Changes near with school suit’s end

Jacksonville, LR facing decisions

A federal judge’s stamp of approval on a settlement in the Pulaski County school-desegregation case means the likelihood of an election later this year to form a new district in Jacksonville and imminent changes for Little Rock’s six original magnet schools.

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School districts takeover and desegregation

On Monday, U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr. approved an agreement that will provide the three Pulaski County school districts with $65.8 million a year in desegregation aid for four more school years.

The settlement - negotiated by attorneys for the state, the three Pulaski County school districts, the class of black students known as the Joshua intervenors and the class of school district employees known as the Knight intervenors - will now allow leaders in Jacksonville and northern Pulaski County to exercise the provisions in state law on forming a district.

That would be done by carving an area from the Pulaski County Special School District to create a new Jacksonville school system.

“It was a big day for Jacksonville and a big day for everybody else, as well,” Daniel Gray, a spokesman for the Jacksonville/North Pulaski County Education Corps, said Tuesday about the previous day’s court ruling.

The Education Corps held community meetings in recent months, produced a feasibility study on the formation of a Jacksonville/North Pulaski school system and collected signatures on petitions that ask the state Board of Education to schedule an election in the Jacksonville area so that voters can decide whether to form a district.

Gray, who is also president-elect of the Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce, said he expects to go to the Arkansas Board of Education in February, or March at the latest, with the petitions and their verified signatures.

“We want to get all our i’s dotted and t’s crossed,” he said, “but we will ask them to set the election at the earliest date available, which I think is September. The way the law reads, the election will take place at the September school board election or at the general election. So September or November are our options.”

During the federal court hearing, Marshall recognized the Jacksonville advocates for their perseverance - dating back decades - in working for a district.

The judge contrasted the new settlement with a previous 1989 agreement that obligated the state to make desegregation payments with no ending date and protected the Pulaski County Special district’s boundaries.

The new settlement relaxes the prohibition against a new district for the Jacksonville area and establishes a path for other communities to form their own districts once the Pulaski County Special district meets all of its desegregation obligations and is released from court supervision.

To attain that unitary status and release from court supervision, the Pulaski County Special district has to equalize the condition of its school buildings, some of which are new and in affluent, largely white communities while others are in much older and poorer communities with higher percentages of black students. Regardless of whether Jacksonville becomes a separate school district, the schools there must be improved, according to the intent of the settlement.

Gray and Derrick Scott, chief operations officer for the Pulaski County Special district, said Tuesday that the district and Jacksonville leaders are cooperatively developing building, funding and site plans for schools.

“The plans pretty much jibe,” Scott said, adding that the Pulaski County Special district is including Jacksonville school changes in the district’s master facilities plan to be sent to the state, even knowing that a new district is likely.

“We want to give them a head start,” Scott said about including the Jacksonville schools in the district’s plan to the state. “We want that visibility in the master plan for those folks because we want them to be successful. If the voters turn the new district down and they remain part of us, we want the schools to be in our plan and we want to be ready to work on those facilities.”

MAGNET SCHOOLS

Other terms of the newly approved settlement will end the long-standing practice of recruiting and enrolling new Pulaski County Special and North Little Rock students into the Little Rock magnet schools. That’s largely the result of the settlement plan’s phasing out of the state desegregation aid. That aid helped the districts afford those student transfer programs that helped desegregate schools.

The magnet schools, which feature programs in the arts, sciences and international studies/foreign languages, included reserved seats for fairly large numbers of students from the neighboring districts.

The settlement also will similarly end the enrollment of any new students into the districts’ majority-to-minority interdistrict student transfer system.

Current Pulaski County Special and North Little Rock students in magnet schools, and current students from all three districts in the majority-to-minority transfer program, may stay in their current schools at least until they complete all the available grades at the schools.Majority-to-minority transfer students can stay in the host district through high school graduation. The districts will continue to provide school bus transportation for those students for at least the next three school years.

The settlement will allow a limited number of transfers through an older but rarely used “legal transfer” system that requires school board approval from both the home and the receiving school districts on a student-by-student basis. The Pulaski County Special district agreed in the new settlement to allow 30 legal transfers per year to Little Rock and another 30 per year to North Little Rock.

Sadie Mitchell, associate superintendent for elementary education in the Little Rock district, said Friday that the legal transfer students can apply for any school in the district, including the magnet schools, but not the newly approved Forest Heights Kindergarten-Eighth Grade Academy.

The magnet schools - Booker, Carver, Gibbs and Williams elementaries, Horace Mann Middle and Parkview High - will remain in operation as special program schools open to students citywide, Mitchell and other district leaders have said.

The magnet school seats previously reserved for students from Pulaski County Special and North Little Rock will become available to Little Rock students who apply and are selected through a lottery system.

Frederick Fields, senior administrator for student services in the Little Rock district, told Marshall in Monday’s court hearing that the district leaders have decided to create a feeder school magnet system for the coming 2014-15 school year to give students who attend certain magnet elementary schools greater priority for enrollment in particular middle and high schools.

Specifically, pupils who complete Gibbs and Williams elementaries will be able to attend Dunbar Middle School, which has a magnet program in international studies and gifted education.Then those magnet pupils at Dunbar will be given some assurance of attending Central High and participating in its international studies magnet program if they desire.

Pupils who complete Booker and Carver elementaries will be given a preference over other applicants for enrollment at Horace Mann Middle School, and Horace Mann pupils will be given a preference over others for enrollment in Parkview High.

Students don’t have to stay in the magnet school feeder system. Carver and Booker pupils can apply to Dunbar, just as Gibbs and Williams pupils can apply to Mann and Mann students can apply to Central, but those students moving outside the planned feeder system won’t be given any special preferences, district leaders said.

The district will host a Magnet School Fair to showcase the programs and answer parent questions Jan 25 at Park Plaza Mall.

Student registration for the 2014-15 school year, including making choices for special program schools, will be Jan. 27 -31 at St. Mark Baptist Church, 5722 W. 12th St., and Feb. 3-7 at the Little Rock School District Student Registration Office, 501 Sherman Street.

The Little Rock School District issued a statement Tuesday welcoming the judge’s approval of the settlement.

“This monumental event provides the district and the collective community an opportunity to forge toward the future with more confidence and less uncertainty in planning for the education of all our students,” said the statement from Superintendent Dexter Suggs’ office.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 01/15/2014

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