Desegregation judge urges sides to work

Trial in ’17 if discord on schools persists

U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr. urged the parties in the long-running Pulaski County school desegregation lawsuit on Thursday to push ahead on meeting desegregation obligations on school staffing or expect a trial next year.

Marshall met with the attorneys and superintendents for the Pulaski County Special and Jacksonville/North Pulaski school districts and for black students known as the Joshua intervenors at a quarterly status conference in the 33-year-old lawsuit.

The judge suggested that a trial be planned for the latter part of 2017 if the two districts and the intervenors continue to disagree on whether the two districts comply with the staffing requirements in the Pulaski County Special district's desegregation plan, known as Plan 2000.

Both the Pulaski County Special and Jacksonville/North Pulaski districts must comply with that desegregation plan in regard to certain areas of their operations -- staffing, facilities, student achievement, student discipline and internal desegregation monitoring -- to be declared unitary and released from federal court supervision. The Jacksonville district's compliance with the Pulaski County Special district's plan was a condition of its formation.

Marshall acknowledged that the parties have been occupied in recent months with all the "huge" tasks associated with the detachment of what is now a nearly 4,000-student Jacksonville/North Pulaski district from the Pulaski County Special district. The Pulaski County Special district now has about 12,000 students The Jacksonville district began operating completely on its own tJuly 1.

"It's done. It's time to say amen and move on to other things," Marshall said about the new district.

He selected staffing requirements in the desegregation plan as the part of the case that could be most readily addressed, with facilities to follow after state-funding amounts for new school buildings are determined in the 2017 state legislative session.

"I ask the parties as you continue your rotating monthly meetings to focus on the staffing issues so that you can inform the court in December whether you all have common ground and, as on other issues, there is either a proposal for unitary status or a request for mediation before a magistrate, or you all could tell me that 'we have reached an impasse on this.'

"If there is an impasse, I will be thinking between now and December of when it is we could have a trial ... in the later part of 2017 to address those staffing issues."

The judge said he isn't willing to give up on making progress toward an end to the lawsuit, and, in the interim, attaining greater clarity about what is right in the districts and what is wrong so that the wrongs can be fixed.

Earlier in the Thursday conference, Allen Roberts, an attorney for the Pulaski County Special district, said the parties have been discussing staffing compliance with the hope of reaching an agreement -- possibly with help from a mediator -- that can be presented to the judge.

Jacksonville/North Pulaski attorney Scott Richardson presented the judge with some preliminary data that show the new school district has hired 515 licensed educators and support staff members, 140, or 27 percent, of whom are black.

Of the 282 state-licensed employees who are not administrators, 16.6 percent are black. Forty percent of the 36 administrators, including principals, assistant principals and central office staff, are black. The district has a student body that is about 50-50 black and white.

Richardson said that the 16.6 percent black teaching staff is double the 8 percent teachers who are black in the state's educator labor market.

Rep. John Walker, D-Little Rock, an attorney for the Joshua intervenors, was critical of the statistics, saying that -- at a minimum -- the racial makeup of the licensed staff in the new district should match that of the Pulaski County Special district from which it was carved. He said the Pulaski County district's percentage of black staff members typically exceeds 20 percent.

Walker also told the judge that the Little Rock, North Little Rock and Pulaski County Special districts have greatly exceeded the relevant labor market percentages in regard to black educators for "years and years," and that Jacksonville district leaders should do the same. He said the Jacksonville district can't expect to use a labor force analysis as a show of their good faith compliance with their desegregation obligations.

Richardson told the judge that the Plan 2000 does not require the district to employ certain numbers or percentages of teachers by race but to use hiring processes that are fair. He said the numbers of employees by race do not put the district into or out of compliance with the plan.

Specifically, the plan says that the district "shall recruit applicants for each available administrative position, by internal and external means, in a manner designed to communicate, broadly, its availability and to develop a racially diverse pool of applicants."

Another part of the staffing section of the plan says that the district "shall continue to implement programs, policies and/or procedures which result in an increase in the number of African-American early childhood teachers, primary grade teachers, and secondary core teachers, including offering incentives for African-American teachers to obtain certification in these areas, and to assign those teachers to the ... schools where the greatest disparity exists."

Plan 2000 and subsequent court orders require the districts to equalize the condition of the school buildings, which entails the districts replacing and/or upgrading older schools -- particularly those serving high proportions of black students and students from low income families -- to make them comparable to much newer campuses in more affluent communities, such as Maumelle High and Sylvan Hills Middle School in Sherwood.

Pulaski County Special district Superintendent Jerry Guess told Marshall on Thursday that dirt work has begun for both the construction of a new Mills High School in the southeast section of the Pulaski County Special district and a new Robinson Middle School in west Pulaski County. The architectural design work has been completed for Robinson Middle but not for the new Mills, Guess said.

The district intends to spend $40 million on each of the two campuses. Both are to open in August 2018, Guess said.

The existing Mills building will be updated and become a replacement campus for Fuller Middle School, also in the southeast section of the district. The existing Robinson Middle will be demolished, except for one wing, which will become a ninth-grade academy, feeding into Robinson High.

Walker asked Guess why the Robinson project in predominantly white west Pulaski County is further along than the Mills project in light of the district's earlier commitment to the buildings in the southeast section. He also questioned whether a $40 million high school will be comparable to other recently built high schools that were more expensive, such as the North Little Rock High School or the planned Jacksonville High School.

Guess responded that different-size student populations affect the size and cost of schools and that the southeast section of the district is the most sparsely populated area of the district. The district includes the cities of Maumelle and Sherwood.

The superintendent also said that while the Robinson project has involved the leveling of a tall hill, the Mills project has been slowed in part by some drainage problems that necessitated work with the Army Corps of Engineers to protect a watershed in the area.

In regard to school buildings in the new Jacksonville/North Pulaski district, Walker argued that the district appears to be putting a priority on refurbishing the former North Pulaski High for Jacksonville Middle School, over the replacement of the Jacksonville High campus.

Richardson, the attorney for the Jacksonville district, said $2.5 million has been set aside for the refurbishing of the middle school that serves all Jacksonville students in grades six through eight.

The architectural design work is underway for the new high school and a new elementary school, and additional plans are being made to present to the judge in December on replacing other elementary schools in the district.

The construction of the new high school and the new elementary hinge on state Partnership Program funding, the amounts of which will be announced by the state by May 1 next year.

"I wish things would move more quickly, but it's beyond your control," Marshall told Richardson about the construction.

A Section on 09/16/2016

Upcoming Events