Circuit Judge Collins Kilgore, Division 13 judge of the Sixth Circuit of Arkansas, has donated his copies of court records pertaining to the Lake View School District case to the University of Central Arkansas Archives.
The Lake View School District case challenged the constitutionality of Arkansas’s school funding system. The case was originally filed by Lake View School District in 1992 and did not come to a conclusion until 2007.
After a two-month trial in 2000, Judge Kilgore issued an opinion in early 2001 finding that the school funding system violated the equal-protection sections of the Arkansas Constitution in that the equal educational opportunity was not being afforded to the school children of this state and that there was no legitimate government purpose warranting the discrepancies in curriculum, facilities, equipment, and teacher pay among the school districts.
Judge Kilgore also found that the school system was inadequate to provide a “general, suitable and efficient system of free public schools” as required by the Arkansas Constitution. On May 31, 2007, the Arkansas Supreme Court issued an opinion that the State had complied and had taken the required and necessary legislative steps to assure that the school children of the state were provided an adequate education and a substantially equal educational opportunity.
Judge Kilgore’s records of the case included trial exhibits, judge’s notes and drafts of orders. The materials in the Lake View School District case have been processed and are available to the public, said Jimmy Bryant, director of the UCA Archives.
“I am grateful to Judge Kilgore for donating copies of his working papers on the Lake View case to the UCA Archives and I am also grateful to Max Brantley, editor of the Arkansas Times, for helping UCA acquire the collection,” Bryant said. “The Lake View School District case is a landmark case involving school funding in Arkansas. I am honored that the UCA Archives holds these papers and can now make them available to researchers.”