Judge takes merger case of 2 schools
Posted on Thursday, November 1, 2007
U. S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright on Wednesday agreed to crack the door open a little on a lawsuit that challenged the 2006 state-mandated consolidation of the Eudora and Lakeside school districts.
In a six-page order, Wright said she will consider whether the federal court has the legal authority to hear and decide the issues in the consolidation case.
The case was filed Feb. 24, 2006, by taxpayers and families in the former Eudora School District against the governor and Arkansas Department of Education officials to stop the immediate consolidation of the Eudora district with the neighboring Lakeside School District in Lake Village.
The Arkansas Board of Education had ordered the merger of the school districts just days earlier, Feb. 13, as a remedy to the Eudora district’s financial insolvency.
The lawsuit was initially assigned to U. S. District Judge George Howard Jr., who administratively terminated the case in September 2006 pending the completion of the Lake View school funding lawsuit in the Arkansas Supreme Court.
The Lake View case was a class action lawsuit that successfully challenged the state’s system of funding public schools.
In response to the lawsuit, state lawmakers revamped the funding system and gave the Arkansas Education Department and Board of Education greater authority to hold school districts accountable for the financial management of the school systems.
That included state authority to take over and / or consolidate districts that are running out of money.
The Lake View case came to a close earlier this year and the Friends of Eudora plaintiffs in June pushed to proceed with their lawsuit.
Wright inherited the case after Howard died in April.
On Wednesday, Wright noted that the Lake View case as it was decided in the Supreme Court could affect whether the federal court has authority to hear the Eudora case. She denied the state defendants’ earlier motions to dismiss the Eudora case and gave their attorneys 20 days to file any new motion that in addition to any other arguments, addresses “the effect of the state court proceedings on this litigation.”
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