LITTLE ROCK
Much like 1957, 2007 has proven to be a highly divisive year for the Little Rock School District but the developments this year pitted a black-majority school board against the district’s black superintendent, rather than a battle over integration.
After the board voted to fire Superintendent Roy Brooks and buy out his contract for $635,000 some white school board members fretted that the turmoil in the district could lead more parents to pull their kids out of the state’s largest school district and put them in private schools.
“We’re broke and we’re going to get broker as we lose enrollment due to the fact that we’ve not settled this,” board member H. Baker Kurrus said after the board fired Brooks in May. “We’ve divided our community. … The next thing that happens is we dismantle our school district because we lose enrollment.”
Responded board president Katherine Mitchell, who is black: “I think I got a pretty good … education in the Little Rock public schools in an all-black setting, so I’m not saying that we don’t need all students,” Mitchell said. “But I don’t think that if people make the decision to leave the public schools that’s going to lead to the destruction of the schools.”
Fifty years after Central High’s integration, race still matters in Arkansas’ capital city. It affects dealings with educational issues, and also is a factor in where people live.
Overwhelmingly, whites live in west Little Rock, an affluent area with views of the Ouachita Mountain foothills and Arkansas River, while eastern and downtown parts of the city are home to the majority of Little Rock’s black residents, according to Census data.
