Tim Jackson is a parent with children in the Little Rock School District and an active member of Grassroots Arkansas, which has been fighting for the restoration of democratic control of the LRSD public schools. He is also a film-maker. He attended the state school board meeting that theoretically restored local control.

He wrote this account:

ARKANSAS STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION MEETING – 10.09.19

Yesterday’s meeting of the Arkansas State Board of Education was another exercise in futility for the true stakeholders in the Little Rock School District. Don’t believe the headlines that local control of the district has been returned or will be retuned anytime soon to an elected school board. All the State Board did yesterday was trash an ill conceived and inequitable framework for reconstituting the district that it announced last month but could not sustain in the face of political and public opinion headwinds.

Board Chairman Diane Zook made it clear – much to the chagrin of Board members who were trying to appear conciliatory – that nothing changed yesterday. And Zook has no intention for things to change until the District is recreated in the image of the prevailing “business knows best” education model that bedevils American public education. As if American public education needed another self-important, self-entitled, shortsighted, external force bedeviling it.

I sat on the front row at yesterday’s meeting for eight hours until I was invited to leave by the Arkansas State Police who were brought in as a show of force by the board. Chairman Zook – whose personal animus toward the Little Rock School District is both unreasonable and inexhaustible – read twice from a prepared statement that anticipated more public outcry to what she knew was coming later in the meeting. We were told yesterday that 1) Police officers would escort anyone who spoke out of turn from the building. 2) Anyone who was escorted from the building yesterday would be banned from speaking in future meetings. 3) The Chairman would decide what constituted “out of turn.”

One of Ms. Zook’s frequent rebuttals when we cry “taxation without representation” over the State’s heavy-handed and demonstrably underhanded takeover is to remind us that we have a Community Advisory Board. Under the terms of the State takeover the Community Advisory Board of the Little Rock School District has no authority, no public accountability, and members serve solely at the pleasure of the State’s Education Commissioner, Johnny Key – a man so unqualified for the job that the Arkansas Legislature had to reduce the qualifications for the job in order for Governor Asa Hutchinson to appoint him.

An influential member of that Citizens Advisory Board stood in the parking lot of the Arkansas Education Building a month ago and told me that the nine members of the State Board of Education are the Governor’s choice for overseeing public education in Arkansas. This CAB member elaborated that under the Arkansas Constitution those nine appointed people don’t owe the people of Little Rock “a vote, a voice, or an explanation for anything they do.” I was told that if I didn’t like, I should go change the Arkansas Constitution.

So, that’s our representation. That’s what Diane Zook wants us to feel good about.

The State Board never fails to create chaos at the end of its meetings – at least at meetings in which the Little Rock School District is on the agenda. Yesterday was no exception. In a flurry of confusion and a complete flaunting of acceptable procedure the Board voted 9-0 to cease recognition of the Little Rock Educators Association as the sole contract negotiator for teachers and other full time support staff in the Little Rock School District. The LREA has been under attack since the State takeover and FOIA requests bear out that the Board’s plan for the LREA hasalways been death for the union by a thousand cuts. Yesterday the Board twisted the knife.

This action did not kill the union. But it is another serious attack and clear evidence that Zook and Company do not have a plan for the Little Rock School District but they do have a vision for it. It’s a vision that values the haves and patronizes the have-nots while expanding a privatized system of public education that we will pay for as a society for the next 50 years.

Tim Jackson | tjackson@category-one.com