Curtail charters, LR schools urge

LITTLE ROCK — The state should be stopped from opening or expanding charter schools and forced to pay Pulaski County’s three school districts for district students who moved to the independently run charter schools, attorneys for the Little Rock School District and black students known as the Joshua intervenors said Tuesday.

In a motion submitted to U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr., the attorneys argued that the state — including the Arkansas Department of Education and the state Board of Education — have violated in multiple ways a 1989 settlement agreement in the long-running Pulaski County school desegregation lawsuit.

Chris Heller and Clay Fendley, attorneys for the Little Rock district and Rep. John Walker and Robert Pressman for the Joshua intervenors contend that the violations include state retaliation against the three Pulaski County districts because of the settlement.

Those retaliatory acts in- clude limiting payments for school bus transportation in the districts, subjecting the three districts to special financial audits and failing to reimburse the Little Rock district for legal fees incurred in the district’s successful attainment of unitary status in 2007.

“The State’s admissions and other undisputed evidence show significant and continuing State violations of the 1989 Settlement Agreement,” the attorneys wrote. “None of the facts necessary for the Court to rule in favor of LRSD and Joshua are in dispute. LRSD should be granted summary judgment,” the attorneys said in the filing that totaled more than 1,000 pages, including depositions and reports.

Summary judgment is a court order in which a judge decides that there are no disagreements about the facts in a case and that a judge can make a decision without a trial or court hearing.

Tuesday’s motion comes in the aftermath of the Little Rock School District’s May 2010 motion to enforce the settlement agreement in regard to the state-approved establishment of independently run charter schools in Pulaski County. The district has argued that the charter schools — of which there are 12 — were approved without considering the effect the schools would have on magnet schools and the majority-to-minority student transfer program in the three districts.

Those interdistrict student transfer programs are part of the 1989 settlement agreement and are an effort to promote racial desegregation in the three districts.

Attorneys said in Tuesday’s filings that 331 Little Rock students moved directly from magnet schools to charter schools between 2005-06 and 2010-11, and 20 more Little Rock district students moved from the majority-to-minority student transfer program to charter schools.

In August, Marshall directed the district and the Joshua intervenors — who contend that the state failed to meet its obligations to work to improve the achievement of black students in the three districts — to file a joint statement of facts in the case this month.

The state, represented by Attorney General Dustin McDaniel’s office, and the Pulaski County open-enrollment charter schools, have been directed by the court to file their own statement of facts by March 12.

Marshall has set a March 29 hearing to decide what steps to take next.

Representatives of the attorney general’s office and the charter school intervenors said late Tuesday that they had just received the motion for summary judgment and accompanying documents and had not had time to review them.

“I will ... respond in court according to the time frame established by Judge Marshall,” said Jess Askew III, an attorney for the charter schools.

The Little Rock district and Joshua intervenors told Marshall that state officials had approved charter schools without court approval; had failed to identify or develop programs to remediate achievement disparities between black and white students; and had “abandoned” its responsibility to monitor desegregation and remediation efforts in the district.

The attorneys wrote that state officials limited the amount of aid for state school-bus transportation to the three school districts in such a way that the districts are reimbursed at a lesser percentage than the state average, a violation of the settlement agreement.

They also said that the attorney general and “other state actors” including University of Arkansas departments in Fayetteville and “private persons and entities have engaged in an orchestrated public relations campaign designed to discredit desegregation efforts in Pulaski County generally and LRSD specifically that has created something like the ‘hysterical political atmosphere’ surrounding desegregation reminiscent of the 1960s.” The 1960s reference is from a 1985 court decision in the case.

The attorneys asked that the state Board of Education be enjoined from approving any new open-enrollment charter schools or increasing the size of the schools unless court approval is granted to do so.

The state also should be directed to retroactively pay the three Pulaski County school districts the state aid the districts would have received had charter school students participated in the majority-to-minority student transfer program, the attorneys said.

Additionally, they said, the Arkansas Department of Education should be directed to identify programs, policies or procedures designed to remediate the racial achievement disparity that exists between black and white students in Pulaski County district schools. The state agency should further be directed to develop a revised plan for monitoring the remediation of that disparity, the attorneys said.

The attorneys also asked that the state be prevented from enforcing a state law that authorized “forensic” audits of the three districts and that the state be precluded from consolidating, annexing or reconstituting the three Pulaski County districts unless authorized by the federal court.

The potential for such consolidation exists because both the North Little Rock and Pulaski County Special districts have been placed in the state’s fiscal distress program and must correct financial problems identified by the state within 1 1/2 years or forced by the state to merge with one or more other districts.