Desegregation Approval Tentative

Preliminary approval of a settlement in the long-running desegregation saga in Central Arkansas is just that: preliminary.

Even the federal judge who tentatively approved it emphasized the point.

“We are not done,” said U.S. District Judge Price Marshall Jr. “This is not the end.”

It could, however, be “the beginning of the end,” the judge said. That thought carries hope for state taxpayers who have plugged roughly $1 billion toward desegregation eff orts in just three, albeit large and admittedly challenged, public school districts.

Although the desegregation saga has played out in Central Arkansas, the entire state has been aff ected. State government has been required for decades to put extra money into these school districts.

The problems have been in the North Little Rock, Pulaski County Special and Little Rock school districts.

The extra state money, millions of dollars each year, was supposed to correctracial inequities and achieve desegregation.

It is money that might have been put toward education all over Arkansas, meeting other state needs or even left in taxpayers’ pockets.

Instead, the state paid the desegregation money for these three districts off the top of the state budget, before other funding decisions were made.

Finally, the payments may end - not immediately but within a time frame spelled out in the settlement reached by all of the parties to the long-running litigation.

Judge Marshall said he saw “no glaring substantive defect or defi ciency” to the agreement. Others may and he might be persuaded diff erently.

Public comment on the settlement will be accepted through most of December and a fairness hearing is set for Jan. 13-14 to determine if the settlement is fair to the state and the school districts, the schoolchildren and educators.

Never forget, the settlement could still fall apart. But, if it does survive the next hearings, the millions in annual desegregation payments to the three districts will be phased out over the next four years.

It will be a welcome resolution. Just don’t get too excited until the deal is fi nalized.

It was 2011 when the last hope arose that the state desegregation support, paid out at roughly $70 million a year, might end.

Another judge, U.S.

District Judge Brian Miller, said then that the time had come to punish rather than reward what he called “dilatory” behavior by the districts.

The old strategy, he said, was a failed carrot-and-stick approach. The “carrot” was all that state money paid out since 1982 as the districtsremained under federal court supervision. But, wrote Miller, “the districts are wise mules that have learned how to eat the carrot and sit down on the job.”

He said the “mules” should either pull their carts on their own “or face a very heavy and punitive stick.”

It was colorful language from the judge, who ordered an immediate stop to the desegregation payments.

His order didn’t stand.

The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said he hadn’t allowed a full hearing.

In the two years since, state government has kept trying to end the payments.

This negotiated settlement offers great hope that will happen.

The state could really be free of this nagging and costly obligation.

But, just in case the settlement crumbles, Judge Marshall set aside some days in March to hear the case in court.

It won’t be over until it’s over.

BRENDA BLAGG IS A FREELANCE COLUMNIST AND LONGTIME JOURNALIST IN NORTHWEST ARKANSAS.