Commentary: Lawmakers risk repeat of past education shortcomings

Lawmakers risk repeat of past education shortcomings

Gov. Asa Hutchinson and the state Legislature have undone what their predecessors in office fought hard to do little more than a decade ago.

The governor signed into law last week a bill that will allow school districts with fewer than 350 students to avoid what had been a mandatory consolidation requirement for the state's smallest districts.

To survive, the small districts must demonstrate they're meeting minimum statewide academic, fiscal and facility standards. But they can survive.

State Rep. Bruce Cozart, R-Hot Springs, proposed and got passed the bill to allow the districts to apply for consolidation waivers.

The idea was so popular among the current crop of lawmakers that there were no votes against House Bill 1263, now Act 377, in the House or the Senate.

That doesn't mean all legislators voted for the bill. A dozen senators and five House members didn't vote. But that left strong majorities for the bill in both chambers.

With Hutchinson eager to make it law, passage of the bill was something of a watershed moment in the saga over education reform in Arkansas.

The consolidation requirement, enacted in 2004, was among many reforms adopted by former legislators in response to long-running litigation over adequacy and equity in the public schools of Arkansas.

Then-Gov. Mike Huckabee encouraged even more stringent consolidation of districts in what was among the longest and loudest legislative fights of the day. He settled for a 350-student cutoff before a school district had to consolidate with another. That was a significant victory for small school districts in the environment that existed then.

Both the administrative and legislative branches of state government were trying to answer an Arkansas Supreme Court finding that the public school system in the state was unconstitutional. Special masters appointed by the court monitored the state's progress in that tense time as lawmakers rewrote the school funding formula and a myriad of other laws.

The lawmakers who went through that period of constitutional crisis are no longer around. Most, if not all, have termed out of the Legislature. Their replacements don't seem to appreciate why their predecessors passed all those educational reforms, including consolidation.

The litigation that triggered the crisis was initially brought by the tiny Lake View School District in Phillips County in the 1990s and later joined by other districts, including large ones in Northwest Arkansas. Lake View, as it came to be known, went through several iterations before its resolution in 2007.

Mike Beebe, who had been attorney general at the height of the court battles, was the state's governor for most of the years since and helped keep successive Legislatures on the straight and narrow when it came to preserving reforms that settled the lawsuit. Now he's termed out, too.

The next chapter in Arkansas public education will be presided over by Hutchinson, who promised help to rural schools in his gubernatorial campaign and who enthusiastically signed the legislation to let the smaller schools get waivers to stay open.

"I think this provides a good balance between keeping high academic standards for our schools and at the same time helping those communities that really need their school and have strong support for their school," the governor said.

To be sure, supporters of small school districts, which are often located in remote rural areas and a long bus ride away from the nearest neighbors, have never let up on the fight to keep their schools. Such schools are, in many instances, what holds a small community together.

Previous efforts to raise the enrollment requirement or otherwise thwart forced consolidation have failed, however. That changed with Act 375.

The larger question now is whether this change in the school consolidation law provides the thread to unravel the greater educational reforms made in the state's public school system.

Like it or not, consolidation of the smallest schools was part of a multi-faceted balancing act to offer an equitable and adequate education to all Arkansas students.

What happens now depends largely on Hutchinson and his administration's long-term commitment to education. It also depends on how current and future lawmakers view their responsibility not just to their small, rural schools but also to schoolchildren in all of the state's districts.

Will lawmakers put greater pressure on state officials not to find their small schools in academic, fiscal or facility distress? Will the governor let them? Remember, if the districts are off the lists, they can survive under this new law.

Or could there be changes in what constitutes distress to make it more likely tiny schools can survive? What's a tweak here or there to the standards?

Just such manipulation helped create the constitutional crisis the state was in with Lake View. And it could happen again, if the governor and lawmakers ignore the lessons of the past.

Brenda Blagg is a freelance columnist and longtime journalist in Northwest Arkansas. Email her at [email protected].

Commentary on 03/18/2015

Upcoming Events