El Dorado School District attorneys want a federal judge to verify for state education leaders that Arkansas School Choice Act student transfers will put the district in violation of its 45-year-old desegregation order.
Attorneys Allen Roberts and Whitney Moore submitted the request to U.S. District Judge Susan O. Hickey this week in a "Motion for Declaratory Judgment and Supporting Brief."
The motion comes after the Arkansas Board of Education voted July 14 to allow a family that lives in El Dorado School District to send their children to school in the adjoining Parkers Chapel School District.
The McAuliffe family had appealed to the Education Board after the Parkers Chapel district denied the transfer request based on the El Dorado district's claim to be exempt from participating in Arkansas School Choice Act interdistrict transfers because the transfers conflict with directives in the district's 1971 federal school desegregation order.
The School Choice Act permits students to transfer out of the districts in which they reside to schools in other districts if there is room for them in the desired district.
The statute does provide an exemption for districts in which student transfers would be in conflict with federal desegregation orders or plans.
Sixteen of Arkansas' 235 traditional school districts have claimed exemptions to the School Choice Act. Those include El Dorado, Pulaski County Special, Jacksonville/North Pulaski and the Garland County school systems. U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr. earlier this month ruled that the transfers are in conflict with a 2014 settlement agreement in the Pulaski County school desegregation lawsuit, affecting both the Pulaski County Special and Jacksonville districts.
Roberts and Allen said in the 14-page motion filed Sunday accompanied by almost 300 pages of supporting documents that the El Dorado School District "was ordered to -- and did -- merge its black and white schools and eliminate its dual system" in a case titled Kemp v. Beasley and Townsend v. Watson.
"The order entered by this Court on August 2, 1971 ... specifically states: All vestiges of 'freedom of choice' is eliminated and any further use is prohibited," the attorneys said in the motion, also citing U.S. Supreme Court decisions that found that freedom of choice plans are inadequate to convert a dual school system to a unitary, nondiscriminatory school system.
Rep. John Walker, D-Little Rock, an attorney for the plaintiffs in the desegregation case, filed notice to the judge on Tuesday that the plaintiffs support the district's position against the transfers and that court relief is necessary due to the state's direction to the district to segregate its schools.
Roberts and Moore wrote that the El Dorado district has complied with its court order by refraining from actions that would have a segregative effect, such as creating or increasing racially identifiable or virtually one-race schools.
The district "has never been declared fully unitary by this court," Roberts and Moore wrote. "[The school district] believes it is unitary in all aspects save one: [it's] obligations to prevent the creation of racially identifiable schools within the district. Further, [the district] recognizes that it will be unable to attain unitary status in this regard if the mechanics of school choice allow students to move freely between and among districts without regard to whether such movement will create or maintain racially identifiable schools."
The attorneys said "shifting political winds" have resulted in the state education leaders becoming "increasingly pro choice," seeming to make it more important than desegregation.
"This shift has vexed the state Board of Education when applying" the School Choice Act in regard to the districts that claimed exemptions from participating in transfers, the attorneys said. Those districts have higher percentages of black students than their neighboring districts, the attorneys said, and would be unable to retain their white students if transfers are permitted.
"The operative question is not whether school choice is in and of itself a good thing in a perfect world. It is rather whether the version of school choice now championed in some quarters in Arkansas is consistent with this State's constitutional obligations in the far less than perfect world in which we actually live," the attorneys wrote.
Metro on 08/19/2016