The Mineral Springs School District will continue its fight to keep the academic distress label off its high school.
The district in southwest Arkansas on Thursday filed a lawsuit against the Arkansas Department of Education and the Arkansas Board of Education. The lawsuit, filed in Pulaski County Circuit Court, comes a week after the Education Board denied the school district's appeal to rid Mineral Springs High School of the academic-distress designation.
The state deems a school or a school district as academically distressed when fewer than half of its students scored at proficient levels on state exams in math and literacy in the last three academic years. The last three years of exams include both Benchmark and Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career, or PARCC, tests.
Mineral Springs administration said in the lawsuit that the Education Department did not give the school timely notice, according to state rules, of the classification. Under the rules, the Education Department has 30 days to give notice.
The district said the department released PARCC results in October and gave notice in January. The Education Department has said final results were released Jan. 26, a day before the letter went out to inform academically distressed schools and school districts.
The lawsuit also said that the Education Department never re-established a cut-off score for the new PARCC exams. State rules state that department officials had to determine the new thresholds once PARCC became "fully operational." Department attorneys have said the test was needed to be administered for three consecutive years to be "fully operational."
State officials found a way to compare the PARCC scores with those of the Benchmark exams. In doing so, attorneys for the Mineral Springs district said, the Education Department did not follow state rules, which require agencies adopting new rules to allow for public input, file the new rule with the secretary of state's office and then list it in the Arkansas Register.
The district is asking Judge Mary McGowan to hold off on classifying the high school as being in academic distress pending the court process.
The case file is 60CV-16-4614.
Metro on 08/19/2016