Leaders of the Pulaski County Special School District on Thursday raised the possibility of having to construct a replacement competition gymnasium at the new Mills High School campus, which opened in 2018.
Speaking to the district’s School Board, Curtis Johnson, the district’s executive director of operations, reported that a replacement gymnasium would cost as much as $12 million.
That’s an amount Superintendent Charles McNulty said the district does not have on hand.
Johnson’s comments about a new gymnasium, along with the construction of a softball field and space for the school’s Driven online instructional program, come as the district waits for a decision from a federal judge on whether the district has met its desegregation obligations and can be declared unitary and released from further court monitoring of its operations.
U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr., the presiding judge in the 37-year-old school desegregation lawsuit, earlier this month concluded a three-week hearing on the district’s efforts to comply with desegregation Plan 2000 provisions dealing with student discipline practices, student achievement, the condition of facilities and self-monitoring of desegregation work.
In the hearing, attorneys for Black students who are known as the McClendon intervenors challenged the district’s compliance in the different areas. That included complaints that the construction of Mills High in a more racially diverse area of the district is inferior to that of Robinson Middle School in the predominantly white and more affluent western edge of the district. Robinson and Mills were built at the same time.
Read Wednesday's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette to learn more.