Harmony Grove Superintendent addresses Sparkman lawsuit

By Bradly Gill

News Editor

The Harmony Grove School District last week answered a request for an injunction filed by residents of Sparkman related to the proposed merging of grades 7-12 of Sparkman Schools with Harmony Grove High School.

On April 28, The Harmony Grove School Board voted 5-2 to move 40 Sparkman High School students in grades 7-12 to Harmony Grove High School.

Sparkman parents filed suit in early May. The suit argued that the closure would force some students to travel up to two hours each way to school and place an undue burden on them.

The request for an injunction was deferred to the State Board of Education last week.

"Judge (Spencer) Singleton basically said it wasn't in his jurisdiction to do that, it would more properly be taken before the State Board of Education, and that is what we are doing," Harmony Grove School Superintendent Al Snow said Monday.

Snow said in April that the low number of students made continued use of the Sparkman High School campus unsustainable. Snow stated no Kindergarteners had yet enrolled for 2023.

"This has been brought on by the lack of enrollment in Sparkman. In the last three years Sparkman has gone from 142 students to 97," he said.

The Harmony Grove School Board met Thursday, where they approved a letter to be sent to contiguous school districts detailing the intention to close Sparkman entirely, Snow said.

"I don't know if that's going to happen or not, but there was a law passed in the legislature last year that if I wanted to do that I had to notify the contiguous school districts a year in advance," he said.

Sparkman parents' lawsuit filed in Ouachita District Court states, "Plaintiffs are citizens of Arkansas who live in and near Sparkman and are interested in keeping the Sparkman School open for all grades for themselves, their children and grandchildren, their relatives and neighbors and the good of the community."

It also states that since Sparkman School is a Local Education Agency offering grades K-12, state code prohibits closing part of the Sparkman school without either a unanimous vote of the School Board or an order from the State Board of Education approving such action.

"HGSD has not satisfied either legal requirement," the lawsuit states. "The law clearly prohibits HGSD's eliminating 7-12 grade education in Sparkman."

Harmony Grove argued in response that, "The State Board of Education had not taken up the matter, but this process is still underway and not expected to be final until July. Accordingly, this court must defer to the State Board of Education...as the administrative process is not yet complete."

The district's response goes on to state, "Nothing in Arkansas Code forbids the district from petitioning the State Board of Education to reconfigure Sparkman Campus as to grades 7-12 in a different school year."

Previous attempts to close the Sparkman campus by the Harmony Grove School District have been denied by the Arkansas Board of Education.

According to to documents from the Arkansas Board of Education, "On January 16, 2020, by majority vote, the Harmony Grove Board of Directors voted to close the District's Sparkman K-12 campus at the end of the 2019-2020 school year, with five members voting in favor of closure and two voting against closure."

Because it was not a unanimous vote, state law required the state board's approval for closure of the Sparkman campus.

Due to testimony and a petition from residents of Sparkman, the Board of Education ruled then that the closure was not in the best interest of Sparkman students.

The Harmony Grove response states, "Plaintiffs reference an order from the State Board of Education from March 12 2020, as grounds for this court to act now. However that order related to the Districts's request to close the entire Sparkman Campus in January of 2020, following the end of classes in May of 2020. The State Board of Education denied that request, but that was two years ago and the current plan from the District to close only grades 7-12 at the Sparkman Campus is a new and different plan for a different school year, subject to a different administrative process."

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