Jacksonville Votes 95% To Form Own School District

After decades of reducing its number of school districts, Arkansas gained one on Tuesday as 95% of voters in Jacksonville and north Pulaski County voted to split from the Pulaski County Special School District.

According to numbers announced by supporters at a rally at the Jacksonville Community Center, the unofficial count was 3,672 for and 202 against.

“This community is just yearning for this for so long to have local control and to be able to make decisions that will finally improve our education for our children,” said Daniel Gray, chairperson of the Jacksonville – North Pulaski Education Corps, the group that helped spearhead the election effort. Gray announced the results of each ballot box to cheers from the crowd.

In addition to Gray and his committee, former State Rep. Pat Bond and Little Rock-based Markham Group helped coordinate the resounding campaign. Supporters said the foundation of community leadership and their grassroots efforts resulted in the successful micro-targeted campaign.

The vote means Arkansas will have 239 school districts, assuming other districts don’t consolidate before Jacksonville achieves complete independence around the 2016-17 school year.

Gray, a real estate agent with the family-owned Bart Gray Realty Company, said the community has conducted five feasibility studies during the past 40 years. Momentum built when the effort gained the support of the Pulaski County Special School District (PCSSD). Language authorizing the potential separation was included in a settlement approved this year between the three school districts in Pulaski County (PCSSD, Little Rock and North Little Rock) and the state that ended the state’s long-running desegregation funding for those districts.

The separation was beneficial to both the community and the PCSSD because the area’s schools have significant renovation needs. As part of the PCSSD, the schools would not be eligible for state partnership funds because the district’s wealth index is too high. As a separate school district, Jacksonville could be eligible to have 60-65% of facilities improvements be funded by the state, according to Dr. Jerry Guess, PCSSD superintendent, who was at the rally.

Residents of Sherwood and Maumelle, which also have been part of the doughnut-shaped PCSSD, have expressed an interest in forming their own districts, but they will have to overcome legal barriers to do so. The settlement making Jacksonville’s separation possible also declared that the state would oppose carving out any more school districts from the PCSSD until the district is declared “unitary,” meaning it is no longer divided along racial lines, and is released from federal court supervision.

Guess said he didn’t know how Jacksonville’s separation will affect the Sherwood and Maumelle efforts.

“That’s down the road. I don’t know what will happen there,” he said. “This was an easy situation because the benefit to the facilities piece was obvious and dramatic. Wouldn’t be the same benefit in a Sherwood or Maumelle situation.”

The creation of a new district runs counter to a long-standing trend of school consolidations in Arkansas. According to a history prepared by Kellar Noggle, former executive director of the Arkansas Association of Educational Administrators, the state had 4,734 school districts in 1927. That number quickly fell to 3,086 in 1933 and kept falling to 1,901 in 1947. By 1983, there were 369. Following the education reforms of the 1980s, the number dropped to 341 in 1986 and 312 in 1995.

In 2003, after Arkansas was sued a second time by the Lake View School District for inequitable funding, the Legislature set a minimum 350-student requirement. As a result, the number of districts fell from 306 to 254 by July 2004.