A lawsuit challenging Arkansas’ new publicly funded education voucher program is still pending, although the Sanders administration has attempted to dismiss it in court.
On Monday, Pulaski District Judge Morgan “Chip” Welch rejected an attempt by the defendants named in the lawsuit – Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Secretary of Education Jacob Oliva, Secretary of Finance and Administration Jim Hudson and members of the state Board of Education – to dismiss the lawsuit.
In a July 11 motion, state officials asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit on grounds of sovereign immunity and because the lawsuit’s central claim — that school vouchers created by the Arkansas LEARN Act illegally divert money from public schools — is allegedly untrue. Welch accepted neither of those arguments, meaning the lawsuit still stands.
The state Supreme Court has ruled that the state of Arkansas cannot be sued in Arkansas courts. However, there are exceptions to the sovereign immunity defense, one of which is illegal racketeering. Because the lawsuit alleges that the government is misusing taxpayer money, the defendants are not protected by sovereign immunity, Welch ruled. You can read his order denying the motion to dismiss here.
The lawsuit is filed by four plaintiffs: Gwen Faulkenberrya college professor and former Democratic candidate for the Franklin County Legislature; Special grindera public school teacher in Drew County; Anika Whitfieldan activist in Little Rock; and Kimberly Crutchfielda teacher at a public school in Little Rock. They are represented by a Little Rock attorney. Richard Mays.
The lawsuit says LEARN vouchers violate both Article 14 of the state constitution, which requires the state to maintain a “system of free public schools,” and Article 16, which concerns taxation. Article 14 states, “No money or property belonging to the public school fund or to this state for the benefit of any school or university shall ever be used for any purpose other than the particular purposes for which it is intended.”
The state funding mechanism in the LEARN voucher program appears to be designed in part to circumvent these constitutional obstacles because the legislature has allocated money for vouchers separately from the public school budget. But the lawsuit argues that this amounts to a “shell game” because the money is ultimately taken away from public schools.
The lawsuit is at least the third challenging parts of LEARNS. Shortly after the law passed, a group of plaintiffs filed a lawsuit arguing that the law’s enactment date needed to be pushed back several months because of a procedural problem with the House vote on the law. Although a district judge initially ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, the state Supreme Court later overturned the ruling.
In March, a group of students, parents and teachers at Central High School in Little Rock filed suit over a separate section of LEARNS that sought to ban “indoctrination” and the teaching of “critical race theory” in Arkansas classrooms. The state Department of Education cited the “indoctrination” restriction last year when it withdrew state support for a pilot AP course in African American studies just days before the start of the 2023-24 school year.
The federal judge assigned to the case, U.S. District Judge Lee Rudofskyissued a preliminary injunction in May partially blocking the “indoctrination” section of the law. But it refrained from issuing a more sweeping order, based in part on arguments from the state that the indoctrination ban should be interpreted very narrowly. A lawyer for the plaintiffs celebrated the state’s retreat on the issue at the time, saying it “rendered the law virtually meaningless.”
