Conway School District under fire for controversy concerning employees paid for time lost to four-day work week

Five Conway School District taxpayers sued the district Tuesday in Faulkner County Circuit Court, alleging administrators paid certain employees for days they did not work without School Board approval.

Attorneys Joey McCutchen and Stephen Napurano filed the illegal-exaction lawsuit on behalf of Jimmie Cavin, Kay Hall, Tami Marsh, Pattie Randall and Alyce Hardee. The complaint says administrators set four-day summer workweeks in 2025 and 2026, closing district offices on Fridays while employees with contracts requiring 240 workdays a year continued to receive regular pay.

The schedules also included additional office closures.

The suit puts the pay tied to those summer closure dates at about $132,304.83 in 2025 and $110,234.85 in 2026, or $242,539.68 combined. Further review found sixteen additional paid days not worked because district calendars provided only 232 workdays rather than the required 240. Those days, together with an expanded look at the 2026 summer closures, raised the alleged illegal payments to $482,967.12.

Cavin submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for records showing the Conway School Board had approved the summer schedules and the additional closures. The district said it had no such records, according to the plaintiffs.

Administrators also treated hours reportedly worked at other times as covering the days off, the suit says. Those hours were never entered and applied to payroll, the School Board did not authorize the arrangement, and the district identified no board policy governing what administrators called flex time.

“Every dollar unlawfully spent is money that cannot be used to meet the needs of our teachers and children,” McCutchen said. “This very type of corruption is robbing our teachers of resources they desperately need to fulfill their vocation to educate our children.”

The retired educators among the plaintiffs have spent a combined 130 years in education, including 88 years in the Conway School District. They said they filed the case because they want to protect the district’s teachers and students.

Randall, Hall, Hardee and Marsh said in a joint statement that they had devoted the better parts of their lives to educating Conway’s children and could no longer stand by while the current administration, in their words, “brazenly robs our teachers, staff and students of the vital necessities they need in order to line the administration’s own pockets.”

The lawsuit asks the court to declare the practices unlawful and to bar them from continuing unless they receive lawful board approval. McCutchen and Napurano said they believe similar spending may exist in other Arkansas districts and described the Conway case as a first step toward holding administrators accountable.