North Little Rock district, lawyers clash on ’86 plan

By CYNTHIA HOWELL ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

Posted: December 30, 2009 at 2:45 a.m.

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LITTLE ROCK — The North Little Rock School District has failed to show substantial compliance with its desegregation plan, including its provisions dealing with staffing, student discipline, special education and student achievement, attorneys for black students said Tuesday.

But Stephen Jones, the attorney for the school district, argued to the contrary, saying the 9,000-student North Little Rock school system has met its desegregation obligations and should be released from federal court monitoring.

The attorneys for both the district and for the black students known as the Joshua intervenors submitted their arguments to U.S. District Judge Brian Miller this week in preparation for a Jan. 25 court hearing on whether the North Little Rock School District should be declared desegregated, or unitary, and released from years ofcourt supervision.

The Joshua attorneys - John Walker and Austin Porter of Little Rock and Robert Pressman of Lexington, Mass. - detailed what they saw as the shortcomings of the district’s compliance with a desegregation plan that dates back to 1986 with revisions made in 1990 and 1992.

The filing is a sign that the Joshua Intervenors will vigorously fight the release of the district from court control.

“It’s going to be interesting because you couldn’t have a much clearer difference as to what seems to be relevant,” Jones, the district’s attorney, said Tuesday about the forthcoming court hearing and its outcome.

“North Little Rock never committed on statistical outcomes,” Jones said. “We focused on processes, procedures and programs that we could implement. Our position is that we have done those things. It appears that Joshua wants to measure how effective the programs and the procedures were in achieving some statistical outcome. That’s not what our plan says.”

Walker, Porter and Pressman propose in their brief that Miller identify the areas in which the North Little Rock district failed to justify thedistrict’s release from court supervision. The court should then give the parties 21 days to suggest ways to remedy the shortcomings and follow up with an order directing what the remedies should be for the violations that are found.

The Joshua attorneys suggest that it will be necessary for the court to continue to monitor the district for compliance.

“If the court agrees with intervenors’ contentions, it will ultimately be necessary to identify a reasonable period of time for attaining and continuing compliance with the relevant plan requirements,” they wrote.

The federal court in 1984 found that black educators were under-represented among administrators and faculty members in the North Little Rock school system.

The Joshua attorneys in their 46-page brief to the court said that North Little Rock efforts to remedy that were not satisfactory.

Between 1984-85 and this school year, the number of teachers in the district increased by 247, yet the number of black teachers decreased by 3, from 104 to 101 out of this year’s 766 teachers, they said.

The attorneys also said the district failed to establish goals for the employment of a racially diverse faculty until 2004 when it called for staffing schools in such a way that students at every school would have access to a diverse staff of licensed employees.

More recently, the goal is to have a “minority staff at each school that is equal to at least 20 percent of total employed staff,” the Joshua attorneys said. But the attorneys said that as recently as 2008, the federal Office of Desegregation Monitoring wrote that it was possible for students to attend some North Little Rock elementary schools “and not have contact with a minority teacher.”

The federal court in 1984 found that North Little Rockblack students were assigned to special education classes in disproportionately high numbers without a valid basis, and the district tended to classify white students as “learning disabled” and black students as “mentally retarded.” The district committed to maintain records and report annually to the court on the students who are screened and provided special education services.

The Joshua attorneys told Miller that the district’s recent special education reports were not submitted on time and, when submitted, did not contain all the information necessary to determine if black students remain over-represented in the program. The attorneys noted that the Arkansas Department of Education has cited the district for having an over-representation of black students in letters written to the district in January 2007 and again in April 2008.

The Joshua attorneys said the district failed to develop an explicit goal for reducing the achievement gap between black and white students, nor has it submitted a comprehensive report to the court on student achievement - despite “the vast body of available test results.”

The attorneys also noted that more black than white students drop out of North Little Rock High School, West Campus, each year, raising questions about whether the district evaluated the success of its drop-out prevention program in regard to black students. In 2008-09, 71 of the school’s 821 black students dropped out or 8.6 percent. That compared with 38 of the school’s 563 white students, 6.7 percent.

Extracurricular activities, gifted education and school facilities also were examined by Walker, Porter and Pressman, as was the work of school and districtwide desegregation monitoring teams.

The attorneys faulted school district reports on student disciplinary measures, saying that those reports in recent years do not include all relevant data necessary to determine if there was racial disparity in disciplining students, nor do the reports raise issues or make recommendations for school board consideration.

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 16 on 12/30/2009

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