The Arkansas Board of Education voted Thursday to return a unified Little Rock School District to local control next year, altering its earlier plan to put the district's F-graded schools under different leadership than other schools in the system.
But the cheers and applause for that decision from the overflow crowd at the board's meeting turned within minutes to confusion and shouts of "What did you just do?" and "Shame! Shame! Shame!" when the state board followed the first vote with votes to:
• Direct Arkansas Education Secretary Johnny Key to end the decades-old recognition of the Little Rock Education Association as the exclusive contract bargaining agent for the employees, effective when the current employee contract agreement expires Oct. 31.
• Revoke its December 2018 waivers of the Arkansas Teacher Fair Dismissal Act and the Public Employees Fair Hearing Act in the Little Rock district, thereby reinstating employment protections that had been set aside in an effort to streamline the process of dismissing ineffective teachers.
• Waive the provisions in state law dealing with the timing and oversight of employee elections to personnel policy committees, enabling a third-party organization to run the election of teachers and support staff to the committees.
The 8-0 vote to end collective bargaining with school employees in the capital city district raises the potential of an employee strike or other job action as discussed by teachers and support staff at recent private meetings of the association. That creates the possible closing of Little Rock schools to its more than 23,000 students.
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Teresa Knapp Gordon, a library media specialist on leave to be the association's president, said after Thursday's Education Board meeting that the association will convene soon -- at a time she did not yet know -- to decide how to proceed.
"LREA will continue to fight for its students and teachers," Gordon said about the association in which a majority of the district's more than 1,500 teachers are members.
The association and its parent organization, the Arkansas Education Association, issued a prepared statement later Thursday night to its membership saying: "The Board's action to eliminate the voice of educators in how students learn is shameful" and "We will take collective action.
"In the coming days and weeks, you'll hear more from us about our next steps as a union," the memo continued. "We'll be having conversations with you and your colleagues, and planning out where this fight for our students goes next. There is no stronger voice for students than the voice of educators, and we will not allow our voice to be silenced."
The Little Rock School District is closed to students today for a scheduled parent-teacher conference day. Oct. 31, the last day of the current employee contract agreement, and Nov. 1, are also student holidays to allow for teacher training.
The current contract prohibits job actions.
The Education Board's newest member, Chad Pekron of Bryant, made the motion for returning the state-controlled Little Rock district in its entirety to a locally elected school board, saying that the original framework plan with its call for three categories of schools was devised with good intentions but that public opposition to it would doom it.
"I don't think we can accomplish what we want for students as long as this is going on, this us-versus-you," Pekron told the crowd at the daylong Education Board meeting. "It's not going to help students.
The framework plan adopted by the board last month called for returning the governance of the district that has been operating under state control for nearly five years to a nine-member School Board that would be elected in November 2020.
DEADLINE NEARS
The state board is making plans for the governance of the district in advance of the January 2020 expiration of the five years the state can operate the district before having to consolidate, annex or reconstitute it as required by law.
The state assumed control of the district in January 2015 when six of 48 schools were classified as academically distressed because of chronically low student achievement on state-required tests. The state board removed the seven-member elected board at that time and placed the superintendent under state direction. Earlier this year, the state education leaders set exit criteria for the district that envisioned no F-graded schools.
The Education Board's framework plan for returning limited authority to a local school board called for placing schools that have F grades from the state -- of which there are eight -- under "different leadership" than the rest of the district but in partnership with the district.
That separate category generated opposition from a number of Little Rock residents who said the plan for a separate category of schools would constitute racial and economic segregation. Education Board members have been flooded with hundreds of email messages in recent days, most in support of a full return of the district to school board management.
Pekron said his motion Thursday -- prepared earlier in the day -- was directed only at replacing the provision on school categories in the initial framework.
"Some of the things we heard recently, particularly from Mayor [Frank Scott Jr., ] earlier this week, were some of the things I was personally thinking about," Pekron said.
Scott at a news conference Monday called for the return of the whole district to local control, starting in January with an appointed "transition board" that would be in place until elections are held in November 2020. F-graded schools would be operated by the Little Rock district under a memorandum of understanding between the city and the Arkansas Department of Education. Those "community schools" would offer wraparound services to address poverty in those areas.
"I love the idea of putting a lot of resources in some of the schools," Pekron said. "The fact is, we aren't going to accomplish the goals we want, the goals we want to accomplish for the students, under this framework. Therefore I think the best thing we can do to moving forward under the circumstances is return the district to unified local control under a framework of significant agreed-upon levels of state support for the schools that really need it.
"I would like to move to replace the framework adopted at the last meeting with a framework that creates a unified district under local control with a detailed memorandum of understanding that sets forth the state's rights and obligations," he said.
