."

The plaintiffs in the suit are three of the seven displaced Little Rock School Board members: Dianne Curry, Jim Ross and C.E. McAdoo. The fourth plaintiff is Doris L. Pendleton, who is a resident in Zone 1 of the school district and who voted for School Board member Joy Springer in last year's September School Board election, according to the lawsuit.

Besides Proctor, the attorneys filing the 24-page lawsuit in Pulaski County Circuit Court are Marion Humphrey and Rickey Hicks. The case is assigned to Judge Wendell Griffen.

Neither Wood nor state Education Board Chairman Sam Ledbetter of Little Rock had seen the lawsuit Friday night and said they could not comment on its contents.

Wood said he would refer the suit to state Department of Education attorneys and to the Arkansas attorney general's office.

"I look forward to reading it, but I would never make a comment on something that I had not read and thought about," Ledbetter said.

Ledbetter cast the deciding vote in the Education Board's 5-4 decision to take over the state's largest district.

The decision was centered largely on dissatisfaction with district efforts to raise achievement levels at six schools that have been classified by the state as academically distressed because fewer than half of the students at those schools scored at proficient levels on state math and literacy exams over a three-year period.

The six schools are among 48 schools in the district. They are Baseline Elementary; Cloverdale and Henderson middle schools; and J.A. Fair, Hall and McClellan high schools.

"We just don't understand why such a drastic action was taken," Humphrey said about the takeover, arguing that the district was working cooperatively with the state to raise achievement at the six schools.

Humphrey questioned what parents and other members of the public are to do without an elected school board to turn to with their concerns.

"Even though Tony Wood is the School Board right now, he said he is not going to have school board meetings. We as members of the public have become accustomed to being able to attend school board meetings where issues concerning the district are discussed publicly and votes are taken publicly," Humphrey said. "There is no such opportunity at this point. The public has been shut out."

The lawsuit filed Friday describes the long history of the state and district involvement in the six schools and the actions taken in recent months by Little Rock district leaders to develop plans for improving achievement. Those plans were developed in response to recommendations made by state Education Department staff members last fall.

The Education Department staff has said the district was implementing the right kinds of innovations at the schools "with a sense of urgency, and no one has said that the LRSD Board has done anything to impede that effort," the attorneys said in the lawsuit.

"LRSD's Board expected that the plans developed at each of the six schools to increase student achievement (inclusive of the ADE's recommendations) would be faithfully followed and stood ready to take whatever further steps may be necessary to improve the performance of those schools," the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit said the state did not give the district and its newly elected School Board members sufficient time to enact the changes at the targeted schools.

Proctor, Humphrey and Hicks said in the lawsuit the Little Rock School Board argued that the standards in Arkansas law do not allow the Education Board to take over control of a whole district unless the takeover is necessary to fix individual distressed campuses.

Arkansas Code Annotated 6-15-430 Section A sets out remedies for a whole school district that is in academic distress, the attorneys wrote. The section doesn't apply to the Little Rock School District, the attorneys wrote, because the Little Rock district as a whole has never been classified as academically distressed.

Section B of the statute describes the school-specific remedies for academic distress, such as reorganizing or closing the school and removing the principal and the staff, they wrote. The section also says that the state Education Board may take one or more of the remedies in the A section of the statute -- such as taking over the district -- but only to the extent that is necessary to remedy the academic distress of the individual schools, the lawyers wrote.

The attorneys said in the lawsuit that Section B of the law for individual schools was written 10 years after Section A on whole districts in academic distress.

"The standard established in subsection B is that the State Board of Education may take only such actions as are 'needed to assist and address the public school' and assure that 'the public school has corrected all issues' that led to academic distress," the attorneys said in the lawsuit.

The Education Board is authorized to completely restructure the six Little Rock schools in academic distress and assume full control of them and "nothing more would be 'needed' to address the academic issues" at the six schools, the lawyers wrote. "However, the State Board of Education acted outside of its authority in assuming full control of the entire Little Rock School District."

The idea that the statute's section B would allow the Education Board to take over a school district that has not been classified as academically distressed and remove its School Board because one or more individual schools is academically distressed "violates the Arkansas Constitution," wrote Humphrey, Hicks and Proctor.

That's because Article 14 Section 3 of the constitution, in conjunction with Amendment 74 of 1997, assigns certain constitutional duties to school boards, the lawsuit said.

The attorneys said in the lawsuit that the Education Board had not taken over other districts in the state "where the rate of academically distressed schools is greater than in Little Rock."

They cited the Lee County School District as the only other district taken over by the state for reasons of academic distress. In that district, all schools were considered in distress. The problems in that district included having no curriculum beyond textbooks and having 42 of 67 high school seniors who were not on track to graduate.

The state classified the Strong-Huttig School District also as being in districtwide academic distress but did not move to take over that district, the attorneys argued.

The state Education Board removed the Lee County and Strong-Huttig districts from the academic distress-classification earlier this month.

The attorneys noted that the state placed the Dollarway School District in Jefferson County under state control for failing to meet accreditation standards but returned the district to local control even though Dollarway High School is classified as being in academic distress. Three of the 26 schools in the Pulaski County Special School District are in academic distress, even though the state has been in control of the district for four years, the attorneys wrote.

A Section on 02/21/2015