Central High families, teacher file federal lawsuit over Arkansas LEARNS Act ‘indoctrination’ ban

From left front: Gisele Davis, Chandra Williams-Davis, Ruthie Walls, Sadie Belle Reynolds and Jennifer Reynolds are five of the seven plaintiffs challenging Section 16 of the Arkansas LEARNS Act in federal court. Mike Laux (at podium) is one of their attorneys and filed the lawsuit Monday, March 25, 2024 before hosting a news conference at Bullock Temple CME Church, across the street from Little Rock Central High, where Gisele and Sadie Belle are students in Walls' AP African American Studies course. (Tess Vrbin/Arkansas Advocate)

A federal lawsuit filed Monday challenges the constitutionality of a section of the LEARNS Act that prohibits “indoctrination” in Arkansas schools and asks the court to block its enforcement.

Civil rights attorneys Mike Laux and Austin Porter Jr. filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas on behalf of three Little Rock Central High students, their parents and AP African American Studies teacher Ruthie Walls.

An AP African American Studies course that’s being piloted in six Arkansas schools, including Central High, received scrutiny after Gov. Sarah Huckabee signed an executive order banning “indoctrination” on her first day in office. 

Similar language was later incorporated into the LEARNS Act, a new law that makes sweeping changes to the state’s education system. The state education department abruptly removed the advanced placement course from its list of approved courses days before the start of the 2023-2024 school year last August. 

According to a statement from the Laux Law Group, Section 16 of the LEARNS Act is “a brazen, political attempt to silence speech and expression” that the governor and education secretary disagree with.

“The LEARNS Act violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution,” the statement reads. “It is unworkably vague and oppressive, and it discriminates on the basis of race. Section 16 is just another front in the culture war being waged by right-wing ideologues.”

In response to the lawsuit against her and Education Secretary Jacob Oliva, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Monday: “In the State of Arkansas, we will not indoctrinate our kids and teach them to hate America or each other. It’s sad the radical left continues to lie and play political games with our kids’ futures.”

Oliva said in a statement that College Board, the organization that manages the AP program, updated the course framework after discussions and assured the Arkansas Department of Education that it doesn’t violate state law.

The department approved the course for the 2024-2025 school year and will continue working with districts to ensure courses are in compliance, Oliva said.

“The lawsuit falsely accuses ADE of not allowing students to participate in the AP African American Studies pilot program and stripped them from the benefits that the course provides — a total lie,” he said. “The department advised schools they could offer local course credit to students who complete the pilot, and six schools participated.”

At a Monday press conference, Laux called Little Rock’s Central High School “a crucible for positive social change” and criticized the state for “trying to erode the rights that the Little Rock Nine and others have fought so desperately for.” 

“[Section 16] is a total affront to what this state has accomplished, to what these children have accomplished, to children’s capacity to understand,” Laux said. “They know what’s going on. They’re not being fooled.”

Central High is home to the Little Rock Nine, a group of African American students who desegregated the school in 1957 with the assistance of federal troops after the governor ordered the Arkansas National Guard to block their entry.

In addition to Walls, the lawsuit plaintiffs are Central High freshman Sadie Belle Reynolds and her mother, Jennifer Reynolds; senior Gisele Davis and her mother, Chandra Williams-Davis; and another unnamed student and parent. 

Sadie Belle and Gisele are both enrolled in AP African American Studies and were present at the news conference, where Laux praised them for “walking in the footsteps of the Little Rock Nine.”

The plaintiffs ask the court to find Section 16 unconstitutional, both on its face and based on evidence. They also seek an injunction preventing that portion of the law from being further enacted and rolling back the ways it has been enforced so far, Laux said.

The LEARNS Act violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. It is unworkably vague and oppressive, and it discriminates on the basis of race. Section 16 is just another front in the culture war being waged by right-wing ideologues.

– Laux Law Group

The suit argues Section 16 violates the First Amendment because “it impermissibly regulates classroom free speech on the basis of the speech content.” The imposed regulations are also viewpoint-based discrimination because they authorize the defendants “to remove fact-based state education resources” they find disagreeable, according to the complaint.

Laux added at the news conference that nothing in Section 16 prevents the removal of books from classrooms.

Additionally, “the law fails to define operative terms and contains redundant and confusing terms,” according to the complaint.

“Section 16 is unworkably vague and overly broad to the point where it fails to give reasonable notice of the conduct and speech it prohibits,” the lawsuit reads.

Laux said the vagueness of the section “sets people up for the arbitrary prosecution of this statute” and creates a “chilling effect” on students and teachers. 

Plaintiffs argue Section 16 violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment because by restricting the AP African American Studies curriculum due to certain subject matter but not restricting the curriculum of similar AP courses covering the same subject matter, “it creates different classes along racial lines.”

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The suit argues plaintiffs have suffered physical injury as well as economic and emotional damages, “including but not limited to, stress, anxiety, fear, confusion, stigmatizations and consternation.”

