Kimberly Davis, University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff
Davis should know: Relocating here in June 2022, after a nine-year tenure as a professor of special education at Arkansas State University, she recalled, “People were like, ‘Why are you going to Pine Bluff?’ I said, ‘You don’t see what I see. I see potential. And where there is potential, that could be success.’”
‘Every kid here has a voice’
For parent Kazmira Davis (no relation to Kimberly), the moment she knew her kids belonged at the school was in 2018, when her daughter sat for skills tests as one of the school’s first kindergartners. She tested in the second- and third-grade levels in reading and math, respectively. Since then, Davis said, she’s always tested at least a year above grade level. “She hasn’t been stagnant since.”
Kazmira Davis, Pine Bluff parent
Nor have her two younger siblings, who are also testing above grade level.
“Our kids have an environment where they feel like they matter,” said Davis, who runs a tutoring and college counseling business. “Every kid here has a voice.”
The approach amounts to what she calls “Go mode,” a constant challenge to both students and teachers to push the limits of what’s possible.
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Ten-year-old Kylie, Davis’s oldest at the school, is now a fifth-grader. She pointed out that she has earned straight A’s since kindergarten and has no plans to earn anything less than A’s going forward. “I like the teachers and I have a lot of friends there,” she said.
Kylie Davis poses in one of the shirts that she designed for her family’s Christian-oriented clothing line. (Courtesy of Kazmira Davis)
She wants to go into clothing design and has already created two shirts for her family’s Christian-oriented clothing line. She said teachers focus a lot on helping students figure out what they need to be successful once they graduate.
“Some days in school, they’ll ask you what you want to do when you grow up, and then we’ll have an essay that we have to write,” she said.
Rebecca Newby, one of the school’s academy directors — a job equivalent to an assistant principal — grew up in Pine Bluff and was educated in a district that was long ago swallowed up during one of many rounds of consolidations. In four years, she attended five high schools. She graduated from Pine Bluff High School in 2013, and taught for four years in the nearby Watson Chapel district, remembering that the only times parents were invited on campus were for orientation and parent-teacher conferences, she said. “And those were required days.”
At Friendship Aspire, parent nights are packed, she said. “You can’t even get down the street” because of all the cars parked along the school’s fence-lined street.
Perhaps most importantly, she and others said, students here, about 98% of whom are Black, are immersed — often for the first time — in teaching by well-trained Black instructors, which research shows can have many benefits. In March, researchers at the University of California and the University of North Carolina reported that Black boys, especially from low-income families, are less likely to be referred for special education when they have Black teachers.
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Many of Friendship Aspire’s teachers grew up here and were trained at the local branch of the University of Arkansas, an historically Black university. Overall, about 90% of Friendship Aspire staffers are Black.
“I do see it as a long-standing change agent that Pine Bluff has needed for a long time,” said Newby.
‘An exporter of talent’
Many see Friendship Aspire and its sister schools as part of a long-term, perhaps even multi-generational, effort to restore Pine Bluff to its former glory as a haven for well-educated, prosperous families.
But even as the school radiates a contagious, productive energy, it can hardly make up for the loss that so clearly lies at the heart of this community.
Pine Bluff’s Southern Mercantile Co. in 1902. The city was once a thriving commercial center that in 1900 had the fourth largest concentration of Black wealth in America. (NYPL)
Each morning, Mary Ann Lee turns the key to her storefront cafe, Indigo Blue, on a quiet side street off Pine Bluff’s once prosperous Main Street. Originally a dress shop built in 1883, the renovated building now features Instagram-worthy high ceilings and stylish, comfortable seating that wouldn’t be out of place in a college-town cafe. Jazz plays on the stereo and historic civil rights memorabilia, lovingly collected over decades by Lee herself, cover virtually every wall. At the back of the room, an eclectic assortment of books, mostly from Lee’s personal collection, comprise what amounts to an ad-hoc used bookstore.
But as cozy and inviting as Indigo Blue is, the shop looks out onto abandoned storefronts in nearly every direction. A cake shop opened next door a few years ago, and an engraver now operates on the other side of Lee’s cafe, but these few establishments, plus one or two nearby, amount to the largest concentration of functioning businesses for blocks.
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It wasn’t always this way.
Just a century ago, the scholar and civil rights pioneer W.E.B. Dubois surveyed the city and found that Pine Bluff had the fourth largest concentration of Black wealth in America. In 1900, a city directory listed 235 Black businesses.
