In the 2019-20 school year, the Jacksonville/North Pulaski School District will for the first time open its borders to allow students to transfer in and out of district schools regardless of the district in which the students reside.
The district's School Board voted 4-2 in December to seek an exemption to participating in Arkansas School Choice Act transfers, as it has done for the current and previous school years.
Board members favoring the exemption said the district could lose more than $800,000 if the maximum 3 percent of students -- about 125 -- transfer out of the Jacksonville district.
However, the Arkansas Department of Education last week notified the district by mail that the exemption was denied. The district has the right under state law to appeal the denial to the state Board of Education.
But Ron McDaniel, president of the Jacksonville/North Pulaski School Board, said Friday that no board member made a motion to pursue the appeal when the matter was raised this week at a School Board work session. As a result, the district will permit the student transfers beginning with the coming school year.
Jacksonville/North Pulaski Superintendent Bryan Duffie said Friday that there isn't a way to predict how many students will apply to transfer in or out of what is now a 3,902-student district.
The district does have some attractive features, he said, referring to the district's newly constructed Bobby G. Lester Elementary School and a new high school building that will open in August. Planning for a new middle school building is underway.
"You try to offer new opportunities and better opportunities," Duffie said. "People get to decide if they want to take part or not."
The state's School Choice Act allows up to 3 percent of the enrollment in a district to attend schools in districts in which they don't reside -- unless a receiving district has inadequate space for the transfer student or a district submits proof to the Arkansas Department of Education that transfers present a genuine conflict with an active desegregation order or desegregation plan that explicitly bars interdistrict student transfers.
Until now, the 3-year-old Jacksonville district relied on the language in a 2014 settlement agreement in the long-running Pulaski County school desegregation lawsuit as the basis for claiming an exemption to the School Choice Act.
But the terms of that 2014 settlement agreement expire at the end of this school year, although the district remains under federal court monitoring over its efforts to meet its desegregation plan obligations.
The district's attorney Scott Richardson told the board in December that with the expiration of the terms in the 2014 settlement agreement the district's legal standing for an exemption was not as strong as it has been in past years.
Lori Freno, general counsel for the Arkansas Department of Education, in a letter to Duffie noted that the district had provided documents to the state concerning the ongoing Pulaski County school desegregation lawsuit, in which Jacksonville is a party.
"The ADE has determined that the ... School District has not provided documentation showing that participation in school choice under the Act would conflict with any federal court order or desegregation plan," Freno wrote. "Consequently, the Jacksonville North Pulaski School District is required to participate in school choice under the Act for the 2019-20 school year."
The School Board's decision not to appeal the state's decision on transfers came Thursday, the same day that a federal judge modified the decades-old federal school desegregation orders in four south Arkansas systems to explicitly prohibit racially segregative student transfers across school district boundary lines. Those four districts are Hope, Lafayette County, Junction City and Camden Harmony Grove.
The state Department of Education and state Board of Education had denied exemptions from the transfer law for the four districts for this school year and again for the coming school year.
Metro on 01/21/2019