The Pulaski County Special School District's first school board election since September 2010 will be Nov. 8 in conjunction with a general election.
A new School Board for the Helena-West Helena School District will also be selected during a day that will feature the election of a U.S. senator and a new U.S. president.
School board elections across the state have -- since 1988 -- been held on the third Tuesday in September as required by state law. However, legislation was passed last year giving school boards the option of moving their local elections to November.
Arkansas Education Commissioner Johnny Key set the November election date for the Pulaski County Special and Helena-West Helena districts that are exiting state control.
"As a matter of policy, I believe a November election date promotes greater participation in the governance of our public schools," Key said Monday in an emailed response to questions about the election date.
Both the Pulaski County Special and Helena-West Helena districts were taken over by the state in June 2011 because of financial mismanagement and overspending. Their superintendents were replaced by state-appointed leaders, and their locally elected school boards were dissolved.
The Arkansas Board of Education earlier this month concluded that the two districts have corrected their financial problems and voted to immediately remove the fiscal distress labels from the districts. The state board also authorized the districts to be returned to the direction of locally elected school boards as soon as those boards can be elected and trained.
"With the vote of the State Board of Education to remove PCSSD from Fiscal Distress and to return the district to local governance upon the election of a new board, it is now necessary to begin preparations for the school board elections," Key wrote to Pulaski County Special Superintendent Jerry Guess before the district closed last week for spring break.
"In my role as acting in the place of an elected school board ... it is my determination that the annual school election for PCSSD will be conducted on the first Tuesday following the first Monday in November as authorized in Arkansas Code Annotated 6-14-102(a)(1)," Key also wrote to Guess.
Key signed the resolution for the Nov. 8 election on March 18, the Friday before the district closed for the break. On Monday, the district issued a news release and a copy of Key's resolution, which also directs that the state-appointed Pulaski County Special district's Community Advisory Board remain in place until the new School Board is elected.
The advisory board makes recommendations to Key about district operations.
The circumstances in Helena-West Helena are slightly different.
The Helena-West Helena district's own state-appointed Community Advisory Board publicly asked the state Board of Education and Key earlier this month for the Nov. 8 election. And the proposed November election was among the items included in the March "School Board" agenda book that the district sends monthly to Key for approval.
Andrew Bagley, chairman of the Helena-West Helena Community Advisory Board, has said that he and the six other members of the advisory board intend to run for election to the re-established school board.
The seven members of the Pulaski County Special advisory board -- six of whom are newly appointed -- have not made public any intentions to file with the Pulaski County clerk's office to be candidates on the ballot.
Key said Monday that widespread public involvement in the operation of the Pulaski County Special system is important.
He said his own historical research indicated to him that school board election dates were "set for times that would tend to minimize voter participation.
"Fifty years ago the elections were in December, in the 1970s and 1980s they were in March, and from 1988 to the present they have been in September," Key said.
"Act 1281 of 2015 provided districts the option for November elections, and in my statutory role of acting in the place of the school board for PCSSD, I selected the November date as a means to increase voter participation in one of the state's largest school districts. As the district emerges from state control and nears the end of the desegregation case, increased voter participation in 2016 and beyond is critical to PCSSD achieving long-term success for its students and the community," he said.
The Pulaski County Special district is a party in a long-running school desegregation lawsuit that puts the district and its efforts to comply with its desegregation plan under the supervision of a federal judge. Over time, the district has whittled down the number of obligations it has left to meet.
Each of seven school board members will be elected from zones that have been reconfigured since the last school board election in September 2010. The redrawn election zones were made necessary largely by the establishment of the Jacksonville/North Pulaski School District. That new district, which has its own elected school board, will detach from the Pulaski County Special district on July 1.
Key on Monday noted the difference in the circumstances for the Helena-West Helena district.
"I commend the Helena-West Helena community for requesting a November election, a request that I was glad to honor," Key said.
"I hope other communities will take a look at this option to generate a greater level of community participation in the public schools," he added.
Metro on 03/29/2016