A recent court filing from Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin against the El Dorado School District could have a "segregative impact" on the district if it's successful, an attorney for the school district said in an email Friday.
Whitney Moore, an attorney for the ESD, said she has filed a motion to extend the deadline to respond to Griffin's April 10 filing. The deadline is currently April 26, and she said her motion requested an extension until May 17.
Griffin's filing, which was submitted to the court as a brief in a 1989 case, contends that because the ESD "fulfilled ... desegregation obligations long ago," it should no longer be subject to federal desegregation supervision.
The ESD in 1964 – 10 years after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision that required U.S. public schools to racially integrate – was found to still be operating a dual education system that served Black and white students separately.
The following year, the district was ordered to "integrate its student body and faculty" and at that point was placed under federal supervision to ensure compliance, Moore said.
Griffin's brief states that the district has remained desegregated since around 1971. Federal courts prohibited the ESD from implementing a choice policy within the district that was found to result in segregation, and in 2016, a federal court also allowed the ESD to opt-out from the State of Arkansas's school choice policy, which he argues was an erroneous decision.
When four other south Arkansas school districts – Camden Fairview, Lafayette, Junction City and Hope – were granted similar exemptions to the school choice policy, the State of Arkansas intervened and an 8th Circuit court reversed their exemptions.
Griffin argues that since school choice is the State of Arkansas's chosen education policy, the State should be able to intervene in the ESD's exemption.
"The Constitution prohibits states from treating people differently because of their race, and it does not require – or even allow – schools to preserve a particular racial balance," Griffin said in an email to the News-Times on Friday. "The El Dorado School District has used long-resolved desegregation litigation from the 1970s to enable it to opt our of school choice in the 21st century."
Moore said there's more nuance to the situation than the brief outlines.
"ESD can be non-discriminatory in its operations and still have an obligation to avoid taking actions that would have a segregative impact, such as participating in school choice," she said. "ESD believes the latter issue justifies continued federal court supervision."
ESD Superintendent Jim Tucker said he didn't have an opportunity to talk about the district's federal supervision with Griffin before the brief was filed.
"The Attorney General has never called me, talked to me, asked me any questions or anything like that. The first time I heard about it was whenever our attorney Whitney Moore contacted me about it," he said.
Moore said that if the AG's office is successful in their case, the ESD would be required to "allow all school choice transfers to neighboring school districts, regardless of the segregative impact of those transfers."
"ESD believes preventing segregative movement is essential to eliminating the remaining vestiges of the dual system," she said.
She gave the example of white flight – "the continued desire of white families to enroll their students in schools with fewer black students" – and its impact on the ESD as one example of "present harms traceable to the previous dual system."
"I hope the ESD is able to maintain its exemption from participation in school choice," she said.
Tucker agreed.
"The deseg order is also to prevent us from becoming segregated again, and the deseg order really does help with that," he said. "There's potential (that if the AG is successful) it could have a negative impact on the El Dorado School District and the City of El Dorado."
During a meeting of the El Dorado School Board on Monday, Tucker noted several transfer requests, all of which he said were legal and recommended approving. The board voted unanimously to do so. Board member Wayne Gibson noted that while the ESD often does approve transfer requests, that isn't a guarantee students will actually leave the district.
"We approve every legal transfer in and out of our district, but lo and behold, some of our counterparts don't do the same thing, and I think it's just not right," he said. "You put a student through a gauntlet, if you will, and if you want them you take them, you don't, you send them back – a number of students that we approve as a legal transfer out of here never get accepted at the other district. I don't think many people know that. "