Board sets meeting to consider LR school intervention

State Rep. John Walker, D-Little Rock, speaks to the State Board of Education's Academic Distress Committee Thursday morning.
State Rep. John Walker, D-Little Rock, speaks to the State Board of Education's Academic Distress Committee Thursday morning.

The state Board of Education will hold a meeting later this month to consider whether the state should intervene in the Little Rock School District.

The Academic Distress Committee voted Thursday morning and the full board later unanimously approved the state set a Jan. 28 meeting "to determine whether at that time to invoke any of the actions" allowed by state law, which include taking over the district, dissolving the local school board and assigning a new superintendent.

The Little Rock School District has six schools considered under academic distress because fewer than half their students scored proficient or better on state exams over three years: Baseline Elementary, Cloverdale Middle, Henderson Middle, Hall High, J.A. Fair High and McClellan High.

One board member, Jay Barth, raised the possibility that the state could potentially take over just those institutions.

Further details on the time and location of the Jan. 28 meeting weren't immediately set.

After hearing from several prominent local businessmen and a former member of the Little Rock School Board who called for a district takeover at a meeting Wednesday, the committee on Thursday heard from two state legislators who urged against it.

Rep. John Walker, D-Little Rock, criticized the notion of the state removing Little Rock's black-majority school board and said the state doesn't have a good track record of turning around academic achievement in schools and districts in which most students are members of minority groups.

He said the state has been involved with the schools in academic distress already and that hasn't led to any progress.

"It may be the state has contributed to the status of the schools in question," he said.

Walker, who addressed the committee and the full board, later alleged some of the calls for the state to take over the district were racially motivated, suggested the problems identified by the state didn't pertain to the local school board and criticized the academic distress label, noting the state changed the definition within the past year from 75 percent scoring below standards to 50 percent.

"How can the district flip minority achievement within a period of 9 months to meet the new standard," he asked. "That is impossible."

State Sen. Joyce Elliott, D-Little Rock, also questioned the state's ability to fix the Little Rock district's problems and said a long-term solution calls for overhauling both schools and neighborhoods, which she said are connected.

"We can do whatever we want to our schools and have short-term success," she said. "But sustained success depends both on what's happening in the neighborhoods and what's happening in the schools."

The full board also heard from Little Rock School Board member Dianne Curry, who said there were no calls to take over the local board before 2006 when it had a white majority.

"Some act shocked when you introduce racial elements into discussions," she said. "But sometimes you have to call things the way they are."

The board ultimately voted unanimously to approve the recommendation for the Jan. 28 meeting, which came from board member Vicki Saviers. But one board member, Diane Zook, expressed some reservations about waiting, saying the state is in its "fifth decade of failing" the students in the Little Rock district.

"I think to continue to delay would be like if someone told me I had cancer, but come back in two weeks and we'll be deciding what to do about it," she said before the vote. "I'm not asking you to change the 28th date. But I would ask you when you come that day, please have studied everything that's been presented and be ready to make a decision and a bold decision."

See Friday's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for full coverage.

Upcoming Events