Attorneys for the state responded Friday to legal claims that the Marvell-Elaine School District can’t be given over to a charter school management group yet because the Arkansas LEARNS Act that paves the way for such handovers is not yet in effect.
A group of public education advocates and community members from the Marvell-Elaine district are suing the Arkansas Department of Education, state board members and the Friendship Education Foundation charter management group. The group says that state lawmakers botched voting procedures with the Arkansas LEARNS Act when they failed to vote separately on the emergency clause that put it into effect immediately, even though a separate vote is expressly required in the state constitution. As such, the law is not yet in effect, so the state does not yet have the authority granted by LEARNS to enter into a “transformation contract” to put the charter management company in charge of the struggling school district.
Representing the plaintiffs, attorney Ali Noland filed two requests for temporary restraining orders this month. Noland is a member of the Little Rock School Board and a frequent contributor to the Arkansas Times. The first request sought to put LEARNS on hold in its entirety; the second angled to vacate the contract non-renewals that went out to Marvell-Elaine teachers and staff in April, when they were told they were losing their jobs and would need to re-apply with the entity contracted to take over school district operations.
On Friday, Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin and lawyers on his staff filed a 33-page response to the plaintiffs’ requests for temporary freezes.
Without the transformation contract that hands the district into the hands of a private group, the district would disappear, they said.
“This arrangement means that MESD [Marvell-Elaine School District] students no longer have to worry about losing their school to impending consolidation, which would have occurred but for the transformation contract,” Griffin’s team wrote.
Is that true? Act 461 passed in 2023, doing away with what had been a state requirement that districts with fewer than 350 students consolidate with other districts.
The AG’s response disparages one of the plaintiffs who is a member of Grassroots Arkansas, a group that applied to take over the school district and was not chosen.
” .. one of the Plaintiffs actually applied and interviewed for the transformation contract, but her group did not get it. After losing out on the contract, she filed this lawsuit, claiming that the Defendants illegally entered the transformation contract because the LEARNS Act is not yet effective because of alleged constitutional defects in the passing of the Act’s emergency clause,” the response says.
The most interesting arguments from the state have to do with the constitutional requirement that separate votes be taken to enact emergency clauses to put new laws into effect before the standard 90-day waiting period.
While video footage of the votes clearly shows only one vote was taken that lumped together the bill itself and the emergency clause, Griffin’s attorneys say the official journals from the House and Senate are the only records the court should consider.
“No other records, including the video recordings of the proceedings, are passed to the Secretary of State and thus are not official records,” they argued.
The challenge here is that those journals, which record the vote for the actual LEARNS bill and its emergency clause as separate votes, do not convey what actually happened. But lawmakers can run their votes however they like and are not subject to a court’s intervention, Griffin’s team argued.
The AG’s team also pushed back against the contention that there was no real emergency, as is required for an emergency clause to be lawful. Arkansas’s poor education rankings in general, and Marvell-Elaine’s rankings in particular, constitute an emergency calling for immediate action, they wrote.
The case is assigned to Judge Herbert Wright‘s court in Pulaski County, with a hearing is scheduled for June 20.
The argument over whether LEARNS is in effect yet or not might be unimportant except for the referendum campaign being undertaken by Citizens for Arkansas Public Education and Students (CAPES), a group of public education advocates seeking to put a repeal of the entire law on the ballot. Rolling back the emergency clause would give CAPES more time to jump through all the hoops required to get their proposal before Arkansas voters.
Awkwardly enough, CAPES members are among the plaintiffs on this LEARNS suit, and Attorney General Griffin is the one who must approve a ballot title before CAPES gets the green light to begin collecting the signatures they need to qualify for the ballot. Although this point, too, is debatable, since it was a new 2023 law passed with an emergency clause that grants the state attorney general the power to approve or deny ballot titles, and this emergency clause vote wasn’t taken separately, either. Regardless, Griffin has nixed all of CAPES’ efforts so far.
“While emergency clauses only regulate the timing of a bill becoming law, for my clients, that timing is extremely important,” Noland said in a statement earlier this month. “We fully expect the Arkansas court system to tell the legislative and executive branches that they aren’t above the law, that the constitution says what it says and that the LEARNS Act isn’t the law yet in Arkansas.”
