Early voting begins today on a proposed Little Rock school millage extension that Baker Kurrus might have killed over the weekend.
Kurrus, the popular deposed superintendent, put out a lengthy written statement explaining his objections. He did so in response to wide-ranging requests for his views from on-the-fence voters.
School district patrons who are opposed to the millage, many in the black community, tend to be firm, even adamant. That's mainly because of resentment that the state has taken over the district, expanded competing charter schools and closed schools in minority neighborhoods.
Those favoring the millage extension, mostly white public-school devotees also opposed to the state takeover, tend to be tepid or torn. They would seem susceptible to the influence of Kurrus. He's a legitimate public school hero in their eyes, seen as authoritative and nobly intended.
Kurrus is the lawyer and businessman who had long labored on the Little Rock School Board and was the genius choice of the state, upon its takeover, to be the nontraditional superintendent.
He was toiling fiercely, admirably and successfully, building local support and gearing up to tackle tougher issues, such as school closings to deal with the loss of special state desegregation money.
Suddenly, Johnny Key, the state education director, dumped him. He did so, it seemed, because Kurrus objected to Key's drive to increase competition by approving expanded public charter schools in the city.
Kurrus argued that you couldn't very well focus on lifting the Little Rock public schools from an officially distressed academic state--presumably the point of the state takeover--by diverting students and draining resources.
Key brought in a solid, able and hardworking public school man, former Bentonville superintendent Michael Poore, to replace Kurrus. Poore has toiled tirelessly, but remains hamstrung by his alliance with the resented takeover. He is distrusted because he, by the takeover's structure, answers not to anyone locally but to the supposedly villainous Key.
The millage proposal, which comes from Poore, is to extend an existing four-year debt levy of 12.4 mills by 14 years--raising no one's taxes from current levels--to build a new high school in southwest Little Rock and make needed capital improvements across the district identified in a report in 2014.
Kurrus' lengthy critique was unrelentingly numbers-based, eschewing any tones of resentment, petulance or bitterness. It was that the district is losing money and likely will lose more due to the charter-school drain. It was that depleting these mills for long-term debt would remove any option to use some of them for operations. It was that facilities aren't academics. It was that borrowing is not a solution to spending cuts. It was to return to the drawing board in pursuit of plan somehow both more fiscally conservative and educationally ambitious.
Poore, meeting with me in his office Sunday, said he had been surprised by Kurrus' action, although, to be clear, he said, he'd talked with Kurrus in recent months about the plan and Kurrus had always said he'd need to study the numbers before embracing it. But Poore produced a report Kurrus had presented to the Civic Advisory Committee in June 2015 that seemed to support the eventual borrowing of $165 million if a favorable interest rate of 4.5 percent was available.
Poore said the interest rate today would be lower than that and that the mills would produce higher proceeds than previously thought based on preliminary Pulaski County property assessment data.
Poore made one other point: It was that every instance of a state takeover of a distressed school district had resulted in return of the district to local control in better shape. The district will be better off on that day if it has attended to needs, he said.
Poore produced a printout of a resolution Key had filed with the state Board of Education endorsing the millage extension and saying, "Superintendent Poore and Commissioner Key hold a shared goal that when state oversight ends and local governance of LRSD is re-established, the schools in the district will be returned in whole and the district will be well-poised to be the educational option of choice for students and parents in the Little Rock area."
Maybe those are the hollow words of cynical destroyers of Little Rock's public schools. Or maybe they're the truth.
The debate reminds me a bit of the proposal in the early 1990s to build a new multipurpose arena called the Arkansas Diamond Center on Interstate 30-adjacent property where the Coachman's Inn had stood and where a post office now stands.
It was a progressive and well-intended proposal, but it didn't strike the community as the right project at the right time.
A couple of years later voters approved a variation formed by a broader consensus for what is now Verizon Arena.
The Verizon Arena has served the community well. But the Diamond Center also might have served it well.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 05/02/2017