LITTLE ROCK — A federal appeals court on Wednesday vacated a U.S. district court judge’s order from earlier this year to end the bulk of the millions of dollars in funding the state provides annually to fund desegregation programs in Pulaski County’s three public school districts.
The three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis also declared the North Little Rock School District unitary, or desegregated, but denied the Pulaski County Special School District unitary status.
In May, U.S. District Judge Brian Miller said allowing the state to continue its annual payments was delaying desegregation. He said the state “is using a carrot and stick approach with three districts but the districts are wise mules that have learned how to eat the carrot and sit down on the job.”
Miller said the “time has finally come for all carrots to be put away … These mules must now either pull their proverbial carts on their own or face a very heavy and punitive stick.”
In Wednesday’s 29-page opinion, the appeals court said Miller’s “frustration is understandable, and (his) conclusions regarding the perverse incentives created by the state funding may well have some merit.”
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
But the court said Miller did not make “specific findings of fact” to support his decision, and that a formal hearing on the evidence must be held and notice issued before a court can end desegregation obligations.”
The appeals court said the state presented the issue of termination of funding in a 2009 brief and in a 2009 status hearing, but those were not a substitute for a formal evidentiary hearing.
Attorney General Dustin McDaniel said Wednesday that the state “continues to move positively toward ending this litigation and taking the courts out of the classrooms of Pulaski County.”
“With the Little Rock and North Little Rock school districts now fully unitary, (Wednesday’s) decision reminds us that taxpayer-funded desegregation payments are not perpetual, nor should they be seen as such,” McDaniel said.
Chris Heller, a longtime lawyer for the Little Rock School District, said he was pleased with Wednesday’s ruling.
“I think this ruling gives us everything we need to move forward and resolve the remaining issues in the case,” Heller said, adding that the ruling also ends any discussion, for the time being, about budget cuts, layoffs and the possible closing of the six Little Rock magnet schools that take students from all over Pulaski County.
“We’ll have to wait and see whether or not the state will file a motion to modify or terminate the funding for magnet schools and its other desegregation obligations,” Heller said.
Under a 1989 settlement, the state provides funding to the three school districts to help pay for programs designed to promote desegregation. The state has been spending about $38 million a year to comply with the settlement, according to Wednesday’s ruling.
A federal judge in 2007 declared the Little Rock School District unitary.