The Fight for School Consolidation in Arkansas, 1946-1948

Abstract

FORCED CONSOLIDATION OF SCHOOL DISTRICTS has often been looked upon as the third rail of Arkansas politics: one approaches the subject with considerable caution so as to avoid political electrocution. This issue was again placed on the public agenda, at least indirectly, by an Arkansas Supreme Court decision in November 2002, which held that the state's funding of public schools did not provide children with the "general, suitable, and efficient" educational system mandated by the Arkansas Constitution. Although the Lake View opinion did not require school consolidation, this method had been proposed in the past to help the state achieve a suitable and efficient system.1 The Lake View decision's broad scope seemed to require major changes in policy, utilizing a variety of innovative plans and techniques. Gov. Mike Huckabee in a "state of the state" address to the Arkansas General Assembly on January 14, 2003, offered a bold plan to help satisfy the requirements of Lake View. Huckabee proposed that Arkansas school districts with less than 1,500 students merge with bigger districts. He especially stressed that larger high schools could offer a richer curriculum.2 This proposal aroused great controversy, which remained at fever pitch for the next year. After heated discussions, many downward revisions of the threshold for consolidation, and frequent compromises that often unraveled, the General Assembly passed a bill that required consolidation of districts with fewer than 350 students rather than 1,500. Under the measure, the number of school districts in the state was expected to drop from 310 to 254. A companion bill changed the state's school funding formula and increased expenditures for public education.3 While Huckabee's effort accomplished limited consolidation, a similar attempt in 1966 had been completely annihilated. The trigger for consolidation proposed then was 400 students, and voters rejected the measure by a landslide vote of 115,452 (26.41 percent) in favor and 321,733 (73.59 percent) against.4 Orval Faubus, governor of Arkansas at the time, opposed the measure as did the two major gubernatorial candidates in that year's general election, Jim Johnson and Winthrop Rockefeller. Despite endorsement by the Arkansas Gazette, the proposed consolidation legislation was even defeated in Pulaski County, where 61 percent of the voters opposed the measure.5 Given the automatically hostile response to any attempt at consolidation in Arkansas, it might seem astonishing that the state's voters in 1948 passed a comprehensive school consolidation act requiring the dissolution of all school districts with fewer than 350 students. Initiated Act 1 was approved in the absence of any court order and with virtually no newspaper advertising, the main method by which campaigns were conducted at that time. And it passed despite the defeat of a very similar proposal just two years earlier. What relevance, if any, does this episode hold for the present? School consolidation had been proposed as early as the 1920s to help districts provide better educational opportunities. In the 1920s, public school education in Arkansas was in a deplorable state, with 5,000 school districts varying enormously in the quality of education they could provide. Gov. Thomas McRae in his inaugural address in 1923 said that the state faced an educational crisis in which only a "little over half of [Arkansas's] children are in daily attendance, and the average school term is only one hundred and thirty-one days."6 An even harsher indictment had come from a legislative study in 1921 : "For thousands upon thousands of children, Arkansas provides absolutely no chance. To these children, to be born in Arkansas is a misfortune and an injustice from which they will never recover and from which they will look back with bitterness when plunged, in adult life, into competition with children born in other states which are providing more liberally for their children. …