LR School Board to hold open forum
The Little Rock School Board and Superintendent Dexter Suggs will host the second in a series of meetings Monday to solicit comments and ideas about the current and future operation of the 25,000-student district.
The forum will be at 6:30 p.m. at the Dunbar Community Center, 1001 West 16th St., next door to Gibbs Magnet Elementary School and on the same block as Dunbar Middle School.
The district is in the early stages of making plans to convert a middle school into a kindergarten-through-eighth grade school with an emphasis on science and engineering, to transform an elementary school into a gifted-education academy and to initiate a district-wide facilities study that could lead to a request for a property-tax increase to finance new school construction.
After Monday’s session, the next meeting will be at 6 p.m. Oct. 14 at the Willie Hinton Neighborhood Resource Center, 3805 W. 12th St.
Basketball lawsuit sent back to court
A panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis last week upheld in part and reversed in part a lower court decision in the case of a Maumelle High School student who tried out and was placed on a school basketball team but then was removed after additional tryouts were held.
Teresa Bloodman, the mother of the student, claimed that the school violated her son’s rights and school policies by placing and then removing her son from the team, and then reassigning him from an athletics class to a study hall and then to a home-economics class.
U.S. District Judge James M. Moody previously dismissed the lawsuit, saying in part that the parent failed to state how her son’s rights were violated. He also said that a student’s interest in playing school sports is not protected by the due process clause of the U.S. Constitution.
The 8th Circuit agreed with Moody that Bloodman failed to state a claim regarding her son’s removal from the team.
The appeals court, however, reversed and sent back to the lower court for consideration Bloodman’s claim that her son’s constitutional rights were violated when he lost credit toward graduation as the result of the class reassignments. Those transfers from course to course, Bloodman argued, violated school policies that prohibit reassignment without parental consent and prohibit reassignment eight weeks into a semester.
“The District Court dismissed the complaint without considering whether these school policies created a justifiable expectation that the son would not be so transferred and reassigned,” the appeals court wrote.
NLR schools begin expulsion program
The North Little Rock School District is starting an expulsion program for students who are expelled from district schools for extended periods because of serious behavior problems.
The program will operate from 4 to 6 p.m. each school day, beginning Tuesday at the North Little Rock Academy campus, which is the district’s alternative school and was formerly Rose City Middle School.
Students can choose to make up their coursework in the program. Participating students will use the online Apex Learning program. They can make up the credits they would otherwise lose by their absence from a regular school program.
Even students who have been expelled for carrying weapons onto school property and who are barred from school property for 12 months can use the Apex system from their homes or another off-campus site, said Micheal Stone, the district’s executive director of student and equity services.
Expulsion program students who complete their expulsion period will have the opportunity to enter into a “step back” program for a nine-week grading period at the North Little Rock Academy. The step-back program will allow the students to show that they are ready to return to a regular classroom setting.
North Little Rock Superintendent Kelly Rodgers said the expulsion program is an attempt to reduce the number of students who drop out before graduation.
Arkansas, Pages 17 on 09/22/2013