The Jacksonville/North Pulaski School District's share of a $62 million price tag for three new campuses will be about $27 million, Superintendent Bryan Duffie and attorney Scott Richardson calculated Thursday in a federal school desegregation case hearing.
The district's share for two new elementaries and a middle school is assuming a $10 million draw on district savings, a voter-approved extended tax levy in 2021 and a state reimbursement of at least 47 percent of the academic building costs, the two told U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr.
Marshall is holding the hearing this week on whether to release the district from further court supervision of its desegregation efforts in both staffing and facilities.
The three new schools -- envisioned for completion by 2034 -- would be in addition to the $70 million high school and $16 million Lester Elementary School currently under construction in the nearly 4,000-student school system that was carved out of the Pulaski County Special School District and began operating on its own in July 2016.
Lester Elementary will replace Arnold Drive and Tolleson elementaries when it opens in August. Also planned is a new elementary to replace Warren Dupree and Pinewood elementaries, and ultimately a replacement elementary school for Murrell Taylor and Bayou Meto elementaries. The School Board voted earlier this week to place the Dupree/Pinewood school and a new middle school on the site of the existing Jacksonville High in the early 2020s.
The long-term building plans are in response to Marshall's January 2016 order that not only approved the immediate plans for a new high school, a renovated middle school, a new elementary school and multipurpose room additions at other elementary schools but said the four remaining elementary schools had to be replaced "so that all the district's elementary schools are equal."
The district includes in its current building plans "Phase II expansions" of the new high school and the new middle school should growth in the district enrollment require the additional classroom space.
Throughout this week's hearing, Marshall has questioned the priority the district is seeming to place on the secondary school expansions in advance of the court-required replacement of elementary schools.
Jacksonville area residents sought to detach from the Pulaski County Special district largely for the purpose of improving the condition of old campuses and attaining release from federal court supervision of its operations. As a condition for the detachment, the Jacksonville district must meet the same desegregation requirements as the Pulaski County Special district in regard to staffing, facilities, student achievement and student discipline.
Rep. John Walker, D-Little Rock, who as a lawyer represents black students known as the Joshua intervenors, is opposing the district's request for unitary status, calling it premature at best for the new system that has just begun its construction program and is under new administrative leadership in just its second school year.
In court Thursday, Walker asked Tony Wood, the district's now retired first superintendent and a former state commissioner of education, why the Jacksonville district didn't ask for state funding for all the school replacements at once, rather than spacing the applications over more than a dozen years.
"We wouldn't have the local match," Wood responded from the witness stand.
The state's Academic Facilities Partnership Program reimburses school districts for academic building costs at a rate determined by a district's local property wealth, with wealthier districts receiving a smaller percentage of the total building cost. Jacksonville residents in 2016 approved a 7.6-mill property-tax increase to aid in meeting its share of the school building costs.
"If you asked for it all, you would have to find the match," Walker told Wood and suggested that the district obtain a state loan to meet its share of the building expenses.
Walker cited as a precedent the Little Rock School District's acquisition of a $20 million loan from the state in 1989 as part of the same federal school desegregation case that is in court this week.
According to that 1989 agreement, the Little Rock district was to repay the loan if standardized test scores of black students were not raised to at least 90 percent of the scores of white students by Dec. 31, 2000. The loan proved to be a point of contention because the two agencies could never agree on the test. A new agreement in 2001 called for the state to forgive the first $15 million of the low-interest loan immediately and relief from the remaining $5 million payment upon its release from court supervision of its desegregation efforts.
Walker said the Jacksonville district has a valid business case to make to the state that passed legislation allowing and encouraging the district's detachment. He offered the proposed language for it: "The facilities in this detached district are illegal. We currently don't have enough money for them. Our funding capacity is limited. We need these schools for all the children now. We need the support of the state for the schools and we will pay you back as our ability allows.'"
Wood said he never considered such a request and if he had, he "wouldn't have gone in that direction. I don't like to borrow money," he said, adding that while the district must meet its federal court desegregation requirements on buildings, to "act recklessly' and risking state takeover of the district "would do more harm than good."
Both Duffie and former Assistant Superintendent Jeremy Owoh, who left the Jacksonville district in July to become an assistant commissioner at the state Department of Education, are expected to be recalled to the witness stand today when the hearing resumes at 8:30 a.m.
Today is to be the final day of the weeklong hearing during which Marshall allotted 17 hours each to the district and the Joshua intervenors to present their cases. The judge has asked that each side include in their remaining time a 20- to 30-minute closing argument.
Duffie's testimony on Thursday dealt with both the facilities and staffing issues in the district that he has headed since July 1. He was an assistant superintendent for support services for the year before that, having left a six-year stint as superintendent of the Westside Consolidated School District in Jonesboro.
He said he anticipates that the new high school and elementary school now under construction will be as nice or nicer than other schools in the state and said that he would like to see all new schools completed sooner than the projected 2034 date if financially possible.
On staffing, Duffie said he had no numerical goals but is committed to employing as many qualified black employees -- particularly teachers and administrators -- as possible in a district where the teaching staff is currently about 20 percent black, according to district reports.
Of the four positions in which he has recently had a role in filling, three of the four are black, Duffie said. That's Tiffany Bone, assistant superintendent of student services, secondary curriculum and desegregation; Gregory Hodges, assistant superintendent of elementary curriculum and support services, and Tammy Knowlton, human-relations coordinator. Knowlton, who has a college degree, also had applied for the job of executive assistant to the superintendent. That job went to the district's former human-relations specialist, Amy Arnone, who is white and does not have a bachelor's degree.
Duffie said that Knowlton was best suited for the human-resources job because of her past experiences, while Arnone had experiences in marketing and nonprofit work that made her a good fit for the executive assistant role.
Metro on 02/09/2018