Federal Judge D. Price Marshall today denied the state’s motion to be dismissed from all obligations under the 1989 settlement of the Pulaski County school desegregation case.
Instead, he ordered a hearing on that question. He cited a number of developments in the state’s favor — two districts declared unitary, significant sums spent, the Lakeview school ruling. But he also noted arguments from the Little Rock side — on lack of state monitoring and on lack of state work to end the achievement gap between black and white students. Here’s the ruling on that question. The parties are supposed to submit a schedule by Feb. 22 on discovery, briefs and the evidentiary hearing.
In the short run, that maintains the status quo on continued state support for desegregation here. That means any hope the legislature might have to capture that spending for other purposes has been delayed to some more distant point.
Judge Marshall, however, made another critical ruling. He held that the state’s approval of open enrollment charter schools in Pulaski County didn’t constitute a breach of its 1989 promise to not contribute to segregation in the county.
In a 30-page ruling, he said “no reasonable fact finder could conclude that the State is in material breach of the parties’ 1989 Settlement Agreement as to open-enrollment charter schools in Pulaski County.”
Here’s the text of the ruling.
Said LRSD spokeswoman Pamela Smith:
We just learned of the ruling and have spoken with our attorneys. They have not had a chance to review/study the ruling, however, we are planning to have a public discussion about it at the next board meeting.
Said Chris Heller, the district’s lawyer, on his reaction:
Disappointed. We wouldn’t have filed the motion if we didn’t think we had a good case so we’re disappointed not to have the opportunity for a trial. I only had time to read the orders once before I had to drive to Fayetteville but I’ve made plans to meet with Dr. Holmes on Wednesday and asked to be on the agenda to discuss the situation with the Board on Thursday.
Re charter schools: Judge Marshall is a heckuva judge. If he says no reasonable fact-finder could argue that charter schools breach the 1989 agreement, that’s an opinion worth respecting. But no reasonable fact-finder could deny that open enrollment charter schools have skimmed middle income and white students from the Little Rock School District as a whole, particularly at the middle school level, and thus made it harder to desegregate those schools. As a matter of law, that might be irrelevant. His analysis focused on charter schools and the interdistrict magnet schools financed by the 1989 agreement. It IS a matter of fact in daily schoool business, however, though I’d concede a lot of these students would have gone elsewhere (private schools for example) absent the charter schools. Or so it seems to me. The judge, however, concluded that the charters had had very little, if any, impact on desegregation, on the magnet schools or on majority-to-minority transfer programs.