Tuesday’s mayoral candidate forum at Friendship Aspire Academy Southeast Campus was largely about education, although candidates took their opportunity to raise other concerns.
“On your way home, turn your radio down and listen for one of the big ol’ potholes in your car,” Ward 4 Councilman Steven Mays Sr. said. “I’m going to fix all of these streets. … I’m going to be the best mayor this city’s ever had. You’ve got my word.”
Samuel Glover expressed his appreciation for Mays’ passion for Pine Bluff.
“I understand where Councilman Mays is coming from,” Glover said, taking his turn after State Rep. Vivian Flowers made her closing remarks. “He’s so passionate because that’s the Pine Bluff beating in his heart. But it beats in my heart as well. If we do not fight for the future of this city, the culture and our children, we’re wasting our time. Change must come, and it must come today.”
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
Shirley Washington, a former teacher and principal pursuing a third four-year term as mayor, revealed a businessman informed her of his plans to bring a movie theater to the city.
Pine Bluff has not housed an operating cinema since June 2020, when The Pines mall shuttered along with its eight-screen theater.
“That’s something we were working on before covid, and we’ve been working on it ever since,” Washington said. “The movie operator called us just [Monday] and said, ‘I’m ready to come to Pine Bluff, Arkansas.”
Washington declined to name the theater operator, but she mentioned the prospect of a cinema when she addressed the developments within Pine Bluff during her mayorship.
Education was the intended topic for the hourlong debate inside the Friendship gym, where the audience packed the bleachers to hear the school’s band along with five of the six candidates in their final push to become the Democratic candidate in the March 5 primary, joined by Libertarian John Fenley, who awaits the winner in the November general election.
Fenley embraced the education theme, making paper airplanes and flying one of them from the podium as he finished his answer as to how to improve safety and security in schools.
His point: “I love the power of the play. I think that is something that is missing from almost everything happening in the city. There is not enough play in the city. People are growing up too fast, and it is a dangerous place to be a kid. I saw that, and that’s why I was trying to start a go-kart track, but I had problems with the city.”
Fenley added he also wanted to build a science museum in Pine Bluff. He checked with Friendship Arkansas Superintendent Denise Simmons if there was a rule against making paper airplanes before launching one of his latest models. (She said no.)
State Rep. Vivian Flowers and Charles Washington joined Glover, Mays and Mayor Washington in the forum as the Democratic candidates. Fellow contender Joni Alexander-Robinson was absent.
Set to a question-and-answer format, each candidate addressed how they propose to broaden and enrich afterschool programs and extracurricular activities, what initiatives will be prioritized to improve safety and security in schools, and how they would support equitable treatment for all public (traditional and charter) and private schools while supporting standards of accountability and fairness.
“I’ve been an educator pretty much my whole life,” Charles Washington said. “Expanding on what I have learned, one of the things I have learned is that it takes both exercise of the body and mind. To exercise the mind, you have to be diverse both in our thinking and our actions. How we do that is to get everybody engaged and the students involved in these activities to get the parents involved, and that will cause expansion.”
Mayor Washington noted she was adamantly opposed to a charter school before Friendship-Southeast’s predecessor, Southeast Arkansas Preparatory School, was established early in her first term. Friendship Aspire Arkansas took over the campus in 2020 and graduated the last enrolled class last May before starting a slow-growth model with this year’s freshman class.
Mayor Washington acknowledged the success Friendship has attained with its elementary and secondary campuses and touched on the renovation of the Pine Bluff Community Center on Ash Street where she said youth programming has been expanded.
Mays credited the attendees, many of them supporters of Friendship, with the vision for the charter system.
“I’m a visionary, and I make things happen as well,” Mays said. “I’m a goal setter, and I can see you all are goal setters as well. Whatever you need from the City Council, I will vote for it, no matter what it is.”
The same way Glover approached youth programming as director of Pine Bluff Parks and Recreation is how he’ll approach the mayorship if elected, he told the audience.
“Every program that is in place at the current Pine Bluff Community Center, I created those programs, like the sports and discovery camp,” Glover said. “Our students and our scholars are our future, and that’s why I’m fighting for our future.”
Flowers said providing academic initiatives, partnering with each school system and faith-based organizations and expanding the community center facilities across Pine Bluff must be prioritized.
“Partnering not only in our community but also with the existing resources and programs throughout the state are also paramount,” she said. “Creating those pipelines from our schools throughout the state, as well as within our city, is one way to provide academic enrichment in these extracurricular activities throughout the city so they can be accessible to our children.”