Arkansas Education Secretary Johnny Key this week approved the Little Rock school board election zone plan that was recently recommended to him by the district's Community Advisory Board.
Key's decision clears the way for Pulaski County election officials -- including the Pulaski County Election Commission -- to act on the plan in time for a Nov. 3 election of a nine-member board for the district that has been without an elected school board since January 2015.
Key acts in place of a school board in the state-directed district and makes final decisions on policies, staffing and finances.
The plan now going to county officials was developed by clustering existing election precincts into nine zones. It was one of three proposals created by the Arkansas Geographic Information Systems agency at Key's request late last year.
The state Board of Education late last year voted to return the district -- with conditions -- to the governance of a nine-member, locally elected School Board.
The Little Rock district will be the only district in the state with a nine-member board. Before the state took over the district because of chronically low student achievement in six of the then-48 schools, the district had seven School Board election zones.
Bryan Poe, Pulaski County elections coordinator, said Friday that he is in contact with the Pulaski County attorney's office and the state Board of Election Commissioners to verify the steps to be taken to finalize the election zone plan, which is at a time other than closely after a decennial census.
Arkansas Code Annotated 6-13-631 calls in part for a "school district board of directors, with the approval of the county board of election commissioners ... to divide each school district having a 10 percent or greater minority population into single-member zones; and file a copy of the plan with the county clerk of the county where the school district is administratively domiciled."
In addition to the zone plan that clusters election precincts to form the nine zones, there were two other proposals considered by the district's Community Advisory Board. One was designed around clusters of elementary school attendance zones, and the other created zones of substantially equal populations -- known as the "low variance" option.
The zone populations in the election precinct plan range from 19,909 to 20,692. Five of the nine zones have a majority black population, and four zones have a majority white population. There is one zone that has a 22.8% Hispanic population, with all other zones having a Hispanic population of between 2.11% and 10.4%.
Before the advisory board's Feb. 20 3-0 vote -- with one member present but not voting on the election precinct plan -- the election zone proposals were posted on the district's website for several weeks. They were also the subject of a public forum, and an anonymous public survey that drew more than 200 respondents and were widely publicized to district parents, neighborhood associations and others.
Shelby Johnson, the state Geographic Information Systems officer whose staff developed the three election-zone plans, had told the Community Advisory Board that he favored the election precinct plan. He said he believed that plan would be easiest for county election officials to use in assigning more than 120,000 voters to school board zones and providing them with correct ballots.
Johnson has said election zones must conform to statutes and court decisions that call for such zones to be substantially equal in population, compact, and take into account minority populations, communities of interest, and political and geographic boundaries.
"This is a plan option that meets all those criteria," Johnson said earlier this year. ""This is your dad's Ford plan."
Metro on 02/29/2020