Motion asks for Pulaski County schools' 'parity'; petitioners urge replacement of 2

Attorneys for black students in the Pulaski County Special School District are asking a federal judge to order the replacement of the district's College Station and Harris elementaries to promote "facility parity" in the district.

Rep. John Walker, D-Little Rock, and his legal team also asked U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr. in a motion last week to order the Pulaski County Special district to do "additional work" on the brand-new Mills High building and the relocated Fuller Middle School so that the campuses are "equal in size and quality" to the new Robinson Middle School building and Robinson High.

The new Mills High and Robinson Middle schools and the relocated Fuller Middle are to open to students next month. Fuller Middle will be renamed Mills Middle. The old Fuller is being demolished, and the Fuller name will no longer be used.

The College Station, Harris, Mills and Fuller campuses are all in east and southeast Pulaski County communities that have a greater proportion of black residents than does the west Pulaski County area served by the Robinson schools that are on Arkansas 10.

"[W]hite communities are favored, while the African American community receives lesser facility resources," Walker and his colleagues Austin Porter and Robert Pressman wrote to Marshall last week on behalf of black students known as the Joshua intervenors in a 35-year-old federal school desegregation lawsuit.

Marshall is the presiding judge in the lawsuit in which the Pulaski County Special district remains a party and is obligated by its Plan 2000 desegregation strategy and various court orders to equalize the condition of its schools buildings.

Sam Jones, an attorney for the Pulaski County Special district, on Friday called the Joshua request for new Harris and College Station schools "premature." As for requests for enhancements to Mills and Fuller, Jones said the Joshua motion "comes awfully late in the game to be considered."

The intervenors had information about the building plans months ago, Jones said.

"If he was serious about any of this relief, he should have sought it earlier," Jones said about Walker.

The Pulaski County Special district has invited Marshall to personally tour Maumelle High, Robinson Middle and Mills High on Aug. 9. Maumelle High is on the tour because it is a newer school in the district and has been held up by the Joshua intervenors as a standard for the older campuses.

The Joshua intervenors have said that the judge's school tour should also include the relocated Fuller Middle School, Sylvan Hills High, and College Station and Harris elementaries.

The Joshua attorneys, who want Marshall to hold a court hearing on facilities, noted that the Pulaski County Special district has no plans to replace Harris Elementary, 4424 Arkansas 161 North in North Little Rock, or College Station, 4710 Frasier Pike. That is despite the fact that district leaders reported in a 2015 document to the state that "absent a complete replacement, facility parity is not attainable" for the two campuses, the Joshua attorneys said.

Both elementary school campuses are several decades old and were originally constructed to serve black students at a time of racially segregated schools.

The Pulaski County Special district has, however, nearly completed both the construction of a 700-student Mills University Studies High School and the relocation of Fuller Middle School pupils to the old Mills High campus that will be renamed Mills Middle School.

Both the new and old Mills campuses are on East Dixon Road in southeast Pulaski County, as is the Fuller Middle School that is in the midst of being demolished.

But the Joshua attorneys contend that the new Mills High and relocated Mills Middle School are inferior to the new "$45 million 'Mercedes Benz' quality Robinson Middle School in a predominantly white area, with planned use of some facilities by Robinson High students."

The district also made improvements to Robinson Elementary and Robinson High and is undertaking a $65 million extensive addition and renovation of Sylvan Hills High in Sherwood, the attorneys for the intervenors said.

The Joshua motion cited a report by Margie Powell, the court's expert adviser in the lawsuit, on Mills. Powell said last year that there were "glaring inequities" between the Mills and Robinson projects and "an amazing lack of sensitivity to the people of the southeast quadrant."

The attorneys also attached to their motion a report from Joyce Springer, a desegregation monitor for the Joshua intervenors, who toured the Mills and Robinson campuses as recently as May 18.

Springer concluded: "Robinson is without doubt the superior facility."

She described, as an example, the Robinson kitchen and cafeteria areas as "exceedingly lavish, on the level of a posh restaurant." She said the Mills kitchen and cafeteria are "grossly unequal to those elements at Robinson" and that the district's plan at the time was to prepare meals off-site for Mills' students and staff.

Springer also found differences in the quality of flooring in the buildings and in storage cabinets. There were differences in the robotics and keyboarding classrooms and in band and choir rooms with respect to storage, acoustics and preparation areas. She said that special-education classrooms at Robinson were intermingled with other classrooms. The special-education classrooms at Mills are isolated, she said.

The Robinson and Sylvan Hills projects are a $110 million commitment to white communities, the Joshua attorneys argued to the judge, noting that the projects were not included in the district's building proposals to the judge at the time the new Mills High and Fuller (Mills Middle) projects were proposed.

The district had proposed in 2015 a $221 million plan to not only replace Mills and Robinson high schools but also move Fuller and Robinson middle schools to former high school sites. The plan also envisioned a single replacement school for College Station, Harris and Scott elementaries, an expansion of Sylvan Hills High and improvements throughout the district.

A proposed 5.6-mill tax increase to finance the plan failed to win voter approval, causing the district to resort to its Plan B -- to build Mills and relocate Fuller. The plan to replace College Station, Harris and Scott schools was abandoned. The district has since closed Scott Elementary and later won voter approval of a property-tax extension to pay for the Sylvan Hills High expansion.

Metro on 07/08/2018

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