Arkansas Education Secretary Jacob Oliva and Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders examine the floor plan of the new Arkansas Schools for the Deaf, Blind and Visually Impaired during a groundbreaking ceremony on March 12, 2025. (Photo by Randall Lee for the Arkansas Governor’s Office)
A federal lawsuit filed Thursday alleges the Arkansas Department of Education violated federal law by failing to equip an online survey seeking input on the future of the state’s deaf and blind schools with auxiliary aids.
The plaintiff in the lawsuit, which was filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas Central Division, also filed a motion for a preliminary injunction ordering the defendants to cease construction of the schools’ new campus, immediately republish the ADE survey with appropriate accessibility measures and include plaintiffs in ongoing “stakeholder” meetings.
The lawsuit comes a week after officials broke ground on a new combined campus for the Arkansas School for the Deaf and the Arkansas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired.
Little Rock attorney Mike Laux, along with two attorneys from the National Association of the Deaf, filed the lawsuit on behalf of the Arkansas Association of the Deaf. Education Secretary Jacob Oliva and members of the Arkansas State Board of Education are the named defendants in the case.
According to the complaint, an online survey posted on ADE’s Facebook page in late December 2023 sought feedback from stakeholders with connections to the Arkansas School for the Deaf and the Arkansas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired. Failure to ensure the survey was accessible to plaintiff’s members resulted in “limited responses and inadequate feedback from the target audience,” the complaint states.
Not making the survey accessible by including American Sign Language (ASL) translations and audio descriptions and related auxiliary aids violates both the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, according to the lawsuit. This “unlawful discrimination” denied plaintiff’s members their right to civic participation, the suit says.
“Defendants’ discriminatory conduct effectively silenced an entire community’s voice in matters directly affecting their lives and education,” the complaint reads. “Without immediate court intervention, Plaintiff’s members will face barriers to meaningful engagement with the policymakers whose decisions affect their community.”
The complaint asks the court to issue an order requiring defendants to publish an identical survey that’s accessible; enjoin defendants from relying on the results of the original survey in policy decisions; legislative recommendations and administrative actions regarding the two schools; and declare any actions taken based on the inaccessible survey are deficient and must be reconsidered following the completion of an accessible survey.
The state has a duty to communicate to all of its citizens, and excluding deaf and blind Arkansans from the ADE survey “is even more egregious” because the issues being addressed in the survey directly pertain to this community, Laux said during a virtual press conference Thursday.
“And while we wish we could say that this was just an oversight, a harmless accidental oversight by the state, we fear that it is instead a designed tactic used to eliminate the voices of these folks who have a real stake in what happens, and instead to use these inaccurate, incomplete survey results to justify political maneuvering and decisions that had already been made and preordained,” he said. “The survey was meant as a cover to lend legitimacy to maneuvers that the state was looking to engage in regardless of the survey.”
The poor conditions of the schools for deaf and blind students gained widespread attention following legislators’ tour of the dilapidated facilities in late 2023. Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders in Feb. 2024 announced plans to create a new “state-of-the-art facility” on the current campus and combine administrative functions.
Sanders cited the survey, saying the responses revealed three priorities that would inform the project – keeping the campus at its current location, providing resources for deaf and blind students beyond the Little Rock campus and addressing critical safety needs.
Lawmakers took steps Monday to combine the two schools by filing House Bill 1810. Nicole Walsh, who was named the School for the Deaf’s superintendent last year, told the House Education Committee Thursday the merger is an “administrative move so we can ensure cohesive services between the two schools.”
While the committee advanced HB 1810 on a unanimous voice vote, the lawsuit argues the bill removes numerous protections and specific provisions related to the operation of the schools. For example, employees would no longer be compensated for providing parent training or student services on the weekend or the evenings, according to the lawsuit.
The complaint also raises concerns about HB 1810’s proposal to combine the schools’ two boards of trustees into a single board consisting of five members appointed by the governor.
“The proposed bill eliminates the current statutory requirement that the board include one member who is a ‘deaf person who fluently utilizes deaf sign language’, and in so doing, effectively removes guaranteed deaf representation on the governing board,” the lawsuit states.
HB 1810 sponsor Rep. Joey Carr, R-Armorel, told the House Education Committee the single board of directors will represent both the deaf and blind students, and they will each have a parental advocate.
“In unifying these schools it will create greater security for safety, also a more effective instructional support for their individual learning needs,” he said.
In response to a request for comment on the lawsuit, an ADE spokesperson said the department doesn’t comment on active lawsuits. The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Kristine G. Baker.
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