Proposed Sherwood school district draws resistance 

Some leaders in the McAlmont community near North Little Rock are asking fellow residents to jump into a conversation about whether the city of Sherwood should form its own public school district. 

A meeting about the potential schism that would carve a number of schools out of the Pulaski County Special School District is scheduled for Thursday at 6 p.m. at 4411 AR-161, North Little Rock, across from Harris Elementary. 

In a letter sent to several local news outlets, Kristina Gulley, a member of McAlmont Concerned Citizens and Youth, said the process for establishing a new school district has lacked transparency and community involvement. Gulley raised particular concerns about the potential removal of Harris Elementary from the Pulaski County Special School District and its possible inclusion in the proposed Sherwood School District. 

The proposal, detailed in reporting by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, would create a new school district comprising Sylvan Hills High School and all of its feeder schools, a group that includes Harris Elementary, four other elementary schools and two middle schools in Sherwood. 

Pulaski County already has four public school districts, including Little Rock, North Little Rock, Pulaski County Special and Jacksonville North Pulaski, the newest district, which launched in 2016 with voters’ blessing. 

Proponents have been pushing for a new school district in Sherwood for more than a decade, but a longstanding segregation lawsuit that included the PCSSD, the Little Rock School District and the North Little Rock School District prevented such a move until February of this year, when a federal judge ruled that the PCSSD had met its obligations to desegregate. 

After that ruling, the Sherwood Public Education Foundation, the group behind the proposal, commissioned a feasibility study to determine if breaking off a new school district would financially hurt the PCSSD. The study found that it would not, and that a new Sherwood district could support itself financially. Proponents of the district say they want decisions about Sherwood schools to be made in Sherwood, not by a larger district. 

Gulley said, though, that public records show that Sherwood Public Education Foundation members Linda George and Beverly Williams and Pulaski County Special School District board member Karyn Maynard, met privately with Arkansas Secretary of Education Jacob Oliva on Aug. 11 to discuss the new district. 

“The three women representing interests in that meeting were Caucasian. Yet the decisions being discussed could significantly affect Harris Elementary and communities with substantial African-American student populations and longstanding Black communities,” Gulley wrote. “No African-American community representative from McAlmont participated nor were they invited to attend this private meeting, not even School Board representative Kierra Sheppard, who represents Zone 2, which consists of Harris Elementary and other schools to our knowledge no parent was invited to join in this meeting.” 

Harris Elementary is predominantly Black, and is the only feeder school to Sylvan Hills High School that technically lies outside of Sherwood city limits, in the unincorporated community of McAlmont. 

Gulley further questioned the necessity of an entirely new district, which she argues would divide funding, enrollment and other resources during a time when the PCSSD is already struggling with enrollment. (The enrollment issue isn’t unique to PCSSD, and is directly downstream of the LEARNS Act, which established a school voucher program that makes it easier for families to jump ship and enroll in private or home schools by giving them public money.) 

“One alternative worthy of public discussion is whether schools south of the Arkansas River could be served through the Little Rock School District and schools north of the river through the North Little Rock School District, rather than creating yet another separate school system,” Gulley wrote. 

Gulley added that PCSSD isn’t without problems, but said that “moving schools from one district to another should not become a substitute for confronting longstanding educational problems.”

Maynard, the PCSSD board member, previously spoke about the plan to create a new school district at a February meeting of the Pulaski County Republican Committee. In the meeting, Maynard, who previously led the Pulaski County chapter of the far-right Moms for Liberty, urged attendees to vote for conservative school board candidates and boasted about getting rid of PCSSD’s “very liberal” superintendent and replacing him with a conservative one, Jeff Senn. 

From our previous reporting: 

Smith went on to detail long-term plans for the district, including establishing a separate school district for the city of Sherwood after a decades-long desegregation case, brought against all of the school districts in Pulaski County in 1982, comes to an end. The PCSSD is the only remaining defendant in the case, and appears to be moving closer to unified status. 

“When the desegregation case ends after 40 years … We will be able to separate Sherwood from Pulaski County. And so my goal, ultimately, will be to have our own school district,” Smith said. “We have more than enough finances, we have enough student body, we are ready to go and have Sherwood school district.”