Opinion ID: 145702
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Louisville

Text: 1. Before the Lawsuit, 1954 to 1972. In 1956, two years after Brown made clear that Kentucky could no longer require racial segregation by law, the Louisville Board of Education created a geography-based student assignment plan designed to help achieve school integration. At the same time it adopted an open transfer policy under which approximately 3,000 of Louisville's 46,000 students applied for transfer. By 1972, however, the Louisville School District remained highly segregated. Approximately half the district's public school enrollment was black; about half was white. Fourteen of the district's nineteen nonvocational middle and high schools were close to totally black or totally white. Nineteen of the district's forty-six elementary schools were between 80% and 100% black. Twenty-one elementary schools were between roughly 90% and 100% white. 2. Court-Imposed Guidelines and Busing, 1972 to 1991. In 1972, civil rights groups and parents, claiming unconstitutional segregation, sued the Louisville Board of Education in federal court. The original litigation eventually became a lawsuit against the Jefferson County School System, which in April 1975 absorbed Louisville's schools and combined them with those of the surrounding suburbs. (For ease of exposition, I shall still use Louisville to refer to what is now the combined districts.) After preliminary rulings and an eventual victory for the plaintiffs in the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, the District Court in July 1975 entered an order requiring desegregation. The order's requirements reflected a (newly enlarged) school district student population of about 135,000, approximately 20% of whom were black. The order required the school board to create and to maintain schools with student populations that ranged, for elementary schools, between 12% and 40% black, and for secondary schools (with one exception), between 12.5% and 35% black. The District Court also adopted a complex desegregation plan designed to achieve the order's targets. The plan required redrawing school attendance zones, closing 12 schools, and busing groups of students, selected by race and the first letter of their last names, to schools outside their immediate neighborhoods. The plan's initial busing requirements were extensive, involving the busing of 23,000 students and a transportation fleet that had to operate from early in the morning until late in the evening. For typical students, the plan meant busing for several years (several more years for typical black students than for typical white students). The following notice, published in a Louisville newspaper in 1976, gives a sense of how the district's race-based busing plan operated in practice: Louisville Courier Journal, June 18, 1976 (reproduced in J. Wilkinson, From Brown to Bakke: The Supreme Court and School Integration 1954-1978, p. 176 (1979)). The District Court monitored implementation of the plan. In 1978, it found that the plan had brought all of Louisville's schools within its `guidelines' for racial composition for at least a substantial portion of the [previous] three years. It removed the case from its active docket while stating that it expected the board to continue to implement those portions of the desegregation order which are by their nature of a continuing effect. By 1984, after several schools had fallen out of compliance with the order's racial percentages due to shifting demographics in the community, the school board revised its desegregation plan. In doing so, the board created a new racial guideline, namely a floating range of 10% above and 10% below the countywide average for the different grade levels. The board simultaneously redrew district boundaries so that middle school students could attend the same school for three years and high school students for four years. It added magnet programs at two high schools. And it adjusted its alphabet-based system for grouping and busing students. The board estimated that its new plan would lead to annual reassignment (with busing) of about 8,500 black students and about 8,000 white students. 3. Student Choice and Project Renaissance, 1991 to 1996. By 1991, the board had concluded that assigning elementary school students to two or more schools during their elementary school years had proved educationally unsound and, if continued, would undermine Kentucky's newly adopted Education Reform Act. It consequently conducted a nearly year-long review of its plan. In doing so, it consulted widely with parents and other members of the local community, using public presentations, public meetings, and various other methods to obtain the public's input. At the conclusion of this review, the board adopted a new plan, called Project Renaissance, that emphasized student choice. Project Renaissance again revised the board's racial guidelines. It provided that each elementary school would have a black student population of between 15% and 50%; each middle and high school would have a black population and a white population that fell within a range, the boundaries of which were set at 15% above and 15% below the general student population percentages in the county at that grade level. The plan then drew new geographical school assignment zones designed to satisfy these guide-lines; the district could reassign students if particular schools failed to meet the guidelines and was required to do so if a school repeatedly missed these targets. In respect to elementary schools, the plan first drew a neighborhood line around each elementary school, and it then drew a second line around groups of elementary schools (called clusters). It initially assigned each student to his or her neighborhood school, but it permitted each student freely to transfer between elementary schools within each cluster provided that the transferring student (a) was black if transferring from a predominantly black school to a predominantly white school, or (b) was white if transferring from a predominantly white school to a predominantly black school. Students could also apply to attend magnet elementary schools or programs. The plan required each middle school student to be assigned to his or her neighborhood school unless the student applied for, and was accepted by, a magnet middle school. The plan provided for open high school enrollment. Every 9th or 10th grader could apply to any high school in the system, and the high school would accept applicants according to set criteriaone of which consisted of the need to attain or remain in compliance with the plan's racial guidelines. Finally, the plan created two new magnet schools, one each at the elementary and middle school levels. 4. The Current Plan: Project Renaissance Modified, 1996 to 2003. In 1995 and 1996, the Louisville School Board, with the help of a special Planning Team, community meetings, and other official and unofficial study groups, monitored the effects of Project Renaissance and considered proposals for improvement. Consequently, in 1996, the board modified Project Renaissance, thereby creating the present plan. At the time, the district's public school population was approximately 30% black. The plan consequently redrew the racial guidelines, setting the boundaries at 15% to 50% black for all schools. It again redrew school assignment boundaries. And it expanded the transfer opportunities available to elementary and middle school pupils. The plan forbade transfers, however, if the transfer would lead to a school population outside the guideline range, i.e., if it would create a school where fewer than 15% or more than 50% of the students were black. The plan also established Parent Assistance Centers to help parents and students navigate the school selection and assignment process. It pledged the use of other resources in order to encourage all schools to achieve an African-American enrollment equivalent to the average district-wide African-American enrollment at the school's respective elementary, middle or high school level. And the plan continued use of magnet schools. In 1999, several parents brought a lawsuit in federal court attacking the plan's use of racial guidelines at one of the district's magnet schools. They asked the court to dissolve the desegregation order and to hold the use of magnet school racial guidelines unconstitutional. The board opposed dissolution, arguing that the old dual system had left a demographic imbalance that prevent[ed] dissolution. In 2000, after reviewing the present plan, the District Court dissolved the 1975 order. It wrote that there was overwhelming evidence of the Board's good faith compliance with the desegregation Decree and its underlying purposes. It added that the Louisville School Board had treated the ideal of an integrated system as much more than a legal obligationthey consider it a positive, desirable policy and an essential element of any well-rounded public school education. The Court also found that the magnet programs available at the high school in question were not available at other high schools in the school district. It consequently held unconstitutional the use of race-based targets to govern admission to magnet schools. And it ordered the board not to control access to those scarce programs through the use of racial targets. 5. The Current Lawsuit, 2003 to the Present. Subsequent to the District Court's dissolution of the desegregation order (in 2000) the board simply continued to implement its 1996 plan as modified to reflect the court's magnet school determination. In 2003, the petitioner now before us, Crystal Meredith, brought this lawsuit challenging the plan's unmodified portions, i.e., those portions that dealt with ordinary, not magnet, schools. Both the District Court and the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit rejected Meredith's challenge and held the unmodified aspects of the plan constitutional.