Longer school-control bill fails in Arkansas Senate, but another vote possible

Way cleared for second try at passage

The Arkansas Senate defeated a proposal Monday that would have allowed the state to maintain control of districts such as the Little Rock School District for up to nine years.

Currently, the state Board of Education must either annex, consolidate or reconstitute an academically or fiscally distressed public school district within five years of taking control of it.

Senate Bill 668 by Sen. Kim Hammer, R-Benton, would permit the state board up to four years of extensions if a district hasn't complied with criteria to regain local control.

The Senate voted the bill down 16-15 with two voting present and two not voting, but it granted Hammer's request to expunge the vote, clearing the path for, possibly, another vote later this week. The bill needed 18 votes to pass and also would need to pass in the House before going to the governor.

Despite nullifying the vote on the bill, senators rejected a Hammer motion to suspend the rules to allow a second vote on the bill late Monday, striking what was likely to be a fatal blow as legislative leaders expect the session to wind down this week, possibly Wednesday.

Hammer said the bill would provide the opportunity for a "soft landing" to state-controlled districts that after five years aren't quite ready to regain independence.

The proposal drew a strong rebuke from several Little Rock Democrats, like Sen. Linda Chesterfield, who said such a prolonged tenure under state control amounted to taxation without representation.

"How do we as parents and as taxpayers get any resonance?" Chesterfield said. "It's not fair. It's unethical. It's unnecessary."

The bill failed the first time the Senate Education Committed voted on it, but it was approved by the committee after Hammer amended it to ease the Department of Education's technical concerns with the bill.

In addition to Little Rock, the Lee County, Dollarway, Earle and Pine Bluff districts are also operating under state control.

Neither Little Rock nor any of the other districts is mentioned in the bill, yet the discussion both in committee and on the Senate floor centered around Arkansas' largest public school district.

The state Board of Education dismissed Little Rock's seven-member School Board and placed its superintendent under the direction of the state education commissioner in 2015 after six of its then 48 schools were labeled as academically distressed for chronically low scores on state-required math and literacy tests.

Three of those schools have since had the distress tag removed, although the state school accountability system has been overhauled and no longer labels individual schools as "distressed."

The Little Rock district is labeled by the state as "Level 5 - in need of intensive support" under the new accountability system. Individual schools receive A to F letter grades based on state test results, achievement gains on those annual tests and on other factors such as student attendance and graduation rates.

Little Rock has eight schools that have F grades based on the 2018 test. The window for the 2019 tests opened Monday.

As part of the criteria to regain local control, the eight Little Rock schools that have F grades must improve achievement on April's ACT Aspire tests compared with the 2017 test scores.

The number of students scoring in the "close," "ready" and "exceeds" categories of achievement on the Aspire tests in math and English/language arts at each of those eight schools must also surpass the total number of students in the lowest, "in need of support," category.

Sen. Will Bond, D-Little Rock, urged his colleagues to vote against SB668, saying the Little Rock district had been under the state's control long enough.

"Give us the opportunity to have our schools back," he said. "What if it was your district?"

Hammer noted that nothing in his bill would require a four-year extension of state control.

"This is not mandatory," he said.

The bill faces an uphill battle to become law. It still needs Senate approval, and then it would have to go through the House Education Committee and full House.

The House Education Committee is holding its final regular meeting today, and House Speaker Matthew Shepherd, R-El Dorado, said he hopes to wrap up business on Wednesday.

Asked if any bills that have yet to get a vote on the floor of either chamber by the end of Monday had a chance at becoming law, Shepherd sighed and said the process would be difficult.

"You would never want to rule it out because, as you know, sometimes towards the end of the session there's opportunities to try and suspend the rules," he said. "We're trying to position ourselves to be as flexible as possible within reason."

Information for this article was contributed by John Moritz of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

A Section on 04/09/2019

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