The plaintiffs have requested a jury trial, and U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker will hear the case, according to court documents.

Background

Arkansas education officials removed the AP pilot class, now in its second year, from the state’s approved course list right before the start of school in August. As a result, the course does not count toward graduation credit.

Oliva defended the decision last August, saying the course “was listed in error” the previous year. State education officials can decide whether it should be considered for approval once the pilot is finalized and becomes an official course, he said. 

An Arkansas Department of Education spokesperson said then that state officials needed clarity on the course to ensure it wasn’t violating state law regarding prohibited topics. 

Oliva sent a letter to schools participating in the pilot requesting course materials for review and to pledge the curriculum would not violate state law against “indoctrination and Critical Race Theory” in public schools.

Critical race theory is typically not taught in K-12 schools in Arkansas, and is reserved mostly for graduate-level college coursework. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund defines critical race theory as “an academic and legal framework that denotes that systemic racism is part of American society — from education and housing to employment and healthcare.” 

Sanders also defended the education department’s decision in a nationally televised interview on Fox News in August, calling critical race theory a “leftist agenda, teaching our kids to hate America and hate one another,” similar to her Monday statement.

Both Sadie Belle and Jennifer Reynolds, who are white, said at the news conference that they disagreed with Sanders’ comments based on Sadie Belle’s positive experiences in AP African American Studies.

“I don’t feel shamed or wronged [in this class],” Sadie Belle said. “I’m just excited to learn, and that’s all I wanted to take this course for: to be a more learned and active citizen.”

After being piloted at hundreds of schools across the country over two years, AP African American Studies will be available to all schools in the 2024-2025 academic year. Walls participated in both years of the pilot, and said at the news conference that roughly 100 Central High students are taking the interdisciplinary course this academic year.

Walls said she doesn’t want Little Rock’s youth to “go away for college and sit in a history classroom and say, ‘I never knew that, why didn’t I ever know that? Well, because my teacher didn’t teach us that.’

“That would be a shame and a mockery,” she said.

Williams-Davis said making the class ineligible for graduation credit the Friday before school started was a source of anxiety for Gisele, but she chose to take the class anyway.

“She has loved this class, but it’s always seemed to me since that Friday that this is an attempt to erase not just African-American history but [also] American history,” said Williams-Davis, who is Black.

Legal pushback

The LEARNS Act has been unpopular with many Central High students since its inception, with students staging a campus walkout and rally at the Capitol last March protesting the legislation.

“Reforms that attack school coursework deemed too inappropriate for students will dramatically decrease their preparation to face real-world social issues,” four students wrote in an open letter to Sanders, co-signed by more than 1,500 students and alumni.

This is also not the first time the LEARNS Act has been challenged in the courts. A group of Arkansans filed a lawsuit challenging the LEARNS Act’s emergency clause last May. 

Plaintiffs were concerned about the quick implementation of a “transformation contract” between the Marvell-Elaine School District and the Friendship Education Foundation, a charter management organization. 

A provision of the LEARNS Act, the contract allows public school districts with a “D” or “F”-rating or in need of Level 5 – Intensive Support to partner with an open-enrollment public charter school or another state board-approved entity in good standing to create “public school district transformation campus.”

Those plaintiffs argued, and a Pulaski County judge agreed, that the emergency clause was invalid because it was not passed with a separate roll-call vote garnering a two-thirds majority, as required by the Arkansas Constitution. An emergency clause allows legislation to take effect immediately instead of 91 days after the end of the legislative session. The Legislature’s long-standing practice has been to cast one vote on a measure but record the same vote separately for any emergency clause. 

The months-long court battle ended in October when the Arkansas Supreme Court reversed the lower court’s ruling invalidating the LEARNS Act’s emergency clause and dismissed the case.

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Also last summer, Citizens for Arkansas Public Education and Students (CAPES) pursued a referendum to overturn the LEARNS Act, but the group failed to gather enough signatures to place the measure on the 2024 ballot. 

CAPES is one of several groups collecting signatures for a proposed ballot measure seeking to amend the Arkansas Constitution in response to the LEARNS Act, with its main goal to hold private schools that receive state funding to the same standards as public schools.

The Arkansas Conference of the NAACP, another group backing the ballot measure, also supports the Section 16 lawsuit, said Reginald Ford, first vice president of the NAACP’s Jacksonville branch.

Laux said the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a national organization based in Washington D.C., has expressed support for the suit as well.

Terrence Roberts, one of the eight living members of the Little Rock Nine, wrote a statement that some of Walls’ students read during the press conference. He claimed Sanders’ and the Legislature’s enactment of the LEARNS Act was a self-interested political move “erecting barriers to learning in Arkansas public schools.”

“Let us not rob another generation of the opportunity to solve the problems generated by the continued embrace of ideologies based on the false notions of race and hierarchies of racial superiority,” Roberts said.

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