The Little Rock School District is asking in a May 9 special election for voters to approve a 14-year extension of 12.4 mills of its overall 46.4 mill property tax rate. Below are key events over recent years that have led to the district’s current situation and debate surrounding the tax proposal. Money from the millage extension would be used for school construction and facilities updates.
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Aug. 23, 2012 — The Little Rock School District initiated a search for property for a new middle school in west or northwest Little Rock and a possible replacement campus for McClellan High. Superintendent Morris Holmes called McClellan “old and out of style,” and inadequate for teaching science and technology.
April 22, 2013 — The Little Rock School Board approved the purchase of 56 acres in southwest Little Rock for $1,372,000 for a new high school. The board also purchased 43.5 acres on North Katillus Road in northwest Little Rock for $4.2 million for a middle school.
July 10, 2014 — The Arkansas Board of Education for the first time classified 26 schools — including six in Little Rock — as being in academic distress, a change from its previous practice of identifying only whole districts as distressed.
Aug. 28, 2014 — The Little Rock School Board accepted a $974,260 facilities-improvement plan from an Indiana-based consultant team and followed that with a vote to form a steering committee on a possible campaign for a millage rate increase.
Sept 16, 2014 — Little Rock School District voters elected Joy Springer over incumbent Norma Johnson and Jim Ross over incumbent Jody Carreiro, retaining the board’s four-black and threewhite racial composition that had been in place since 2006.
Jan. 28, 2015 — The Arkansas Board of Education voted 5-4 to take over the Little Rock district, immediately removing the seven-member elected School Board and retaining two-year Superintendent Dexter Suggs as interim superintendent under the direction of then Education Commissioner Tony Wood.
March 2, 2015 — Former state Sen. Johnny Key is named by new Gov. Asa Hutchinson as his choice for education commissioner, pending state law changes that would qualify Key, who holds a degree in chemical engineering, to hold the top education job.
May 5, 2015 — The Arkansas Board of Education approved Key’s recommendation that Baker Kurrus — lawyer, businessman and veteran school board member — become superintendent after Suggs resigned in the midst of allegations that he had plagiarized his doctoral thesis at Indiana Wesleyan University.
Oct. 1, 2015 — Kurrus announced plans to purchase the former Leisure Arts office building and warehouse at 5701 Ranch Drive for $11.5 million from Baptist Health for a new Pinnacle View Middle School. The school opened to sixth-graders in the office building in August 2016 while the district converts the warehouse into a sixth-through-eighthgrade school. Kurrus called the purchase “a whale of a deal.”
Oct. 1, 2015 — Kurrus also announced renewed planning for a new high school on district-owned land between Mabelvale Pike and Mann Road in southwest Little Rock.
Feb. 12, 2016 — Attorneys for two displaced Little Rock School Board members and families of black students sued the Little Rock district and state leaders to reverse the state takeover, stop possible school closings and eliminate what attorneys said were disparate conditions of school buildings and treatment of students.
March 23, 2016 — U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr. declined to stop the development of the new middle school after a court hearing in which building needs at Cloverdale and Dunbar middle schools were described. He later declined to reverse the state takeover. A trial on whether there are disparate conditions in schools and disparate programs for students is set for July 2017.
April 18, 2016 — Kurrus said his contract with the state would not be extended by Key beyond its June 30 expiration date. The same day, Mike Poore resigned from the Bentonville schools superintendent job to take the Little Rock job under Key’s supervision.
Feb. 9 — Key approves Poore’s recommendation to close three schools and repurpose a fourth for the 2017-18 school year as a way to achieve about $3.5 million of an $11 million package of cuts. The cuts are part of a multiyear effort to offset $37.3 million a year in state desegregation aid that will end to the district after the 2017-18 school year.
Feb. 23 —Poore recommends to Key, and Key approves, a plan to ask voters to pass in a special May 9 election the extension of 12.4 debt service mills for 14 years — moving the expiration date for the mills from 2033 to 2047 — to raise money to build a new high school, replace the McClellan High classroom building and make improvements at all other campuses in the district.