Hiring decisions made in the new Jacksonville/North Pulaski School District — starting with the superintendent and his top assistants — were the focus of testimony Monday in a federal court hearing on staffing practices and facilities.
U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr. is holding the hearing this week in response to the district’s request from last fall that it be released from further court monitoring of its desegregation efforts in regard to its employment practices.
District leaders are also asking the judge this week to minimize his supervision of the district’s plans to replace nearly all of its existing schools with new campuses by the early 2030s, with most of the new construction to be done by the mid- 2020s.
The hearing resumes at 8:30 a.m. today.
Attorneys for the class of black students known as the Joshua intervenors are opposing the district’s proposed release from court supervision, calling the moves “premature” in a district that has only been operating since July 2016 — when it was carved out of the Pulaski County Special School District — and has already had a complete turnover in top leadership jobs.
As a condition of the detachment, the Jacksonville/ North Pulaski district is obligated to show compliance with the Pulaski County Special district’s desegregation plan, Plan 2000, in the same areas of operation in which Pulaski County Special was not in compliance at the time of the separation. Those requirements call for a show of equity not only in staffing and the condition of school buildings as compared with schools in more affluent, predominantly white parts of Pulaski County, but also in student achievement and student discipline.
Scott Richardson, an attorney for the Jacksonville district, told Marshall on Monday that Jacksonville’s request for unitary status on staffing just 19 months after it was established is “pretty darn quick” compared with the 22 to 32 years it took the Little Rock and North Little Rock districts to be released from court scrutiny of their desegregation efforts in the same lawsuit.
But the Jacksonville district had the advantage of incorporating the provisions of Plan 2000 directly into its policies on hiring state-licensed and support service staff members, Richardson said.
Using those Plan 2000-based policies, the new district generated 2,401 applications for 101 state-licensed positions in the district, he said. A total of 429 of those applicants were black, he added. Only eight positions attracted no black applicants. The equivalent of 281 full-time teachers were hired for that first 2016-17 school year in the new district, 50 of whom were black.
Plan 2000 calls for recruiting applicants for administrative and teacher positions in ways that create racially diverse pools of applicants from which to select employees. The plan calls for ongoing programs, policies and procedures that result in an increase in the number of black teachers in early-childhood education programs, primary elementary grades and core academic subjects in secondary schools.
The plan further requires assignment of teachers and other professional staff in a manner that avoids the racial identification of schools. It prohibits any cap on the proportion of black teachers.
State Rep. John Walker, D-Little Rock, an attorney for the Joshua intervenors, told the judge that the district leaders claim they can’t find black employees in numbers equal to or greater than when the district was part of the Pulaski County Special system. He also accused the district of changing the qualifications for some district administrative positions, giving director titles and pay rates above those of teachers to people without college degrees.
“That is not a characteristic of a unitary pay system,” Walker said, adding later that the district has recently hired Greg Hodges and Tiffany Bone, both of whom are black. He said hiring policies weren’t necessarily followed in those hires according to documents he said he would present during the hearing.
“When you talk about unitary status, you have to have a period of good faith compliance and some assurance that the matters are embedded to the extent that they will be used to enhance educational opportunity for black children because they are the ones not being taught and their facilities are inferior,” Walker said.
Richardson said the district is in the midst of building a new high school and a new elementary to replace Arnold Drive and Tolleson elementaries. The district has applied for state partnership money to help with the cost of a new school to replace Pinewood and Dupree elementaries in the mid-2020s. A new school to replace the Bayou Me-to and Murrell Taylor elementary schools would follow in the early to mid-2030s, he said.
Tony Wood, who became superintendent of the Jacksonville district in July 2015 and retired June 30, 2017, and Jeremy Owoh, a former assistant superintendent in the district, were the only witnesses called to the stand to testify Monday.
In response to questions from Richardson and Austin Porter Jr., another attorney for the Joshua intervenors, Wood told the judge how he was anxious to retire from his position as state education commissioner in 2015 but was persuaded by Jacksonville resident Daniel Gray, now president of the district’s School Board, and others to apply for the superintendent’s job in the district. He was interviewed by the interim board and selected for the job, following Bobby G. Lester in the position. Lester served only for a few months after the district was created in 2014 but was not yet operating on its own.
Wood said he worked with the Pulaski County Special district leaders, who continued to operate the new district through a transition period, to advertise and interview candidates for two assistant superintendent positions. Owoh was one of three applicants recommended to be assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction by a biracial committee of Pulaski County Special district staff members. He accepted the job offer from Wood after the top-recommended candidate, Marvin Burton, declined the job.
Owoh has since left the district to be an assistant commissioner in the Arkansas Department of Education.
Wood said he urged Owoh against applying for the superintendent’s job when Wood retired, saying that Owoh was a “quick study,” “conscientious” and “as good as I’ve ever had,” but not ready for the rigors of the top job in the still new Jacksonville system.
The Pulaski County Special district’s biracial interview committee in 2015 also recommended Janice Walker, a Pulaski County Special district principal at the time and a U.S. Army veteran with experience in military personnel matters, to be the district’s first assistant superintendent for human resources and support services.
But Wood declined to accept that recommendation, preferring Bobby E. Lester, the son of the former superintendent, for the job because of Lester’s experience as a principal plus his work in human resources and with federal funding programs.
“We were starting at ground zero,” Wood said about the early days of the new district. “I needed people who were knowledgeable and had a strong background,” he added and referred to Lester’s work in federal programs at the state level.
Jerry Guess, Pulaski County Special district superintendent at the time, rejected Lester as the selection over Janice Walker and Lester ultimately withdrew his application. The district went without an assistant superintendent for support services for a year, until Bryan Duffie was hired from the superintendent’s job in the Westside School District in Craighead County. Duffie is now the Jacksonville district’s superintendent. Wood said he didn’t formally recommend Duffie for the top job but believed he was a good choice. Janice Walker is a district principal.
Porter, the attorney for the Joshua intervenors, asked if Wood thought having two black assistant superintendents — Owoh and Janice Walker — would be too much. Wood said no.
As the district’s only assistant superintendent in 2015-16, Owoh worked with district-hired consultant Beverly Williams, a longtime personnel director in the state Department of Education and in the Little Rock district, to develop the processes for hiring staff members, Wood and Owoh testified.
Owoh identified for the judge on Monday the different policies and procedures he and Williams developed for the district to use in forming selection committees, generating applicant pools and interviewing and rating applicants for jobs.
Asked whether the district had developed incentives to attract certified staff members to the district, Owoh said that a policy was approved by the board in the spring of 2017, shortly before he moved to the state job.
John Walker questioned Owoh about specific goals for recruiting and hiring black staff members and for documentation of specific recruiting strategies and results. Owoh is expected to return to the stand later in the week to respond to more questions from Walker.
Marshall has added Eshe Mustafa and Takeena Wilbon, parents of children currently attending Jacksonville schools, as representatives of a “new sub-class of intervenors, which includes the black children attending JNPSD, their parents, and other adults” acting in place of parents.
“These additions are tentative,” Marshall wrote in an order last week and gave the school system until March 9 to examine Mustafa and Wilbon’s adequacy as representatives for the sub-class. The judge said the two women cannot testify at this week’s hearing.
The judge also denied last week the Joshua intervenors’ request that the Jacksonville branch of the NAACP be added as an intervenor but said that could be revisited later.