W.E.B. Du Bois
In 1913, the 23-mile-long Dollarway Road, the first concrete road in the South, opened here, reaching about halfway to Little Rock. Drivers would actually ship their cars in by rail to drive on the bump-free, high-tech road.
For generations, a passenger railway station greeted visitors in the center of downtown, as did the magnificent six-story neoclassical Pines Hotel and a Black-owned streetcar line.
In the late 1950s, Lee, the cafe owner, recalled, “Pine Bluff used to be ‘the thing,’” a bustling little city with department stores, movie theaters, amusements, a horse racing track and an annual carnival. “You couldn’t even walk on the sidewalks, there’d be so many people,” she recalled.
Mary Ann Lee, who bought an 1883 building originally built as a dress shop and now owns Indigo Blue, a cafe that is one of the few businesses still operating downtown. (Greg Toppo/The 74)
The city now has exactly zero movie theaters. The streetcar, department stores and amusements are all long gone. Rail service ended in 1968 and the Pines closed in 1970.
After the loss of much of the domestic cotton industry, as well as decades of disinvestment from manufacturers and government, families moved away, abandoning not just businesses but homes. Block after block of crumbling buildings now haunt the quiet streets. The city’s population has never exceeded its 1970s census numbers.
Lee, who attended city schools, remembered that teachers pushed her and other Black students to excel “because integration was coming and we needed to show that we could compete, and that we can learn just like any other kid.”
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She left town in the late 1970s, and would go on to a long career promoting human rights and civil rights in Michigan, first with Detroit’s city government and later as a leader of the state NAACP. In that sense, she’s like a lot of Pine Bluff residents who took their good educations and got out.
Over the past century or more, the city has seen a diaspora of smart people leave and, in many cases, never return, said local historian Lori Walker Guelache. They included George Edmund Haynes, co-founder of the National Urban League, and businessman O.W. Gurley, who founded Tulsa’s Greenwood district, otherwise known as “Black Wall Street.”
“We’ve done a great job of cultivating talent historically, but we haven’t done a great job of creating pathways for them to come back,” she said. “And so I guess you can say we’ve been an exporter of talent.”
A row of buildings across the street from Indigo Blue. Its owner wants to develop the spaces into commercial properties including an ice cream parlor and a martini bar. (Greg Toppo/The 74)
‘We found it’s a great city’
Those losses have eased somewhat in recent years, she and others said, with small upticks in population for most age brackets — except two: children, as well as adults aged 35 to 44. “So basically young families,” Walker Guelache said.
That reality, among others, drew Friendship to the region. It now runs 11 schools statewide. Already the operator of half a dozen well-respected charter schools in Washington, D.C., it came here in 2018 at the invitation of the Bentonville-based Walton Family Foundation, which admired its work creating a pipeline of Black teachers — especially Black male teachers — in D.C., said Kim Davis, a senior advisor who leads Walton’s work in the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta.
An entrance to Friendship Aspire Academy, which was built partially from a repurposed church’s cast concrete sanctuary. (Greg Toppo/The 74)
“They’re really good at not only saying, ‘Hey, we think that there is a talented person at the beginning of their career, but we also have a development program for those individuals,’” he said.
Davis also said Friendship’s willingness and ability to partner with the local University of Arkansas campus was critical to attracting more Black teachers to schools here.
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But the decision on where to invest was up to Friendship, said Phong Tran, its southern regional superintendent. “Pine Bluff has always been the city that no one wanted to touch,” he said. “But we found that it’s a great city.”
In many educators’ eyes, Friendship Aspire and the six other network schools — they include the new downtown elementary school and a new middle/high school — are leading the push to keep families here. Through its strategic takeovers and new openings, Friendship has quietly built a group of schools that nearly matches the number of remaining district schools, with plans to continue expanding.
A lot of what Friendship has done is to simply offer families a peek into what high-quality schools do, said Friendship Aspire Principal Jherrithan Dukes. Though not a Pine Bluff native, he attended college here at the University of Arkansas and worked at charter and traditional public schools in Little Rock before arriving in the fall of 2020.
Newby, the academic director, said Friendship’s policy to offer free before- and after-care from the beginning showed that it understood the community. “We have working parents that need the support,” she said. “And so we offer that free,” an anomaly in the city.
