LITTLE ROCK — Attorneys for parents in a dispute over the Arkansas Public School Choice Act argue that the Little Rock School District should not be permitted to weigh in on an appeal of a lower court’s decision to strike down thatlaw as unconstitutional.
The Little Rock School District - battling with the state over the continuation of a decades-old desegregation settlement - has sought to file an amicus brief in the separate case over the School Choice Act suit to argue that parties in that case were using the wrong legal standard to determine whether a remedy for segregation is constitutional.
Despite the district’s fears that the standard could negatively affect its claims in the desegregation case, the state’s largest school system should not be permitted to create“distractions” by filing in the School Choice Act case, attorneys for plaintiffs in that case said in a brief filed late Monday.
The plaintiffs, a group of Malvern parents whose white children were forbidden transfer to the Magnet Cove School District undera racial restriction in the law, “seek to have their rights, and the rights of their children, decided without the distractions presented by LRSD and its infamous Pulaski County Desegregation Case,” wrote Jess Askew III, their attorney.
He filed his brief with the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis, which will consider appeals of a lower court’s decision to rule the Arkansas Public School Choice Act unconstitutional.
Under a stay issued by U.S. District Judge Robert Dawson, that law will remain in effect until the 8th Circuit panel of judges rules on the appeals.
A racial restriction - the basis of the original constitutional challenge to the law - will also remain in place, forbidding a student from transferring “to a nonresident district where the percentage of enrollment for the student’s race exceeds that percentage in the student’s resident district.”
Attorneys for the parent plaintiffs sought to have that restriction stricken independently, leaving the rest of the law in place so that studentscould transfer more freely out of their resident school districts. The restriction is unconstitutional because it uses race too broadly as a factor, they said, citing a standard used in U.S. Supreme Court precedent related to the Seattle School District.
Dawson, f inding that the restriction couldn’t be severed from the law’s surrounding language, struck down the entire act.
The Arkansas attorney general’s office, defending the Arkansas Board of Education, argued that the restriction was necessary to prevent segregation in Arkansas districts and to allow students to balance racial compositions of districts by moving between them.
The School Choice Act meets the standards in the Seattle case, they argued, because the use of race is “narrowly tailored” to serve the state’s desegregation interests.
But Chris Heller, an attorney for the Little Rock School District, has said the Seattle case is the wrong standard to judge the constitutionality of the majority-to-minority standards. He favors a less restrictive precedent that has been used in other cases.
If the Seattle case becomes the measure for judging the constitutionality of such transfers, its effects could spill over into the separate Little Rock case, Heller wrote. That’s because transfers permitted under the School Choice Act mirror a portion of the 1989 desegregation settlement among the state and black students, Pulaski County’s public schoolteachers and the Little Rock, North Little Rock and Pulaski County Special school districts.
That settlement incorporates a system of school transfers through which students who are members of a racial majority in one of the three districts transfer to another district where their race is in the minority.
Under that settlement, the state pays about $70 million a year to the three districts to fund items such as transportation for the transferring students and interdistrict magnet schools, which enroll students through a racebased assignment system.
The state has asked U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr. to end the desegregation settlement and its associated funding obligations, citing the Seattle case in its brief.
Askew, who also represents a group of intervening charter schools in that desegregation settlement case, said the Pulaski County situation should not be a factor in the School Choice case.
The Little Rock School District “can air its views on the law in its Pulaski County Desegregation Case without detracting from the opportunity of the Plaintiffs/Appellants to vindicate their rights in this case,” Askew wrote in his filing.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 9 on 09/26/2012