The Little Rock School Board had its first public work session with a firm creating new voting zones for the district.
The board is reluctantly downsizing. A 2025 state law, mandates districts with fewer than 20,000 students to decrease their number of board members. The LRSD will move from nine members to seven.
If the LRSD wants to keep a board at all, they have until August 14 to make the new zoning decisions. Some board members wondered if the law was designed to create a time crunch.
“All of this reorganization is going to simply cause confusion within this district,” member Evelyn Callaway said.
During the meeting, a possible lawsuit to halt the legal mandate was alluded to.
“I think we need to sue,” Callaway said. She earlier explained, “attorneys need to look into the validity of this law.”
Citygate GIS is the company redrawing the maps. The information technology company works with cities across the country to create new zoning maps.
Over a PowerPoint, CEO Fred Hejazi presented a tentative seven-zone plan for the district.
Hejazi is not from Little Rock, and did not visit the city to develop the zoning plan. He told board member Anna Strong he had only been to the city “a few times, but not enough to know the neighborhoods.”
His map is instead based on census databases. Hejazi is using software to draw boundary lines for the district. The software breaks down neighborhoods on a block-by-block level.
“One person, one vote,” he said. “The districts need to be balanced.”
The lines are based on population, not race. Hejazi said he was able to consider race when drawing the map, but ultimately has to base the lines on population. Hejazi said this preempts a court challenge, because high courts have generally ruled against race-based zoning. This has even been true when voting districts were designed to give Black voters more power.
Hejazi was wary of a situation where an underpopulated place has more voting power than zones with more people.
“We do keep race visible as we are doing the work,” Hejazi said. “But we can't inadvertently disenfranchise voters. I don't want to create a situation accidentally where I've packed a certain minority into one district, or divided up a neighborhood.”
Most of the meeting was spent with board members debating ideas and alternative plans.
Strong was concerned about the zoning line in the Heights and Hillcrest area. This is the neighborhood she lives in. Strong said the current map would arbitrarily cut through the middle of the community.
“It doesn't look natural,” she said, describing it as a “puzzle piece.”
She suggested Cantrell Road or Mississippi Avenue as better dividing lines for the two districts.
Other board members wanted more public comment before okaying the plan.
Osyrus Bolly is a new member of the board. He wants an equity impact analysis to investigate how the plan would affect certain communities.
Hejazi seemed confused by the request.
“When we talk about policy and how it impacts certain communities," Bolly said, “In the work that I do, there's usually an assessment done to determine how it will affect certain neighborhoods, certain genders, race.”
Hejazi said it's largely impossible to know how the plan would affect different genders.
“Typically, maps that are used for electing officials are drawn based on population.”
He said his priority was to preserve district cohesion without “destroying the core of the district as it existed.”
“It's just a voting map,” Hejazi said. “It doesn't change how you would vote.”
Bolly said he “disagreed” and suggested Hejazi consider demographics when drawing boundaries, something Hejazi said he was already doing earlier in the meeting.
The district largely agreed that the next steps should be to listen for community input.
Board member Tony Rose wondered if this was a bad idea.
“Voting is a privilege,” he said. “Input doesn't make any sense to me. Demographics is a science.”
Mid-meeting, Bolly and Strong had a polite disagreement over transparency. Bolly said he wanted a “plain language summary” of the new zoning map to show his constituents.
“We're trying to explain to the people why the map was drawn a certain way,” Bolly said.
Strong said this exact summary had been sent over email at least a month before. She had been easily able to share zoning plans with constituents. The district posted materials on its website and made earlier zoning maps available. Strong reminded Bolly the deadline is approaching.
“We have until August 14th,” she said, “in order to have an election this fall.”
The proposed zoning map with a comment option is at this link.