It doesn’t hurt that the Friendship schools offer nationally recognized curricula that are raising literacy and math skills in ways that other local schools have struggled to do, said Davis, the University of Arkansas dean.
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In the most recent state achievement tests, no district-run school earned a grade higher than a D; just 19.4% of third-graders districtwide proved “ready” or exceeding standards in math and 15.4% in reading.
At Friendship Aspire, a different trend is beginning to take shape: 75.9% of students scored “ready” or exceeding standards in math and 33.3% in reading, scores high enough to earn the school a respectable 70.7% rating, a solid C.
When Friendship expanded last year, one show of support was to build the new elementary school in the heart of downtown, partnering with the local public library, which was renovating its downtown building.
“When you want to revitalize a city, what better place to build a school than downtown?” said Tran, the regional superintendent. “There are a lot of parents who come to work downtown. So where are they going to drop their kids?”
For Pine Bluff, that comes with fraught considerations. The city ranks as one of the least safe in the U.S., with more than a dozen teens killed since 2020. So when they designed the new school, architects included a large outdoor space surrounded on all four sides by classrooms to keep students from having to leave the school’s confines to play outside.
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Students at Friendship Aspire Academy practice a cheer routine. (Greg Toppo/The 74)
Kay’Leah King, 12, a sixth-grader at Friendship STEM Academy, said she thinks a lot about safety, and worries about school shootings, which are often on the news.
Kay’Leah King (Courtesy of Friendship Schools)
She’s glad the school, like Friendship Aspire Academy, which she also attended, keeps its doors locked all day. “On every door that’s on the outside and in the office, you have to have a key code to get in,” she said. “And you can’t get in without it. You can’t get in through those doors without being let in.”
Best in the state
Dukes said many of his students’ parents vividly remember the substandard education they got in Pine Bluff just a few years ago — and don’t want a repeat experience with their kids.
As a result, they fiercely support the school, organizing events such as the annual “Trunk or Treat,” a Halloween tradition in which they park cars outside the school and essentially recreate house-to-house trick-or-treating for students who may not be able to do it otherwise. Several parents said the city’s violent crime rate makes them think twice about letting their kids go house-to-house each October.
Parents at Friendship Aspire Academy organize an annual “Trunk or Treat” event, a Halloween tradition that recreates house-to-house trick-or-treating for students who might not be able to do so in their neighborhoods. (Photos courtesy of Kazmira Davis)
The school is tidy and orderly. On a recent morning, Dukes patrolled the halls, reminding students to cross their arms in front of them as they pass between classrooms to keep their hands to themselves.
Davis, the Arkansas dean, said her students, teachers in training, push to work at Friendship Aspire and the other network schools, lured by their energy. In a sense, she said, salaries have become less important due to a 2023 state law that raised public school teachers’ minimum salaries from $36,000 to at least $50,000. That puts the burden on schools to support teachers in other ways.
People were like, ‘Why are you going to Pine Bluff?’ I said, ‘You don’t see what I see. I see potential.
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– Kimberly Davis, dean, School of Education, University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff
Last fall, Friendship brought in the D.C. coaching firm SchoolKit, which provides literacy coaches to work with small groups of students. The Arkansas Public Schools Resource Center also provides tutors and helps teachers pace lessons. And the school partnered with the Detroit-based Center for Strategic Leadership, which helps teachers improve math instruction and provides retention bonuses for those who stick around.
More importantly, Friendship is offering what many here never got during their K-12 schooling: a plethora of well-trained Black educators.
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Countless adults here can recount the experience of attending school with mostly Black classmates but mostly white teachers. “Growing up, the majority of my teachers did not look like me,” said Friendship Aspire Academy Director Brianna Reynolds, who began here as a kindergarten teacher in 2018.
Brianna Reynolds, director, Friendship Aspire Academy
In many years, she said, her only Black teacher was her home economics teacher.
From kindergarten on up, Dukes and others said, Friendship principals prioritize hiring Black teachers. At the new Friendship high school, they comprise half of Principal Anitra Rogers’ staff. She recounted literally praying to God to provide the campus with the teachers it needed, “preferably with Black men.”
The result is a small but growing set of schools that are quietly changing people’s minds about the city, said Reynolds one recent morning. “It changes the narrative.”
