THE PAST AND FUTURE OF HALL HIGH SCHOOL Once a school of choice, now in the crosshairs of the State Board of Education, Little Rock Hall prepares to hit the reset button. BY LINDSEY MILLAR PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRIAN CHILSON
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hen Hall High School opened in 1957, it was part of a plan to forestall broad integration of the Little Rock School District. It was three years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, and the same year that would see the desegregation crisis unfold at Little Rock Central High. Anticipating change under Brown, Superintendent Virgil Blossom and the School Board opened the all-black Horace Mann High School in what was mostly black East Little Rock in 1956. Hall was built a couple of blocks west of University, in what was then an affluent white neighborhood in West Little Rock. Under Blossom’s token desegregation plan, in 1957, white students could opt out of attending Horace Mann, but black students didn’t get the option of attending Hall. Although three black students enrolled at Hall in 1959, residential housing patterns preserved de facto segregation at Hall until court-ordered busing began in 1971. In 2020, low-income black and Latino students make up the overwhelming majority of 26 FEBRUARY 2020
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Hall. With Little Rock’s city limits expanded far to the west, Hall is now in midtown — perhaps not as affluent as it was in the late 1950s, but still solidly middle class and mostly white. Few students who live in the school’s neighborhood attend Hall: Only 12 percent of the student body comes from the two ZIP codes that surround the school. Hall’s enrollment in general has dropped. Its peak attendance in the last 20 years was 1,500 in the 2007-08 school year, but today only 888 students are enrolled. School officials say that the school could accommodate around 1,800 students. Next school year will mark a new era for Hall. The Little Rock School District is moving forward with a long-gestating plan to convert Hall into a STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and math) magnet school open to any student in the district. The school will no longer have a geographic attendance zone, meaning that students will not be assigned to Hall based on where they live; they’ll have to apply. (Students enrolled now will stay at the school unless they take action to enroll at their
zoned schools or in other magnet programs.) Education Secretary Johnny Key announced that he had approved the change Dec. 12. The same day, the Arkansas State Board of Education meddled further, sparking new outrage among the LRSD community. The State Board, which voted to take over the district in 2015 because of low standardized tests at a handful of Little Rock schools, including Hall, voted to require Hall to be reconstituted, a term in education that means that everyone in the building — from the principal to the custodians — will be laid off and forced to either find another job or reapply. Board member Sarah Moore of Stuttgart, who made the successful motion, noted that on recent standardized tests only 6 percent of Hall students scored at the state’s desired level in reading and only 4 percent at the desired level in math. “That is not to say there aren’t great teachers, there aren’t great students and there aren’t great things going on there, but to move these students forward we need to do more,” Moore said. During a public comment period, LRSD supporters called Moore’s motion “microman-
