The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported today on a court filing on a story I reported early last week — an illustration of the state’s general lack of concern about school desegregation.

The Jacksonville-North Pulaski School District remains in federal court for supervision under the long-running Pulaski school desegregation case. A final obstacle for court release is equalizing school facilities. The district is about halfway there with new junior and senior high schools, but needs to replace two elementary schools. It has a plan to replace the Taylor and Bayou Meto elementary schools, but can’t do it without sufficient state facility money. The Hutchinson administration doesn’t want to provide enough to get the job done, as the Democrat-Gazette’s article spelled out today. The state particularly shorted money needed to replace Taylor, which, incidentally, is a school with a majority-minority enrollment.

The news today was a court filing Friday in which the school district’s attorney, Scott Richardson, spelled out the dilemma the district faces in complying with federal Judge Price Marshall’s order to get the Taylor replacement done by 2023.


Here’s Richardson’s status report to the judge.

The district still has an appeal left, but it’s to a panel controlled by the Hutchinson administration. As I reported earlier, the state has washed its hands of the Pulaski desegregation case and vows to spend no more to fix the problems it created in defying school integration. The state also is past worrying about school desegregation in general: It encourages white flight transfers in districts with large minority populations; it encourages wreckage of the Little Rock School District by charter schools; it is rapidly increasing state support for “virtual” schools (huge profits for the private operators) and private school voucher programs. All this is to the detriment of real public schools in loss of state financial support. Real public schools also are being beggared in terms of adequate overall state financial support, a policy decision in budget allocation that hits hardest the poorest (and typically those heaviest in minority populations). Orval, we hardly knew ye.


In sum, Richardson wrote the judge about the state’s refusal to fully help JNPSD:

The State’s refusal to participate in replacement of Taylor Elementary and the full replacement of Bayou Meto Elementary likely means that JNPSD will be unable to comply with the Court’s order; that is, that JNPSD will fall out of compliance with the District’s desegregation obligations because of the action of the State. This also, the State appears unconcerned about.

What will the judge do? Monthly conferences on the case — to be held by telephone in these virus times — might provide a clue.