As if to underscore the change, that morning as he chatted with Reynolds and other staffers in his office, Dukes received a flat cardboard parcel in the day’s mail. He sliced it open to reveal a gleaming glass plaque: Friendship Aspire had been named a U.S. News & World Report “Best Elementary School.” The magazine, which ranks schools and colleges nationwide, named Friendship Aspire the 28th-best elementary school in Arkansas and its No. 1 charter elementary school.
As he scanned the plaque, colleagues cheered. Dukes beamed, saying repeatedly, “There it is. There it is.” He held it up to pose for photos. “There it is.”
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Friendship Aspire Principal Jherrithan Dukes celebrates as he receives a plaque honoring the school as one of the best in Arkansas. (Greg Toppo/The 74)
‘We’re raising a great generation of students’
Meanwhile, in downtown Pine Bluff, small signs of life are beginning to peek through. A new aquatic center, proposed in 2011, finally opened in 2019. The historic hotel’s owner sold it for $1 to a nonprofit named Pine Bluff Rising, which plans to revitalize it.
And Lee, the cafe owner, is now thinking about renovating the second story of her building to create a loft apartment for her retirement. Forever busy scheduling speakers at the cafe and working with other building owners on downtown preservation projects, she’s excited about the new possibilities.
Each morning, she looks out her renovated storefront windows and across West Barraque Street onto a block of three abandoned, brick-wrapped buildings. Their owner says he’s finally ready to renovate them, with plans for an ice cream shop, loft apartments and a martini bar.
But all of these efforts, locals said, need families to stick around.
Friendship continues to explore new schools and new takeovers, even as the State Board of Education last fall voted unanimously to return full local control of Pine Bluff schools to the district. State officials will continue monitoring the district’s academic and fiscal performance for another year.
For his part, Dukes, the elementary school principal, is cautiously optimistic — and patient. He believes real change in the city may take years.
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“I feel like once these kids get older and get grown and come back to this community, we’re going to see a real take-off in the city,” he said. He’s not actually sure he’ll be around to see it, but he’s convinced a rebirth is at hand. “I feel like we’re raising a great generation of students.”
Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to The 74. The foundation also provided early financial support to the Friendship Education Foundation to set up a charter network in Pine Bluff.
This story first appeared at The 74, a nonprofit news site covering education. Sign up for free newsletters from The 74 to get more like this in your inbox.
FAYETTEVILLE — The number on the flag at John McDonnell Field increased again Thursday at a celebration of the Arkansas men’s track and field outdoor national championship that was clinched six days earlier in Oregon.
The latest win was Arkansas’ 44th national championship recognized by the NCAA in men’s track and field and cross country. Outdoor titles won in 2004 and 2005 were vacated as part of NCAA sanctions against the program in 2009.
When coupled with the nine national championships won by Arkansas’ women, the Razorbacks claim 53 national championships — hence the “53” flag that now flies high above Meadow Street.
It was the second time in three months the white number was changed on the 10-foot tall by 15-foot wide red flag. The Razorbacks’ men won the NCAA indoor championship in March.
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“This is becoming a pretty frequent occurrence that we really enjoy,” Arkansas athletics director Hunter Yurachek said in remarks to the assembled crowd. “It’s a great tradition for our track and field program.”
Arkansas athletics director Hunter Yurachek (left) speaks to the crowd as he stands next to men’s track and field coach Doug Case during a flag raising ceremony Thursday, June 18, 2026, in Fayetteville. (Hank Layton/WholeHogSports)
It was the fifth time the flag number was updated since a “47” flag was first raised earlier this decade. The men and women swept the 2023 NCAA indoor meet, and the women won national titles indoors and outdoors in 2024.
“This flag idea was born out of the fact that when our athletes walk out of their locker rooms, they see what we’re about,” said Chris Bucknam, a two-time indoor national champion coach of the Arkansas men who retired in December. “This is what we strive for. It’s not to show off or anything else, but it’s a message to our men and women athletes.
“It’s a perfect symbol of honoring the past and the incentive of, ‘Hey, now let’s put 54 up, and 55.’”
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For Yurachek, a dominant year in track and field validated his decision to elevate Doug Case, an 18-year Arkansas assistant, to the head coaching job when Bucknam retired.
“I think it was an easy transition when Coach Buck said he was going to retire, to hand the baton over to Doug and let him take this,” Yurachek said. “We knew we had an opportunity to have a really successful year, but as a [new] head coach he still had to make sure he put all the pieces together, both in the indoor and the outdoor.
