Little Rock Sch. Dist. v. N. Little Rock Sch. Dist.
| Decision Date | 17 January 2013 |
| Docket Number | No. 4:82-cv-866-DPM,4:82-cv-866-DPM |
| Parties | LITTLE ROCK SCHOOL DISTRICT, et al. PLAINTIFFS v. NORTH LITTLE ROCK SCHOOL DISTRICT, et al. DEFENDANTS LORENE JOSHUA, et al. INTERVENORS ARKANSAS VIRTUAL ACADEMY, et al. INTERVENORS |
| Court | U.S. District Court — Eastern District of Arkansas |
Reasonable people of good will disagree about the wisdom and efficacy of charter schools. Those issues are not before this Court. The Little Rock School District and the Joshua Intervenors make no facial challenge to the Arkansas Charter Schools Act of 1999, as amended. LRSD and Joshua argue, instead, that the State, acting through the Department of Education, has broken the parties' 1989 Settlement Agreement in applying the Act to open-enrollment charter schools in Pulaski County. These new schools, the argument runs, have grown with the State's blessing to the point where they are substantially interfering with desegregation efforts. The parties'Settlement Agreement is a contract, which this Court approved and adopted as part of its consent decrees governing how the State, LRSD, PCSSD, and the North Little Rock School Districts would remedy their constitutional violations. Has the State broken the parties' contract in implementing the Charter Schools Act in Pulaski County? And can the Court decide on the record compiled by the parties or does there need to be a trial to resolve genuine disputes about important facts? These are the main questions presented.
. Procedural Background and Posture. In 2010, the Little Rock School District, joined eventually by the Joshua Intervenors, moved to enforce the parties' 1989 Settlement Agreement. This branch of the case was dormant for some time while the parties and the Court focused on unitary-status issues involving the Pulaski County Special School District and the North Little Rock School District. After those issues had been decided, 2011 WL 1935332 (E.D. Ark. 19 May 2011), the Court turned back to the motion to enforce. The Court denied the motion as to educational adequacy/transportation issues arising under Lake View and related Arkansas law; as the State pointed out, no subject-matter jurisdiction existed over those issues. The Court allowed somediscovery, and requested further briefing, about charter schools and the remediation of achievement disparities between black students and non-black students. Document No. 4608, at 8.
A group of open-enrollment charter schools moved to intervene. The Court agreed, and granted permissive intervention, FED. R. CIV. P. 24(b)(1) & (3). The Court rejected the charter schools' request to reorient the case immediately toward what might be called the Parents Involved issues, but welcomed their participation on the already-joined issue that affected them: whether the State had violated the Settlement Agreement in chartering and overseeing these schools. Document No. 4690. The charter schools filed their complaint in intervention, and have participated fully in discovery, briefing, and oral argument.
LRSD and Joshua seek judgment as a matter of law, or a trial, on their motion to enforce. They have also moved for summary judgment. The State and the Charter Intervenors seek denial of the motions and judgment as a matter of law that the State has not violated the Settlement Agreement. The Pulaski County Special School District and North Little Rock School District have not taken a position. At the day-long oral argument in March, all theparties agreed that judgment as a matter of law one way or the other, or a trial, were the Court's procedural options. In this regard, the Court has been helped by the parties' cross-statements of material facts that are and are not disputed, in particular the State's amended response, Document No. 4719, which lists material facts, sometimes with differing perspectives, and the post-hearing notice, Document No. 4734, which pins down some student numbers.
2. Remedying the Achievement Gap, Monitoring, and Retaliation. The Court denies without prejudice the LRSD/Joshua motions on these issues. The several alleged retaliatory acts by the State were not raised in the motion to enforce and did not come into the current papers until the motion for summary judgment. Compare Document No. 4440 with Document No. 4704. No pointed discovery was done on retaliation. LRSD and Joshua mentioned State monitoring in passing in their motion to enforce, but it has now grown into a full-fledged claim. Monitoring, the Court concludes, is intertwined with whether the State has fulfilled the Settlement Agreement regarding programs on remedying the achievement gap. The State's obligations under the Settlement Agreement on both monitoring and remedying the achievement gap, however, are better addressed as part of the State's pendingmotion for release from the Agreement. Document No. 4723. In a companion Order that will be filed today, the Court has taken up the motion for release. LRSD and Joshua may, at their choice, pursue these arguments in responding to the motion for release.
