34 vie for LR district advisory board seats

A map showing Little Rock School Board election zones.
A map showing Little Rock School Board election zones.

A total of 34 people are applicants for seven positions on what will be the new Community Advisory Board for the state-controlled Little Rock School District.

A Community Advisory Board is authorized by state law for a school district classified as being in distress that has been taken over by the state and has made some progress in correcting some, but not all, of the problems that led to the distress classification.

The legally described duties of a Community Advisory Board are: to meet monthly in public with the superintendent regarding the progress of the school and district; to conduct hearings and make recommendations to the state education commissioner on student and employee discipline matters; to seek input from district residents regarding academic distress concerns; and to submit quarterly reports to the Arkansas education commissioner and state Board of Education.

The applicants for the new board -- some of whom were nominated by Pulaski County lawmakers -- include several who had been previously elected to the Little Rock School Board and some who are former members of the recently disbanded, much larger state-appointed Civic Advisory Committee. That committee existed for just over a year. The committee recently asked that the district be returned to local control and that Johnny Key be removed as state education commissioner.

The state Education Board will hold a work session with the advisory board applicants at 5 p.m. Monday. The applicants have been invited to make 3-minute presentations at that work session, which will be open to the public and live-streamed on the Education Department's website.

The session will be held in the Arch Ford Education Building auditorium at 4 Capitol Mall.

Live video streaming of the meeting will be available at http://bit.ly/1DMPinN.

The session's agenda and applicants' resumes are available at http://bit.ly/28Lv8fE.

Ultimately, Key will select the advisory board members -- one for each of the seven school board election zones in the district -- and present his selections for approval to the state Board of Education at its July 14 meeting.

The applicants for the new board have a wide range of educational, occupational and civic backgrounds.

At least one graduated from Yale University and another from the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service. There are several lawyers and small-business owners in the pool, as well as public school and college-level educators.

One applicant is a former professional football player. Several are graduates of the Little Rock School District. Others have children in the district's schools. Some have spouses who work or did work for the district. At least two have sued state officials over the state takeover of the district last year.

Joy Springer, one of five applicants for east Little Rock's Zone 1 seat on the advisory board, is one of those who has sued the state. She is a former elected School Board member and a former member of the successor advisory committee that had more than 30 teacher, student and community members.

"The reason I ran for the School Board is the same reason why I am interested in this one," Springer said Tuesday about the new advisory board. "People give lip service to making sure all the children get educated, and I haven't seen that to be the case. My intentions are and have been to make sure ... that all the children are educated."

Christopher Burks, an attorney and a former member of the Pulaski County Election Commission, is one of four applicants for the advisory board's Zone 3 seat, representing north-central Little Rock.

Burks said Tuesday that he has worked professionally on educational and constitutional law issues, and has been a volunteer and a fundraiser for district schools.

"It's a critical time for the long-term vision of the district," he said about his interest in being on the Community Advisory Board. He believes that his skills and experiences in law, public policy and community engagement service would be beneficial to the advisory board.

The state Board of Education voted in January 2015 to take control of the Little Rock district because six of the district's schools were state-labeled as academically distressed for chronically low student test scores. The state dismissed the elected School Board and put the district's superintendent under the direction of the state education commissioner.

Baseline Elementary has since been removed from that list of academically distressed schools. Still on the list are J.A. Fair, McClellan and Hall high schools, as well as Cloverdale and Henderson middle schools.

Members of the Community Advisory Board will serve without compensation until the Little Rock district is returned to local control or until the state Education Board takes other action against the district. That action can include the annexation of the district to another district, consolidation or reconstitution.

The state Education Department has posted the work session's agenda and the candidates' applications on its website but blacked out all addresses and home or cellphone numbers for the applicants.

The applicants are:

Zone 1

• Chauncey Holloman, a small-business development coordinator for Little Rock.

• Gabe Holmstrom, executive director of the Downtown Little Rock Partnership.