“He had a plan in place for this program to continue the tradition and the legacy that Coach [John] McDonnell started a long time ago, Coach Bucknam continued and now [Case] is stepping right into that. We hadn’t won an outdoor championship in 23 years, and so for him to be able to put the pieces to that puzzle together this year was amazing.”
Case, 64, had previous head coaching experience at Drake in the late 1990s and had turned down multiple head coaching opportunities to remain an assistant at Arkansas.
“He was probably more qualified for a head coaching position than any coach in any sport in the NCAA in 2025-26,” Bucknam said. “I knew it and Hunter was able to see it, thank goodness.”
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When Arkansas won the NCAA outdoor meet last Friday, Yurachek said his first call was to congratulate Case. His second call was to Bucknam, who oversaw the roster assembly and coached the team in practice for several months before the indoor season began.
“He was very much a part of this,” Yurachek said.
Former Arkansas men’s track coach Chris Bucknam acknowledges the crowd during a flag raising ceremony Thursday, June 18, 2026, in Fayetteville. (Hank Layton/WholeHogSports)
Bucknam, who still lives in Fayetteville, attended Thursday’s ceremony and received a warm ovation when he was recognized during Yurachek’s remarks to the crowd. But he was quick to deflect credit to Case.
“He did a masterful job to take over when he took over midstream,” Bucknam said. “I thought we did it the right way and the timing was perfect, but then somebody’s got to execute it, and Doug executed it. There were no guarantees that I would have been able to pull this off, but obviously I’m extremely proud.
“I was close to the team — my name was probably on everybody’s scholarship papers — but it was Doug’s team and he did a masterful job of navigating the big four championships.”
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Arkansas went 4-0 at the SEC and NCAA indoor and outdoor meets. That had not happened since the 2005 season when the Razorbacks’ NCAA outdoor title was abdicated.
“It was just fun stepping back and watching something that you were part of, but watching the new generation kick ass like they did,” Bucknam said.
Arkansas had an NCAA-best 21 entries into the outdoor meet, but the Razorbacks suffered a setback on Day 1 when multiple athletes failed to qualify in the 200 meters and 110 hurdles, including star sprinter Jelani Watkins. The two-sport athlete — Watkins is also a receiver on the Razorbacks’ football team — let up at the end of the 200 and failed to qualify for the finals. Watkins was projected to score points in the final, and perhaps win individual gold.
“If you watched the meet, you saw it didn’t exactly go our way at the beginning,” Case said. “We were fighting tooth and nail the whole way. Nobody ever quit, nobody laid down, nobody thought we couldn’t do this thing.”
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Arkansas men’s track and field coach Doug Case (left) and members of the Razorbacks’ outdoor team stand with SEC and NCAA trophies during a flag raising ceremony Thursday, June 18, 2026, in Fayetteville. (Hank Layton/WholeHogSports)
Arkansas scored 56 points and won comfortably without an individual or relay title. Georgia finished in second place with 49 points.
“We had a great amount of depth on the team,” Case said Monday on the WholeHogSports Daily Podcast. “We were good from the 100 to the 10K. We just qualified so many people into the meet … that we had a little room for error.”
An estimated 150 to 200 people were in attendance at Thursday’s flag raising, which began at 4 p.m. Bucknam called the workday turnout “great” and “super important” to show support for an Olympic sport.
“These wins couldn’t have come at a better time,” Bucknam said. “As Doug said, we’re just trying to do our part to make Arkansas proud of a program that is national and global. … We’re getting it done on all levels and it’s extremely important that people see the value of what we’re trying to do here.”
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Matt Jones
mjones@wholehogsports.com
Matt Jones is the managing editor of WholeHogSports.com and hosts the WholeHogSports Daily Podcast. He is a member of the Football Writers Association of America and National Collegiate Baseball Writers Association, and voter for the Heisman Trophy. He has a bachelor’s and master’s degree in journalism from the University of Arkansas.
Arkansas students’ end-of-year test scores improved across grade levels and subject areas, state officials said Thurday, but most students still aren’t meeting performance targets.
Results from the Arkansas Teaching and Learning Assessment System exam, known as ATLAS, showed students’ overall proficiency rose from 36.9% in 2025 to 42.2% in 2026, according to an executive summary of the scores.
The number of students performing at the lowest level across all subjects declined from 27.3% in 2025 to 23.1% in 2026, according to the report.