3. Charter Schools. This Court's job is to enforce the parties' Settlement Agreement. Knight v. PCSSD, 112 F.3d 953, 954 (8th Cir. 1997). It is a contract become consent decree with this Court's imprimatur. As with any contract, interpretation presents questions of law, absent some ambiguity that must be resolved based on disputed extrinsic evidence. Compare LRSD v. PCSSD, 83 F.3d 1013,1017 (8th Cir. 1996), with LRSD v. PCSSD, 60 F.3d 435, 436 (8th Cir. 1995). In resolving the charter-school issues, this Court must "apply[] the terms of a contract between the parties to facts that have arisen since its creation." 83 F.3d at 1017. "The meaning of the terms in the Settlement Agreement, and their application to the facts in this case, are legal questions . . . ." Ibid. The Court therefore agrees, procedure-wise, with the initial positions of LRSD, Joshua, the State, and the Charters: no genuine issues of material fact exist, and this Court can and should decide the charter-school issues as a matter of law.
The Settlement Agreement does not mention charter schools. This is common ground among the parties. The Agreement predates the Arkansas Charter Schools Act by a decade. Indeed, the parties settled this case some two years before the first charter-school law was passed anywhere in the nation. KERN ALEXANDER & M. DAVID ALEXANDER, AMERICAN PUBLIC SCHOOL LAW 43 (6th ed. 2005). The Settlement Agreement's silence weighs heavily against any argument that the Charter School Act violated the Agreement. And LRSD and Joshua make no such argument. They've been clear that they challenge how the State has implemented the Act: the State, they say, was in material breach in about 2008-2009, based on the number of open-enrollment charter schools authorized in Pulaski County and the number of students those schools could enroll by that point.
a. The Jacksonville Analogy. LRSD and Joshua argue, first, that the open-enrollment charters in Pulaski County are the functional equivalent of the proposed Jacksonville splinter district, which this Court (speaking through my Brother Wilson) rejected in 2003. Document No. 4440-9, LRSD Ex. 7. No one appealed that decision. It became, as LRSD and Joshua say, the law of the case. The law they extract from this ruling is sweeping: "the consentdecree prohibits the removal of students from the interdistrict system of school choice governed by the [majority-to-minority] and magnet stipulations without Court approval." Document No. 4705, at 3, LRSD/Joshua Brief Supporting Summary Judgment. The Court disagrees—both on what law is embodied in this Court's 2003 ruling and on the soundness of the analogy between the Jacksonville-splinter effort and the open-enrollment charters in Pulaski County.
The Court there construed a specific provision of the Settlement Agreement that guaranteed the integrity of the PCSSD and NLRSD until they became unitary. Judge Wilson was clear about the Court's holding:
Thus, in my opinion the State Board of Education's vote to allow an election to create a new school district in northeast Pulaski County unquestionably violated the [S]tate's obligation under Section II(j)* of the 1989 settlement agreement to preserve the independence and sovereignty of the Pulaski County Special School District until such time as it ha[s] fulfilled all of its desegregation obligations and achieved unitary status.
Document No. 4440-9, at 7, LRSD Ex. 7. The Court also noted the precedent in this case on "the procedure that should be followed in order to change the geographic boundaries among the three Pulaski County school districts." Ibid. Of course the Court was concerned about the potential effects of any boundary change on the districts' abilities to pursue their desegregation obligations —that was, most likely, the driving purpose of § II(j). Document No. 4440-9, at 3-4, 9-11, 13. The law of the case from the 2003 ruling is this: § II(J) means what it says; PCSSD and NLRSD are autonomous and independent districts whose geographic boundaries may not be changed, absent Court approval, until they achieve unitary status.
The factual analogy has a surface appeal —the proposed Jacksonville district would have served about 6,000 former PCSSD students, while the open-enrollment charters currently serve about 4,400 students in Pulaski County. LRSD Ex. 76; Document No. 3761, PCSSD Ex. 15, at 9-13. But the analogy fails on scrutiny. These charters have not removed any land from LRSD. They have not taken over any LRSD buildings or infrastructure. They have not altered LRSD's tax base. Perhaps most importantly, the harmful effects of detaching the Jacksonville area on the PCSSD's desegregation effortsin 2003 were obvious; any similar effects of these charter schools on the stipulation magnet schools and M-to-M transfers are elusive at best. Some of the students now attending open-enrollment charters in Pulaski County probably would be...
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