Parents in the Jacksonville North Pulaski School District are now pushing for greater transparency.

JACKSONVILLE, Ark. — Parents in the Jacksonville North Pulaski School District (JNPSD) will soon see a new advisory group made up of fellow parents.

The district says that the goal is to give parents a stronger voice and increase transparency across the district.

The JNPSD Parent Action Coalition sent a letter to the school board with 19 demands on the list. 

One section of the letter has four demands about governance and oversight, in that the group asked for an independent oversight committee made up of parents, and the school district responded.

“We’re hoping to see them match that as closely as possible. We just, we’re just really looking for the oversight component of that, and we’re not interested in advisory,” said Kristian St. Clair, a member of the JNPSD Parent Action Coalition.

When the JNPSD Parent Action Coalition sent its demand letter in December, the proposed outline asked for parents, educators, and community members to monitor the board. The district said that parent advisory groups are meant to create a space for parents to communicate with district leadership.

“It would be nice for all of the parents to know exactly what’s going on and have something in a format that’s a quick read and you’re able to digest it without spending your entire evening on it,” St. Clair described.

The group also asked the district to issue a quarterly update about safety procedures and any changes or updates. The parents said this is the next action item they’d like to see implemented.

“So the safety newsletter, with all of the safety and incident reports, multiple different ways to communicate safety, the trends that are happening, the patterns, and how often the police department or the sheriff’s office have to be involved in our school and where we can kind of, you know, get those numbers down a little bit,” St. Clair added.

Parents said the relationship between the district and parents has been broken after the district failed to notify parents about the arrest of former Bayou Meto Elementary School custodian Harold Butchart, who is accused of sexually assaulting several young female students. The parents say they’d like to see the changes for the community.

“We’re interested in working with the community as a whole. We want to work with anyone who is interested in keeping our kids safe and moving the school district forward in a more positive manner, to where there’s a more positive relationship between parents and the school board. That’s what we want. We want to reestablish our the relationship between parents and the school board, it stands, whenever everything settles,” said Camille Vollmar, a member of the JNPSD Parent Action Coalition.

The goal of the Parent Action Coalition has been to create a hub to help parents navigate the school district.

“We our goal is to be a resource hub for parents. We want to be a resource that they can come to find out how to handle situations appropriately, whether it’s dealing with in a more professional manner, whether it’s dealing with them just not knowing how to navigate the system or fill out the forms, or, you know, all of those things we want to be able to point parents in the right direction, to actually get something accomplished and ease some of the frustration that our parents are feeling about the school system,” Vollmar said.

We did reach out to the school district about the Parent Advisory Group, and the JNPSD district provided the following statement:

“The JNPSD Parent Advisory Group is a great step toward strengthening the connection between our schools and families. It creates a consistent space for parents to share ideas, ask questions, and provide feedback, while also learning more about what’s happening across the district. We look forward to the conversations, insights, and collaboration that will come from this group.”

The Parent Action Coalition is hosting a community outreach meeting on February 28, 2026, at 3:00 p.m. at Landmark Baptist Church.

There will be multiple resources there for parents, and the district hopes to hold the first parent advisory group meeting sometime before March. 

The plan is for the committee to meet once each quarter.