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This is only the third year that Arkansas has used the ATLAS test, limiting direct comparisons to years before 2024. State Education Secretary Jacob Oliva has said the state shifted to ATLAS from its previous end-of-year test, the ACT Aspire, to better align measurement of student performance with Arkansas’ academic standards.
“The 2026 ATLAS exam scores confirm what we’re hearing from educators across the Natural State: Arkansas LEARNS is working and students across Arkansas are doing better because of it,” Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a news release.
Sanders’ signature legislative package on education, the LEARNS Act, mandated the state move to a new student test and adopt a new grading system for schools and districts. The state offers grants for districts to administer high-impact tutoring, and students who struggle to read can also qualify for supplemental literacy tutoring.
Under LEARNS, third grade students who don’t read at grade level will be held back, though school districts also may give students good-cause exemptions from the requirement. Early numbers suggest that large numbers of third graders in some districts will be promoted to fourth grade even though they fell short of the literacy standards.
LEARNS also includes the Educational Freedom Account program, which significantly expanded state taxpayer funding of student tuition and other costs related to private schools and homeschooling. Over 44,000 students received an Educational Freedom Account in the 2025-26 school year, the first year participation was open to all K-12 students.
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Participants in the school choice program are not required to take the ATLAS but still must take a national, norm-referenced test each year.
In the 2024-25 school year, Arkansas students showed slight increases in subject mastery overall, with the most notable increases in math and science.
The results come roughly a month after the release of the 2026 Education Scorecard, a cross-state analysis that says schools across the nation — including Arkansas — are in the midst of a “learning recession” that began in 2013. Math and reading performance declined over the past decade in most places, according to that report. Though the longer-term trend is downward nationally, the Education Scorecard says student performance has partly rebounded from the damage done by COVID-19.
As of 2024, Arkansas’ math and reading scores continued to lag national averages on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test often called the Nation’s Report Card.
Students who take ATLAS are classified into one of four performance levels, with level four being the highest. Level three indicates mastery of grade-level content, according to the report released Thursday. It describes each level as follows:
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Level 4: Students demonstrate an advanced understanding of the knowledge and skills required of the grade-level standards. These students are on track for career and college, and demonstrate readiness for advanced and accelerated content at the next grade/course.
Level 3: Students demonstrate a proficient understanding of knowledge and skills and show mastery of grade-level standards. These students are on track for career and college, and demonstrate readiness for content at the next grade/course.
Level 2: Students demonstrate a basic understanding of knowledge and skills required of the grade-level standards and personalized support and intervention may be needed to access content taught in the next grade/course.
Level 1: Students demonstrate limited understanding of knowledge and skills required of the grade-level standards and will require significant support/scaffolding and intervention to access content taught at the next grade/course.
Check back for updates.
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With support from the ADG Community Journalism Project, LEARNS reporter Josh Snyder covers the impact of the law on the K-12 education system across the state, and its effect on teachers, students, parents and communities. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette maintains full editorial control over this article and all other coverage. View all LEARNS Act coverage at arkansasonline.com/learns
Josh Snyder
jsnyder@adgnewsroom.com
Josh Snyder reports on how the state LEARNS Act has changed public education, including on the local level. His position is funded by the ADG Community Journalism Project. A Phoenix native and graduate of the Clinton School of Public Service, Josh has worked for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette since 2018.
LITTLE ROCK, AR (KATV) — A North Little Rock pathology lab and several of its current and former owners are paying $30 million to settle federal allegations that the company used unlawful kickbacks and ordered testing that wasn’t medically necessary.
Advanced Pathology Solutions PLLC, formerly known as Advanced Pathology Solutions LLC, and its management services organization, APS MSO LLC — together referred to as APS — agreed to the settlement with the United States. The agreement also includes current and former owners Kevin Hannah, Donell Burkett and Daniel Hunter Pledger.
“Healthcare referrals must be based on the best decision for patients, not the influence of kickbacks,” said Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate of the Justice Department’s Civil Division. “This settlement demonstrates the Department’s commitment to hold accountable both corporations and individuals who profit from improper kickback arrangements and who burden federal healthcare programs with claims for medically unnecessary services.”
The settlement resolves allegations laid out in a federal complaint filed April 8 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas. The United States alleged that from 2015 through July 2022, APS and its owners violated the False Claims Act by providing unlawful kickbacks to gastroenterology practices to induce referrals of pathology testing to APS, resulting in false claims to federal health care programs.