• Norma Johnson, former Little Rock School Board member and permit technician for the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department.

• Barclay Key, history professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and a plaintiff in an unsuccessful lawsuit in Pulaski County Circuit Court to restore local school board control in the Little Rock district.

• Springer, a paralegal/education monitor for civil rights lawyer John Walker and a plaintiff in an ongoing federal lawsuit that in part challenges the state's 2015 takeover of the Little Rock district.

Zone 2

• Maria Chavarria-Garcia, executive director of Education, Economic Opportunity and Healthy Futures.

• Robert Webb, owner of Webb Construction.

Zone 3

• Christopher Burks, attorney at the Sanford Law Firm.

• Chandle Carpenter, special education teacher at Parkview Magnet High in the Little Rock district.

• Melanie Fox, owner of J&M Foods Inc., and former two-term member of the Little Rock School Board.

• Tippi McCullough, a 31-year teacher, currently working at Little Rock's Central High.

Zone 4

• Greg Adams, social worker at Arkansas Children's Hospital, former Little Rock School Board member, and most recently co-chairman of the state-appointed Civic Advisory Committee for the Little Rock district.

• Mac Bell, director of communications and development for Easter Seals Arkansas.

• John Thomas Adams, attorney for Shults & Brown and adjunct professor at the William H. Bowen School of Law.

• Mark Fortune, marketing consultant for Fortune Marketing, which he established in 2014.

• Eugene Levy, a retired rabbi and former member of the Civic Advisory Committee for the Little Rock district.

• Margaret Melissa Muse, a homemaker and mother.

• Jeremy Owoh, assistant superintendent for the Jacksonville/North Pulaski School District and a former Little Rock principal at J.A. Fair High.

• Jeff Wood, attorney and owner of the Wood Firm.

Zone 5

• Tommy Branch, juvenile-detention center specialist for the state Department of Human Services' Division of Youth Services, a former appointed member to the Little Rock School Board and now chairman of the new Little Rock Area Public Education Stakeholder Group, which is to identify opportunities for cooperation among traditional schools and charter schools.

• Larry Clark, lead systems program for Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield.

• Barry Vuletich, an advocate and consultant for students with disabilities after spending his career working for rehabilitation and disability rights agencies, and a former candidate for the Little Rock School Board.

• John Wilkerson, an attorney for the Arkansas Municipal League and served on the Little Rock School District Civic Advisory Committee.

Zone 6

• Derick Brooks, a real estate professional for Rausch Coleman Homes.

• Van Marq Golden, employed by the state Department of Human Services and was a member of the Civic Advisory Committee for the Little Rock district.

• Anthony Hampton, office manager for City Connections Inc., and minister of outreach/media for The City of Grace.

• Jesse Hargrove, associate professor of Spanish at Philander Smith College.

• Bruce Hill, semiretired/paralegal at the Nickels Law Firm, previously worked for more than 30 years for the National Labor Relations Board.

Zone 7

• Henry Brooks IV, a doctoral candidate in public policy at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, a substitute teacher and former vice president for institutional equity, trader/compliance specialist for Stephens Inc.

• Soreya DeGonzalez, executive director of Centro De Apoyo Hispano.

• Dianna Harshfield, retired after 24 years as a teacher, most recently at J.A. Fair High.

• Kandi Hughes, associate general counsel and compliance officer for the University of Central Arkansas in Conway.

• Kenyon Lowe Sr., adjunct instructor, former candidate for the Little Rock School Board, member of the Little Rock City Housing Authority/Metropolitan Housing Alliance.

• Freddie Scott, director of network operations for Exalt Education Inc., which is a charter school management organization.

The Community Advisory Board for the Little Rock district is not the first established under state law. The Pulaski County Special and Helena-West Helena school districts, which are emerging from five years of state control for fiscal distress, each has had a Community Advisory Board for about three years. Those boards will cease to exist after the two districts elect new school boards in November.

Metro on 06/22/2016

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