2 districts’ pupils OK’d to stay in magnet track

Fifth- and eighth-graders who live in the Pulaski County Special and North Little Rock school districts but attend Little Rock magnet schools are now eligible to move to the next level of magnet schools for 2014-15,representatives of two districts said Friday.

The plan announced Friday provides continued enrollment opportunities for students who were otherwise destined by a recent federal court-approved desegregation case settlement to have little chance of moving from elementary to middle school and to high school in the magnet school system.

Frederick Fields, the Little Rock School District’s senior director of student services, said Friday that those North Little Rock and Pulaski County Special district residents attending Little Rock magnet schools can remain in the Little Rock district as long as they follow the district’s newly established magnet-school feeder patterns.

Pupils now at Booker and Carver magnet elementaries will feed into Horace Mann Magnet Middle School, and Mann students will feed into Parkview Magnet High. Pupils at Gibbs and Williams magnet elementaries will feed into Dunbar Magnet Middle School, who will in turn move into Central High.

“They cannot deviate from the feeder patterns,” Fields said of the nonresident students who are completing their last semesters at a magnet school. “If they do not want to adhere to our established feeder patterns, they will have to return to their school districts.”

The Jan. 13 federal court-approved settlement in the long-running Pulaski County school desegregation lawsuit put an immediate end to any new magnet school and majority-to-minority interdistrict transfer students for the 2014-15 school year and beyond.

Majority-to-minority transfer students have long been able to continue in their chosen school districts until they graduate. But magnet school students have only been permitted to complete the grades at their current schools and then had to go through the application and lottery selection system for possible enrollment in a magnet school at the next middle school or high school level.

The new settlement terms end the desegregation transfer programs, making it difficult for nonresident students to continue in Little Rock’s special-program magnet schools.

Parents of interdistrict transfer students who are completing the fifth and eighth grades at magnet schools this year have appealed to district leaders and even to the presiding judge in the case in recent weeks to give their students a means to continue in the magnet school system.

There are 67 North Little Rock district pupils and 96 Pulaski County Special students now in fifth or in eighth grades in the magnet schools, according to Little Rock district records.

In place of the long-standing interdistrict transfer programs, used to promote racial desegregation, the parties in the desegregation case negotiated late last year a limited number of student “legal transfers.” Legal transfers are permitted by an older state law but have been rarely used in Pulaski County in recent years.

The Pulaski County Special district is obligated by the settlement to approve the legal transfers of up to 30 students per year for five years to the Little Rock School District and another 30 students per year to North Little Rock, with some flexibility each year, but with no more than 150 students per district over five years.

The Little Rock and North Little Rock districts also agreed to approve legal transfers for up to 30 students per year to each other’s districts, again with the annual flexibility but also with a 150-student cap over five years.

The magnet school plan announced Friday has the potential to far exceed the 30 legal transfers to Little Rock from each of the neighboring districts that was envisioned in the settlement.

Chris Heller, an attorney for the Little Rock district, said Friday that he believes the districts are free to make the agreement on the magnet students without seeking federal court approval.

“The agreement is for one year, and we will talk again when we see how it works out,” Heller said.

Allen Roberts, an attorney for the Pulaski County Special district, said the mother who addressed the judge at a Jan. 13 settlement “fairness hearing” about magnet-school student transfers “was pretty eloquent.” He also said that permitting the magnet students to remain in Little Rock “seems like a pretty educationally sound thing to do.”

“Our obligation is to agree to up to 30 legal transfers,” Roberts said. “I never thought we were limiting ourselves to 30,” he said.

“The essence of it is that we waived the 30 [transfers] limit for this year only, but we don’t waive the 150” for five years, he said. “We really don’t know what to expect. We’ll see how popular it is without giving away the ranch for when the next year comes around.”

The Little Rock district will send letters by mail to parents of fifth- and eighth-grade magnet students next week , asking them to select the “area of concentration” for their children, such as science, one of the arts, or international studies, Fields said.

“They will have seven days to hand-deliver that letter in person to the student registration office at 501 Sherman St. to confirm their child’s seat in the magnet school,” Fields said. “They will have to return it on or by Feb. 21. They must make a selection - that is their application to return to the district. When they do that, we’ll automatically place them in the [magnet] school.”

In addition to the students who wish to continue in the magnet schools, other students residing in the North Little Rock and Pulaski County Special districts can apply for legal transfers to the Little Rock School District, and Little Rock district resident students can apply for legal transfers to North Little Rock. The Pulaski County district is not obligated by the settlement to accept any legal-transfer students.

In short, parents who want legal transfers for their students must apply within the next few weeks for those transfers in the districts in which they reside. The districts will then forward the applications to each family’s choice district, or the receiving district.

Each receiving district will determine how to select students from the pool of all applicants for their district.

The Little Rock district plans to put all the applicants into a random-selection lottery or “scramble,” Fields said.

The North Little Rock district has proposed giving priority to siblings of current and newly selected transfer students, as well as to current North Little Rock district students who have moved outside the district but want to remain in North Little Rock schools.