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According to the complaint, APS and its owners developed a business model that involved setting up and managing limited-purpose laboratories — known as “lean labs” — inside gastroenterology practices nationwide. Those practices could bill for preparing and staining biopsy specimen slides, while the slides were then shipped to APS’s lab in North Little Rock for pathologist interpretation and review. Federal officials alleged that in exchange for various benefits furnished by APS, the gastroenterology practices agreed to exclusively refer their patients to APS, creating improper financial relationships that amounted to kickbacks.
“Fraud against the taxpayer is rampant and insidious and when discovered must be held accountable. Engineering kickbacks to result in unnecessary medical testing which is then paid for by the United States taxpayer is unacceptable and once discovered as with APS, will result in lengthy investigation and review, and ultimately a significant settlement amount as demonstrated by this settlement,” said U.S. Attorney Jonathan D. Ross for the Eastern District of Arkansas. “Our office will continue to work with Main Justice to detect and deter any similar schemes and then hold the wrongdoers accountable under the law.”
The United States also alleged APS and its owners submitted — and caused the submission of — claims to federal health care programs for unnecessary testing. Specifically, the government said APS directed lean lab personnel to automatically order certain special tests, called “special stains,” before a pathologist reviewed a routine test, a hematoxylin and eosin stain, to determine whether additional testing was needed. The complaint alleged the protocol led to special stains that were not medically reasonable and necessary and were ineligible for Medicare coverage or reimbursement. In many cases, the government said APS also ordered additional “confirmatory” immunohistochemical testing that was not medically necessary.
“Kickbacks and medically unnecessary testing don’t just violate the law — they endanger patients and drain critical federal health care funds,” said Acting Deputy Inspector General for Investigations Scott J. Lampert of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General. “Schemes like this erode trust in the health care system and divert resources away from those who truly need care. HHSOIG will move swiftly and aggressively with our law enforcement partners to uncover these abuses and hold every responsible party accountable.”
In addition to the allegations in the April 8 complaint, the settlement also resolves claims that from Nov. 1, 2018, to Nov. 30, 2020, APS and CEO Kevin Hannah knowingly and willfully provided unlawful kickbacks to Richard Sorgnard through volume-based commission payments to induce referrals for epidermal nerve fiber density testing. The United States contends APS paid Sorgnard 4% of all payments APS collected for ENFD testing he referred, and that the arrangement violated the Anti-Kickback Statute and resulted in false claims under the False Claims Act. Sorgnard previously entered into a settlement with the government to resolve related claims.
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“Any entity that participates in health care and reaps illicit profits by taking advantage of and violating the trust given by Medicare and Medicaid programs must be held accountable,” said U.S. Attorney Troy Rivetti for the Western District of Pennsylvania. “This settlement is notice that such illegal conduct simply will not be tolerated.”
As part of the resolution, APS entered into a five-year Corporate Integrity Agreement with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General. The agreement requires APS to implement auditing and accountability provisions, including a compliance program, training and education requirements, and a review of physician referral relationships.
The complaint followed three lawsuits originally filed under the whistleblower provisions of the False Claims Act, which allows private parties to sue on behalf of the United States and potentially receive a portion of the recovery. The consolidated cases are United States ex rel. Watkins v. Advanced Pathology Solutions, No. 4:20-cv-1110 (E.D. Ark.); United States ex rel. Aucoin v. Advanced Pathology Solutions, No. 4:21-cv-277 (E.D. Ark.); and United States ex rel. Paulsen v. Advanced Pathology Solutions, LLC, No. 3:22-cv-00652-JPG (E.D. Ark.).
The settlement comes after a $4.75 million settlement reached earlier this year with Atlanta Gastroenterology Associates, a former APS client.
The Justice Department’s Civil Division, Commercial Litigation Branch, Fraud Section and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Arkansas are handling the matter, along with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Pennsylvania. The matter was handled by Fraud Section attorneys Evan Ballan, Jeff McSorley and Kelley Hauser, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jamie Goss Dempsey for the Eastern District of Arkansas, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Skirtich for the Western District of Pennsylvania.
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Officials also pointed to broader federal efforts to combat health care fraud, noting that tips about potential fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement can be reported to HHS at 800-HHS-TIPS (800-447-8477).
Former Arkansas men’s track coach Chris Bucknam acknowledges the crowd during a flag raising ceremony Thursday, June 18, 2026, in Fayetteville. (Hank Layton/WholeHogSports)
