Upset parents say Malvern district forcing transfers

Last updated Saturday, October 25, 2008 7:16 PM CDT in News

By Rob Moritz
The Morning News

Benjamin Lynch Sr., one of about 20 parents named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said the ordeal has hurt his family and the Magnet Cove community.

“This is devastating to the parents,” the father said. “My son has been attending Magnet Cove since kindergarten and now he’s been forced out.”

He said he and his wife moved to the Butterfield Community in Hot Spring County years ago to live on property his mother’s family once owned.

“We moved here because we were in the Magnet Cove School District,” he said, adding he was told he had a choice whether his son attended the 747-student Magnet Cove district or the 2,213-student Malvern district because school buses from both districts stopped near his home to pick up children.

The Lynches live much closer to Magnet Cove High School than Malvern High, he said.

“This is really not fair to the student,” the elder Lynch said, adding he was concerned about reports of violence in the Malvern district and that the district has in the past been on academic probation.

Malvern School Superintendent Brian Golden could not be reached for comment last week, but he told the Malvern Daily Record last month that Malvern school officials decided to go after students in neighboring districts who should be attending school in Malvern because the district loses $5,789 in state funding for each student it should have but does not.

“I’m just trying to protect the school district,” Golden told the newspaper. “That’s a lot of budget money.”

The superintendent said the district has slowly been losing students to other districts over the past decade and the problem is getting worse. Some students are trickling back to the district when they learn attending school outside the district where they live is against the law, he said.

Arkansas’ school choice law allows a student to apply for a transfer to a school district outside of the district in which he or she lives. However, but as a safeguard against racial segregation, the law prohibits a student from transferring to a district where the percentage of the student’s race exceeds the percentage in the student’s home district, with some exceptions.

Parents of students attending school in other districts face up to a $500 fine if their primary residence is inside the Malvern District.

Earlier this year, state lawmakers said they may have to revisit the law during the 2009 legislative session because of a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that school choice plans in Seattle and Louisville, Ky., were unconstitutional because of their reliance on race-based criteria.

The lawsuit filed last week by Hot Springs attorney Andie Davis on behalf of the parents asks a judge to declare the School Choice Act of 1989 unconstitutional because it makes race the sole factor in determining whether a student can transfer.

The Malvern district has a 35 percent minority enrollment, while Glen Rose, Magnet Cove, Ouachita and Poyen have lower percentages of minority students.

Magnet Cove School Superintendent Gail McClure said she received three letters from Golden, the first in early September, informing her that as many as 80 students may be attending school there illegally.

McClure said she later determined that most of the students are legally attending schools in Magnet Cove but as many as 10 could still end up having to transfer to Malvern.

“This really came out of the blue,” McClure said, though she acknowledged that on occasion she discovers students living within her district who are attending school elsewhere and she files paperwork to get them back.

Last year, two students attending school in Malvern had to change districts because they live in Magnet Cove.

To avoid transfers, some parents have rented homes and moved, while others have purchased trailers and moved next to family who do live in the Magnet Cove school system, McClure said.

The families of the students in question also received letters from the Laser Law Firm in Little Rock, which was hired by the Malvern School District, to get the students back.

The letter said the Malvern district “is potentially losing thousands of dollars to this problem, and it is now required to insist that any child who should be attending the Malvern School District, but is not, return immediately to the Malvern School District.”

Dan Farley, executive director of the Arkansas School Boards Association, said it’s not unusual for a district to claim one or two students are attending school outside the district illegally, but he’s “never seen it on this scale.”

“This does pop up occasionally and the primary reason is it affects the school district’s funding,” Farley said, adding that students who want to attend another district must apply and complete paperwork.

Reader Comments (No comments posted.)

The following comments are provided by readers and are the sole responsibility of their authors. The Morning News does not review comments before their publication, nor do we guarantee their accuracy. By publishing a comment here you agree to abide by our comment policy. If you see a comment that violates our policy, please notify the web editor.