The Pulaski County Special School District's new system for gathering and processing data about its schools promises to be "a real game changer," an expert in a long-running Pulaski County school desegregation lawsuit has told a federal judge.
Margie Powell, the expert appointed by Chief U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr., made the observation in the seventh of eight reports she is preparing on efforts by the Pulaski County Special and the Jacksonville/North Pulaski school districts to meet their desegregation obligations.
Marshall is the presiding judge in the 37-year-old lawsuit in which the two districts are the only remaining defendants.
Last year, Marshall directed Powell to prepare the different evaluations before a court hearing to begin in July. The hearing's purpose is to determine whether the districts have met their commitments on facilities, discipline practices, student achievement and self-monitoring, making them eligible to be declared unitary and released from further federal court monitoring.
The Pulaski County Special district's desegregation effort, Plan 2000, calls for the district staff to develop a plan for monitoring the district's compliance with the provisions of the desegregation plan.
That monitoring plan was to identify the district staff members who have the responsibility for carrying out the different parts of the plan.
The Joshua intervenors in the case, now known as the McClendon intervenors, represent all black students in the district. The monitoring plan is to be shared with them.
Powell provided the judge with some background on the district's struggles with the internal monitoring requirement, noting that in 2011 the district was declared only partially unitary in monitoring.
That was because the district had taken more than two years to adopt a monitoring plan, and then it was rejected for being "woefully inadequate," she said.
In the most recent three years, the district's monitoring reports showed little change in the format and contained little detail with respect to corrective actions or interventions when problems were found.
But the district has a new monitoring tool "that should greatly improve its monitoring processes and possibly eliminate most, if not all, of the shortcomings found in past monitoring reports," Powell wrote.
The new Educational Equity School Monitoring system is made up of an elementary equity report, secondary equity report and school profile reports.
Jessica Duff, a Pulaski County Special district spokeswoman, said Friday that the combined reporting system -- made up of sharable online documents that pose no new costs -- is new this school year.
John McCraney, the district's coordinator of equity initiatives, called the new system "exceptionally more effective than how we've presented data in the past.
"With this new reporting tool," McCraney said, "we combine the data from the Elementary Equity Report, Secondary Equity Report and School Profile Report into one cohesive report.
Before, we answered the same questions on each report; however, the data was reported at different times throughout the year. The Educational Equity Monitoring Tool compiles all the data at one time for one submission [in the fall]. It's cleaner across the board."
Powell said the response and observation forms for the system are "detailed and verifiable."
"As a result, district officials and school personnel can examine each element of the educational process in a school to determine where there are problems and then make a plan to address the area(s) in question," she wrote.
"Should a school's report show deficiencies in any area(s), the school is placed on Alert Status. The school's administration must develop a clear, concise well-written Action Plan for specific improvement."
If a school is labeled as being on Alert Status-Year One, that notice goes to the school principal and requires a meeting with the school equity committee.
The district's equity committee will provide assistance and give directions to help school personnel make corrections. There are also consequences for year 2 and year 3 alert status, Powell said.
Powell concluded her report by acknowledging the difficulty of developing a monitoring system. She cited her many years of experience as a staff member in the federal Office of Desegregation Monitoring, which is now closed but was responsible for monitoring and reporting on school desegregation efforts in the Little Rock, North Little Rock and Pulaski County Special systems.
"When the ODM [Office of Desegregation Monitoring] first got started, our team noted that there were no real definitions of what 'monitoring' meant," she said.
"We had to visit other states to get an idea of how other monitors were reporting their information. We found there were no two monitoring teams alike and that the Pulaski County's school desegregation case was the only one of its kind."
Powell pointed out that online information gathering and processing has become widely used in the years since the Pulaski County Special district's Plan 2000 was written.
"Fortunately, the [Pulaski County Special School District] has progressed into the new era of information gathering and data processing, and has a new monitoring tool. This new computer program has promises of being a real game changer," she said.
"The new monitoring reports have more detailed information reflecting the school's entire educational process and, the report has an equity focus in each area examined," she continued.
"School personnel no longer have to wait until the end of the school year to modify or eliminate programs, practices, or interventions that are not working. In the [district], if an updated monitoring report is needed today, it's available today."
Metro on 01/11/2020