By RICK KRON
Leader staff writer
The president of the Pulaski County Special School District Board, Bill Vasquez, told a legislative panel Friday morning that the school board should be dissolved—including his position.
Shortly after that, the Legislative Joint Auditing Committee approved a motion by its co-chairman, Sen. Bill Pritchard, R-Elkins, to recommend that the state education commissioner, Dr. Tom Kimbrell of Cabot, remove the school board. The motion passed unanimously.
Pritchard made the motion at the end of a hearing in which he and other legislators expressed frustration with district officials’ evasive answers to their questions and continued financial irregularities.
“We just get the same lip service, ‘We’re going to do it, we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it,’ and nothing happens,” Pritchard said.
But despite the outcry from the legislative group, there will be no dismembering of the board overnight. Kimbrell is out of town, and although staff members have briefed him, a spokesman said he would take a deliberate look before acting on the panel’s decision.
The legislative recommendation, in the form of a resolution, is outside the normal process for abolishing a local school board. But Seth Bromley, spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Education, said Kimbrell will take the legislative audit group’s suggestion very seriously.
But Bromley explained that because the district is already under fiscal distress and under state oversight, the EducationDepartment could dismiss the board at anytime, with or without the backing of the legislative group.
The ADE can also fire the superintendent, consolidate the district or completely take over the district.
“Generally, a district has a two-year window after it goes into fiscal distress to get its house in order,” Bromley told The Leader. “But the state can come in at anytime during that period.”
Superintendent Dr. Charles Hopson said it was his job to continue to move the district forward. He said any state action is outside his control.
Hopson said after the hearing that he believes the district has made improvements.
“I’ve seen some progress, but evidently it hasn’t been swift enough,” he said.
“We can’t sit and wait for the state to make a decision. We have to make it for them by doing what is right, and that’s trying our best to catch everything. We are not going to be at 100 percent, but we have addressed most of the issues the panel was concerned with,” Hopson told The Leader.
He admitted that it may not be fast enough for the legislators.
“However, we have been working at a break-neck speed the past 10 months trying to right 10 years of wrongs. It’s not a neat, tidy job. We are having to wrestle with a lot of things. But our progress is evident,” Hopson insisted.
He said that since the district is in fiscal distress, it has been working closely with Kimbrell’s staff. “Our actions are very open and visible to them.”
The Pulaski County Special School District, the state’s third largest with about 17,000 students, is classified as fiscally distressed, which gives the education commissioner authority to remove the board. He also could remove the superintendent, though that was not part of the recommendation.
If the district does not get removed from fiscal-distress status within two years, it must be consolidated or annexed to one or more neighboring district.
The state Board of Education does not have to wait two years to take that action, however.
The legislative panel made the recommendation to remove the PCSSD board because of audit findings that lawmakers said have not been adequately addressed.
Hopson said the improvements are evident, but admitted that distractions have slowed progress.
Those distractions include U.S. District Judge Brian Miller’s ruling not to release the county district from federal monitoring, but to go ahead and instantly cut off its share of nearly $70 million in desegregation funding, and an alleged bribery scheme involving two members of the school board and a resulting $5 million lawsuit filed by one member against another.
Board member Tom Stuthard, who has been on the board nine months, called the panel’s recommendation “sensible” and said Hopson and other district officials should be removed as well. He said his experience on the board has been so frustrating that he has come close to quitting.
“There’s no accountability from the custodian up to the superintendent,” he said.
