A Pulaski County Circuit Court judge has again blocked the state from enforcing the LEARNS Act in an order Friday, pushing the education law back into legal limbo.
The ruling from Judge Herbert Wright means the LEARNS Act won’t take effect until Aug. 1, delaying implementation of most of the law which had been in place since early March. The lawsuit, filed May 8, aims to delay when the LEARNS Act — Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ plan to overhaul public education — can take effect.
The plaintiffs, a group of Phillips County residents and two public education activists, argue lawmakers didn’t follow the Arkansas Constitution when approving the LEARNS Act’s emergency clause, a parliamentary move to make a law take effect immediately.
At the center of the lawsuit is a dispute over what the word “separate” means. Article 5, Section 1, of the Arkansas Constitution states the Legislature needs to hold “separate roll call” votes to approve a bill’s emergency clause. Since the Arkansas House of Representatives and Senate held only one vote for the LEARNS Act and its emergency clause, it “was not passed in accordance with the Arkansas Constitution,” Wright ruled.
While the method the Legislature used to pass the act’s emergency clause was one lawmakers have used for decades, the circuit court judge sided with the plaintiffs Friday, saying despite being traditional practice it was unconstitutional.
“The emergency clause simply had not been constitutionally passed when it left the Legislature and made its way to the Governor,” Wright wrote in his order. “The State may defer to the rules of the Legislature, which allow for such a combined vote, but such rules do not insulate the Legislature from the requirements of the Arkansas Constitution.”
The lawsuit was brought after the state Board of Education approved an agreement allowing Friendship Education Foundation, a charter school group, to take control of the Marvell-Elaine School District in Phillips County. To approve the takeover, the state Board of Education used a provision of the LEARNS Act that allows struggling school districts to enter into “transformation contracts” with nonprofits to run their schools.
“This politically motivated lawsuit is absurd and those responsible should be ashamed of themselves for trying to hurt our kids’ futures,” Sanders said in a statement. “We will continue to implement LEARNS raising teacher pay, empowering parents, and expanding literacy programs.”
Plaintiffs argued the takeover would mean layoffs for teachers and staff in the district, while the Arkansas Department of Education has contended the transformation contract is a necessary move to prevent Marvell-Elaine from further consolidation, which could have been triggered by the district’s low enrollment of 306 students.
After the board’s unanimous vote approving the takeover, a group of parents and grandparents from the district filed suit, arguing the LEARNS Act’s emergency clause — the parliamentary procedure that allows laws to come into effect immediately — was not valid. The attorney general’s office argued lawmakers followed a long-standing practice when approving the LEARNS Act, saying that while legislators held one vote on the bill and its emergency clause, they were recorded separately in both chambers’ official journals.
Ali Noland, attorney for the plaintiffs, contended that videos showing lawmakers holding only one vote should supersede the official journals of the House and Senate which state otherwise.
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“This case is not complicated. The official video records of the Arkansas General Assembly show that the legislature failed to follow the Arkansas Constitution when it passed the LEARNS Act,” Noland said in a statement. “As such, Judge Wright correctly ruled today that the LEARNS Act is not yet law, and the State Board of Education lacked authority to enter into the ‘transformation contract’ handing over management of the Marvell-Elaine School District to a charter-school management company and terminating the district’s teachers and staff.”
In its briefs, the attorney general’s office argued the debate over the LEARNS Act’s emergency clause was a political question and that a judge should not interfere in a decades-old practice of the Legislature. Responding to that argument Wright wrote, “While each branch promulgates its own rules and is free to discharge its duties as it sees fit, the Constitution places bounds at the outer lanes of each branch’s authority.”
Wright also rejected claims of sovereign immunity, a legal theory that the defense made that argued the state cannot be sued in some circumstances, with the circuit court judge writing “Sovereign immunity does not entitle the State to ignore [its own] Constitution.”
A WINDING ROAD
Sanders signed the LEARNS Act into law in March calling it “the largest overhaul of the state’s education system in Arkansas history.”
The 145-page law easily passed the House and Senate — which are controlled by GOP super-majorities — and covers a wide range of education issues including a $14,000 increase in starting teacher pay, state funds for parents to send their children to a private or home school, a ban on critical race theory, higher literacy standards for third graders and updated regulations for school security protocols.
Laurie Lee, chairman of the Reform Alliance, a nonprofit that pushed for school choice and backed the LEARNS Act, said in a statement Wright’s ruling “now jeopardizes hundreds of other bills passed this year under the same longstanding, bipartisan legislative practice, one that was seemingly not objectionable until it was applied to the LEARNS Act.”
In April, the state took control of the Marvell-Elaine School District after it reached Level 5 status of the state’s accountability system, meaning it is in need of intense support. Both the Marvell-Elaine elementary and high schools have state-applied F grades.
Arkansas Secretary of Education Jacob Oliva has said the transformation contract is the best way to save the school district, which had the third-highest per-student expense in the state in the 2021-22 school year, according to the state Department of Education’s latest annual statistical report. Marvell-Elaine’s $19,556 per-student expense rate far exceeds the state average of $12,584.
Wright’s ruling is likely not the end of the nearly two-month-long legal journey for the lawsuit. Responding to the order, Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin pledged in a statement to “appeal this ruling to the Arkansas Supreme Court immediately.”
The state’s highest court has already become entangled in the lawsuit, issuing a ruling overturning a temporary restraining order Wright issued May 26. However, the June 15 majority opinion from the Supreme Court did not touch on the case’s underlying issue of whether lawmakers followed the state constitution when passing the LEARNS Act’s emergency clause.
POTENTIAL IMPLICATIONS
While the lawsuit seeks only to delay when the LEARNS Act takes effect, for two of the plaintiffs the ruling has much deeper implications. A referendum effort headed by Steve Grappe and Veronica McClane could put a much longer pause on the LEARNS Act.
Grappe and McClane head Citizens for Arkansas Public Education and Students, also known as CAPES, the group leading a petition campaign to put the LEARNS Act to a referendum. If the group can get more than the roughly 54,000 signatures it needs, the LEARNS Act could be put on hold until voters get a chance to weigh in in November 2024. But the LEARNS Act would only be held in “abeyance” if signature-gathering efforts were able to get the referendum approved before the law takes effect.
“Their failure caused us, the citizens, to have no time to hold the LEARNS Act in abeyance by the utilization of the veto referendum process, which is to petition to put a law passed by the legislature onto an election-wide ballot for the People to decide,” Nancy Fancyboy, a spokesperson for CAPES, said in a statement. “It is the Hail Mary pass we are given by our constitution, the power for the People to check the power of the legislative branch.”
