LITTLE ROCK — A federal judge approved a settlement through which the Pulaski County Special School District agreed to pay $875,000 to cover two decades of litigation and desegregation monitoring by attorneys for the Joshua intervenors, representatives of black students in a 30-yearold desegregation case.

U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr. in an order Friday called the out-of-court settlement “fair and reasonable.” After reviewing documentation of time spent on the case and court-approved hourly rates for the attorneys, Marshall determined that the Joshua intervenors’ claims for fees could have exceeded $2.5 million, not including related expenses.

“In sum, the proposed settlement — approximately one-third of Joshua’s goodfaith claim — is well within the range of reasonable compromises,” Marshall wrote. “It is, moreover, in the public’s interest to resolve this issue now by settlement rather than more litigation.”

The intervenors’ litigation and monitoring stems from a lawsuit in which the Little Rock School District sued the state and the North Little Rock and Pulaski County Special school districts in 1982, claiming they had fostered segregation among the county’s three school systems.

That suit led to a 1989 settlement under which the state pays about $70 million a year to help finance Little Rock’s six original magnet schools and all three districts’ majority-to-minority interdistrict student-transfer programs, some employee healthcare and retirement costs and general operating expenses.

The Joshua intervenors, represented by lead attorney and state Rep. John Walker, D-Little Rock, tracked those plans and previously challenged some of the county district’s claims of compliance in court.

Earlier this month, Marshall requested additional documentation that he said he needed before he could provide final approval of the agreement presented by the district and intervenors.

Neither Walker nor Jerry Guess, superintendent of the state-controlled, 18,000-student Pulaski County Special School District, returned calls to their offices Friday.

Guess said earlier this month he was “pleased” with the fee agreement.

“We believe it’s much better to find some common ground than it is to litigate,” he said.

Guess told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in October that settlement talks started with a request from the intervenors for about $3 million.

The district paid the intervenors $150,000 last year as ordered by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals after the intervenors’ successful challenge to the district’s claim for unitary, or desegregated, status.

Before that, the district had not paid fees to the Joshua intervenors since the early 1990s, Guess has said.

Newspaper reports show that the district previously paid the intervenors, including the Legal Defense and Education Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a total of $337,985, not counting the $150,000 from last year.

Sam Jones, a Little Rock attorney who represents the Pulaski County Special School District in the case, said the $875,000 settlement was “not a big number” considering how long the Intervenors have been involved in the case.

In 2006, all parties in the case said total expenses for legal representation had exceeded $16.5 million, a figure that has grown since.

Marshall plans a series of hearings next fall to allow the Pulaski County Special School District — the only district that hasn’t reached unitary status in the desegregation case — a chance to prove it has met some or all of its obligations and that it should be freed from court supervision in those areas.

In a Dec. 11 order, Marshall denied the district’s November motion to declare it unitary in four of the nine remaining parts of its desegregation plan: addressing onerace classrooms in the district, Advanced Placement/gifted education programs, special education services and district staffing.

But Marshall said he was “heartened” that, from the perspective of the Joshua intervenors, the school system is “moving diligently to address areas where the District is not in compliance.”

In addition to the four areas listed in its court motion, the Pulaski County Special School District remains under court supervision in five other areas described in the district’s Plan 2000 desegregation plan: student achievement, student discipline, facilities, scholarships and internal monitoring.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/29/2012