Pekron did not offer what the provisions of the memorandum of understanding might be, leaving that for later. Neither did he address the possible use of Scott's transition board. Diane Zook, the board's chairman, said later that she anticipates that the district's existing seven-member Community Advisory Board, state-appointed from zones across the district, would continue to function until an election is held.
Education Board member Fitz Hill's second to Pekron's motion was followed by more than two hours of comments from more than a dozen audience members, many of whom hustled to revise their prepared remarks to include thanks to Pekron for the alteration to the framework plan that they didn't like.
'WINNING HAND'
Scott was the first to speak.
"Never have you seen this city this engaged for its school district. Why? Because it represents economic revitalization," the mayor said, adding, "We are going to put our money where our mouth is with investments."
He said the city's prevention and intervention treatment dollars will be directed to students in every neighborhood to ensure they achieve.
Little Rock Superintendent Mike Poore also welcomed Pekron's motion along with earlier descriptions by state education agency staff on efforts by the Education Department's Division of Elementary and Secondary Education to raise student achievement in cooperation with both past and present district staff.
"It's kind of creating a winning hand right now," Poore said. "We're going to get better with the new folks we have, with the teachers we currently have and with the community that is all behind us. We won't stop but we also have to have the [division] to support us."
Other speakers included lawmakers, teachers, teacher organization leaders, parents and mental health professionals, many of whom also spoke in support of teachers and retaining union recognition.
Charles Zook, a substitute teacher in the district and the stepson of Diane Zook, warned the board and the audience against what he sees as the "systematic destruction of public education in order to break unions and usher in privatization," including establishment of independently operated publicly funded charter schools, in Little Rock and elsewhere in the country.
Parent Vicki Hatter appealed to the hearts of the Education Board members to keep the Little Rock Education Association recognition intact and that dissolving union protections is wrong.
Kimberly Crutchfield, a teacher at Central High and a former teacher at Little Rock's McClellan High, said that as a teenage mother her family didn't support her but her principal and teachers did and made sure she was at school. She said a true measure of a teacher is whether their students come to school and try despite their hardships
Crutchfield also cited her decade of experience as a member of a personnel policy committee in another district.
"It does not work," she said. "We don't have time [as teachers] to get the budgets and try to come up with a plan to counter the offer that the district administration is making. Guess what we are doing? We are teaching, doing lesson planning. LREA and Teresa Gordon have the time to put the effort in. They speak for 100 percent of teachers because they all get the benefit of their great work."
LEGISLATORS WEIGH IN
Pulaski County Democratic legislators who spoke included Reps. Andrew Collins and Tippi McCullough, and Sens. Joyce Elliott and Will Bond.
Elliott pointed out that district teachers have sacrificed work days and pay, as well as insurance benefits and lost protection of the state's Teacher Fair Dismissal Act in recent years.
Parent activist Ali Noland lamented the initial framework that would have divided the district saying, "To my neighbors across Little Rock and in the F-graded schools -- you are not a burden and you are important to this district."
Noland who repeatedly asked for the public to be able to comment on the framework plan as well as on the different motions to end collective bargaining and form personnel policies, told the Education Board, "I will stand with teachers just as teachers stand with my kids."
Later Noland questioned why a decision on collective bargaining couldn't wait to be decided until a democratically elected school board is put in place.
Education Board member Sarah Moore of Stuttgart first made the motion to end collective bargaining and establish employee personnel policy committees at a Sept. 20 meeting , saying then and again Thursday that all other Arkansas school districts operate with the personnel policy committees. She said the committees are intended to represent all employees in discussions with administrators and school boards about employee matters, including salaries and working conditions.
On Thursday, Pekron said he supports personnel policy committees that would represent 100% of employees but he proposed that the Education Board refer a decision about ending collective bargaining in the Little Rock district to Key.
Key serves in place of a school board in the state controlled Little Rock district and it is typically a school board decision whether to engage in bargaining with an employee union.
But the audience that had been restrained most of the day, shouted out objections to Pekron's motion. Pekron then moved to consider the original motion made by Moore to direct Key to end collective bargaining. That motion was passed 8-0 by the board, as was in short order a motion to restore Teacher Fair Dismissal Act employment protections in the district and the motion to waive state law that requires election of personnel policy committees in the first nine-weeks of a school year.
Another law, now waived, enables teachers to conduct their election of members to the policy committee without interference from administrators. As a result, a third party will conduct the personnel policy committee elections for teachers and support staff members in Little Rock.
Moore attempted to explain her rationale for the proposals and issued a call for efforts to educate Little Rock employees about the personnel policy committees but she was largely drowned out by angry reaction from the audience -- which prompted one of the Arkansas State troopers present at the meeting to move to the front of the room and warn that the room would be cleared.
Metro on 10/11/2019