Should we move toward full funding for universal pre-kindergarten enrollment for the state's 4-year-olds? It's an important question.
But you'd never get a sense of that importance from the altogether unseemly dust-up in a big state House race in the well-to-do neighborhoods of north-central Little Rock.
City Director Stacy Hurst of the Tipton & Hurst flower shop is the Republican candidate. Clarke Tucker, Harvard-educated lawyer and third-generation scion of a prominent local family of civic and educational leadership, is the Democratic nominee. Both candidates favor state funding of universal pre-K, which makes the raging squabble fully personal and wholly political, not at all about policy.
It turns out they have sharp political elbows up toward Prospect Terrace and the Heights.
Clarke Tucker has a 4-year-son. He sought to get the little guy enrolled this fall in the Little Rock School District's model and coveted Forest Park pre-K program in his neighborhood.
Tucker was notified by letter in April that pre-K enrollment had been filled by lottery and that nothing existed districtwide for his son.
So the Tuckers spent much of the summer inquiring and complaining and figuring out what to do. They settled on enrolling their child for fall in the private Episcopal School's pre-K program.
On Aug. 11, Tucker sent to the printer a campaign flier reporting both the lack of a public pre-K spot for his child and his family's fallback to the private-school option. His flier argued that no child should ever be denied public preschooling opportunities.
A few days after that, but before the fliers got delivered in the mail, the state Republican Party--acting at the behest of the Hurst campaign--filed a Freedom of Information request with the school district. It wanted copies of all records of school district communications having to do with the matter of pre-K for the Tucker child, including any emails between the parents, Clarke and his wife, Toni, and the maternal grandparents, Little Rock Central football coach Scooter Register and Sandra Register, principal at Terry Elementary.
A few days before school started, the Tuckers were notified that "exactly one" spot--not at Forest Park, but at the Fair Park Early Childhood Center--had opened.
They turned it down. They'd already changed their child's expectations once and didn't want to do so again--especially so abruptly and so close to the school opening.
So Hurst's political consultant, veteran Republican operative Clint Reed of Little Rock, posted a photo of the Tucker campaign flier on Twitter. He insinuated it was not true, as the flier said, that the Tucker youth was denied a public pre-K spot. Reed said he was making a point about a pattern of inaccuracy in the Tucker campaign, including a false assertion that Hurst opposed the private-option form of Medicaid expansion.
Hurst was then quoted by the Arkansas Times as saying there had been a lot of talk among her supporters and school people and at cocktail parties about the Tuckers' situation. So she was pursuing the FOI request, she said, to "vet" Tucker on whatever he might have been doing to pull strings to get his son moved ahead of other children on a waiting list for the Forest Park pre-K program.
Hurst said to me Tuesday: "May I first say I was very inarticulate yesterday in that comment about 'cocktail parties,' and that I am sorry about that?"
Here's her side: All during her campaign she has heard from voters about the popularity of Forest Park and "rumors" that the Tuckers, because of their prominence and connections, might manage to get their child moved ahead of others and placed in the school. So she brought up the matter with her consultant, Reed, a former state Republican Party executive director. And Reed offered to get the party to submit a general FOI request of school documents about the youth's case.
Hurst said the request amounted merely to the very kind of vetting she's been subjected to as a city director and political candidate. She said the FOI request very well might have produced information she would have chosen not to use in her campaign.
But then Reed, her consultant, posted the innuendo about the Tucker flier on Twitter, piquing the interest of a couple of newspaper people. Then Tucker, who can read Twitter, chose to get out in front of the issue by calling a news conference to reveal the FOI request and accuse Hurst of involving his 4-year-old child in a political fight, which she insists she was not doing.
There are documents released under the FOI that show school district officials reporting they'd offered the Tuckers other pre-K slots as early as May. But Clarke Tucker says he and his wife never understood those to be firm offers, but mere possibilities.
It's all rather petty and convoluted and untoward. But it all comes down to these facts: The Tuckers' actions regarding the education of their child is their business. The campaign flier was accurate when written--and is accurate still, in that the Tucker child was denied a slot in April.
Hurst says she has no criticism to make of the Tuckers in their advocacy for their child. As a mom, she says, she is ready to move on--as soon as she can explain to everyone that she's not a child-exploiting villain as is being portrayed.
I don't think she's a child-exploiting villain. I think she plays rough-and-tumble politics. I think it turns out the other guy does too.
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 08/28/2014