By John Hofheimer
Leader senior staff writer
Over the objection of the Pulaski County Special School District, the state Board of Education on Friday unanimously approved amendments to Jacksonville’s Lighthouse Academy charter that would add a high school and increase the enrollment cap from 650 to 1,019 by 2016, allowing a second campus on Little Rock Air Force Base and also approved the lottery system for selecting the additional students.
The amendments had widespread support in Jacksonville, with Mayor Gary Fletcher, state Reps. Mark Perry and Jane English and chamber of commerce executive director Amy Mattison among those attending the meeting in support, as well as Col. Kenneth Walter from Little Rock Air Force Base.
The Air Force is making a building available for the school, with Lighthouse responsible for the nearly $1 million in remodeling costs.
Sam Jones, the lawyer who has represented PCSSD in matters related to the desegregation agreement for nearly 40 years, argued that the amendments to the original Lighthouse Academy charter would threaten the district’s financial health, the district’s compliance with the existing desegregation agreement, its chances of achieving unitary status and that it violated at least the spirit if not the actual ruling of a federal judge in the desegregation case.
PCSSD Superintendent Charles Hopson sent a letter urging the state board not to approve the amendments.
“Our monitoring indicates that Lighthouse Academy had drained almost 200 students from the PCSSD in the last two school years,” Hopson wrote. “It would appear to us that the expansion of charter schools, particularly in the Jacksonville area, have the effect of slowly strangling the ability of the PCSSD to deliver quality educational services.”
“The issue is not whether or not Lighthouse Charter School is doing a good job, with widespread community support,” Jones said. “The issue is whether it would have an adverse effect on PCSSD to desegregate.”
He said the 1989 desegregation-settlement agreement says, “The state board must ensure it doesn’t negatively affect desegregation efforts of any school district.”
He said the timing to increase the Lighthouse enrollment at the expense of PCSSD was bad, with the desegregation case still undecided by U.S. District Judge Brian Miller.
Jones said the expanded school would target Northwood Middle School students and North Pulaski High School students and it would siphon off about 400 students and between $2.4 million and $3.6 million a year in state and federal aid—money that a district already being considered by the state Education Department for a designation of being in fiscal distress could not afford to lose.
But in the end, the board, which had heard similar arguments before about threats to the finances and racial balance that charter schools posed to the Little Rock School District, was unpersuaded.
Before the board voted to amend the Lighthouse charter, board member Sam Ledbetter, who had challenged many of Jones’ assertions, said he couldn’t approve the amendments unless the Lighthouse board assured the state board that it would not use its future bonded indebtedness as an argument for renewal of its charter.
School charters must be renewed every five years.
The Lighthouse Academy has announced its intention to seek $12 million in tax-exempt bonds issued by the Arkansas Development Finance Authority in 2013 for construction and expansion.
The proposed 25-year, 6.5 percent loan would also refinance current debt for the existing $3.3 million schoolhouse and build a new facility to house 500 students in grades 7-12, adjacent to the existing building on North First Street.
Construction, design and furnishing the old officers club for use as a school on the base is projected to cost $950,000, but the charter school already has received commitments of gifts and loans totaling $875,000.
The academy has raised $600,000 in grant pledges from the builders and managers of new housing on Little Rock Air Force Base, another $2 million in pledges, plus a $75,000 bank loan.
The state board approved the original application for Jacksonville Lighthouse Charter Schools on Nov. 3, 2008. K-12 was approved with maximum enrollment of 650.
