The Little Rock School District is seeking to join a federal lawsuit challenging the Educational Freedom Accounts created under the LEARNS Act of 2023. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is seen here signing the lawl on March 8, 2023. (Photo by John Sykes/Arkansas Advocate)
Arkansas’ third-largest school district asked a federal court Friday to let it intervene in a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the state’s school voucher program.
In a motion filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas, the Little Rock School District also argued that the Educational Freedom Account program hurts public schools by diverting public funds “to support a separate system of private sectarian schools to the detriment of LRSD and other Arkansas public school districts.”
The district’s motion says that “for each student who leaves LRSD for a private school, or who is home schooled, because of the Voucher Program, LRSD loses resources necessary to educate its remaining students.” The district’s enrollment this school year is 18,964, according to the state education department’s website.
The EFA program was created by the LEARNS Act of 2023, a wide-ranging overhaul of the state’s public education laws that also raised annual teacher salaries to a minimum $50,000 and prohibited so-called “indoctrination” of students.
The LRSD motion supports arguments made in the original complaint filed by parents in June that the EFA program violates both the First Amendment’s provision prohibiting establishment of a state religion and the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection clause.
The EFA program became available to all students this school year after being phased in two years ago. A recent estimate put the total cost in the 2025-26 school year at $326.1 million, more than the $277.4 million budgeted by the Legislature this spring.
“The provision of such significant sums of public money to support a system of private, mostly sectarian schools, violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution,” the motion argues.
The voucher program also discriminates against low-income families who can’t pay private school costs, students in rural areas who have no access to private schools and children with disabilities who “are not acceptable to many private schools,” in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, the motion adds.
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The school district also argues that instead of maintaining a robust system of free public schools as required by the Arkansas constitution, “the state has violated that obligation by creating a separate and competing system of publicly funded private religious schools, and providing vouchers to encourage students to attend those schools.”
In supporting its argument to intervene, the district says it “enrolls, on average, students with greater educational needs than the students in the private, sectarian school [system] supported by the LEARNS Act Voucher Program. LRSD has an interest in this case because the outcome will significantly impact these students and educators.”
“An outcome which allows the state to continue to invest in a separate private school system for more affluent students will inevitably work to the detriment of the constitutionally required free public school system,” the district argues.
Sam Dubke, a spokesperson for Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, directed the Advocate to a statement issued in June when parents and guardians of public school students — Gwen Faulkenberry, Special Sanders, Anika Whitfield and Kimberly Crutchfield — filed the lawsuit against Sanders, Education Secretary Jacob Oliva, the Arkansas State Board of Education and Department of Finance and Administration Secretary Jim Hudson.
“This suit has no merit. More than 44,000 [now 51,000] students have applied for EFAs for next school year and far-left activists are playing politics with those kids’ futures to try and protect a failed status quo.”
Jeff LeMaster, a spokesperson for Attorney General Tim Griffin, said, “We are reviewing the filing and will continue to proudly defend the LEARNS Act.”
The Little Rock district is being represented by Christopher Heller, Khayyam M. Eddings and Liz K. Harris of the Friday, Eldredge & Clark firm in Little Rock.
