Opinion ID: 500653
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: school segregation

Text: 71 Management and control of the Yonkers school district were entrusted to defendant Yonkers Board of Education. The Board, an independent municipal corporation subject to the control of New York State's Board of Regents and Commissioner of Education, consisted of nine members appointed by the mayor for staggered five-year terms. Its budget was subject to review by the Yonkers City Council. 72 At the liability trial, plaintiffs sought to show that students in Yonkers schools were segregated and that that segregation had been caused or enhanced principally by (1) the Board's general adherence to a neighborhood-school policy, with awareness of the City's practice of maintaining segregated neighborhoods; (2) other segregative actions of the Board with respect to (a) school openings, closings, and boundary changes, (b) faculty assignments, (c) special education classes, and (d) vocational programs; and (3) the Board's failure to take any of a number of recommended or otherwise appropriate steps to alleviate the growing school segregation. 73 Plaintiffs contended also that the segregative housing practices of the City were designed in part to achieve and preserve segregation in the schools. They sought to show that the City helped to maintain such school segregation also by, inter alia, the mayor's appointing to the Board persons known to advocate preservation of the segregated neighborhoods and neighborhood schools. 74
75 As of the 1980-81 school year, Yonkers had 23 elementary schools for grades K-5 or K-6; four middle schools for grades 6-8 or 7-8; two combined elementary and middle schools; four general academic high schools; and one vocational high school. In a number of these schools, special education classes were conducted for students with learning disabilities or emotional disturbances.
76 In 1980, the student enrollment in Yonkers public schools was approximately 37% minority. The percentage of minority enrollment had approximately doubled from 1970 to 1980, due in part to an increase in minority enrollment and in greater part to a decline in white enrollment: Yonkers Public School Student Population 77 White % White Minority % Minority 1967 .... 28,875 85 4,421 15 1970 .... 25,049 82 5,583 18 1975 .... 21,514 72 8,195 28 1980 .... 13,840 63 8,023 37 78 In 1980, only two of Yonkers's schools, one an elementary school located in Southwest and the other a middle school in Northwest, had student populations whose racial compositions approximated that of the system as a whole. The next most balanced schools had student populations that were, respectively, 21%, 45%, and 47% minority. The great majority of the schools were either disproportionately white or disproportionately minority. 79 At the elementary level, although 61% of the students were white, in 19 of Yonkers's 25 elementary schools the student populations were either more than 80% white or more than 80% minority. Some 85% of Yonkers's minority elementary school students attended nine schools in Southwest Yonkers. In addition, one elementary school in Northwest Yonkers had an 88% minority population. These 10 schools enrolled 92% of all of Yonkers's minority elementary school students. More than 55% of Yonkers's minority elementary school students attended just five Southwest schools, whose minority populations were 75%, 81%, 90%, 98%, and 98%. 80 Sixteen elementary schools were located outside of Southwest Yonkers. Of these, 14 had student populations that were at least 90% white; more than 70% of Yonkers's white elementary school students attended these 90%-white schools. Of the 11 elementary schools in East Yonkers, only one had a minority student population of more than 7%. 81 In Yonkers's middle schools, 62% of the students were white. Two of the six middle schools were located in East Yonkers and together enrolled only 62 minority students, or 5% of Yonkers's total middle school minority population; these two schools were, respectively, 94% and 96% white. Three middle schools were located in Southwest Yonkers and had minority student populations of 62%, 69%, and 94%. Nearly 80% of Yonkers's middle school minority students attended the three Southwest schools. Another 15% attended a middle school in Northwest. 82 About 70% of the students attending Yonkers public high schools, including the vocational high school (see Part A.II.A.3. below), were white. Of the four academic high schools, two were located in East Yonkers, one in Southwest, and one in Northwest. The two located in East Yonkers had student populations that were 91% and 98% white. The high school in Southwest had a student body that was 62% minority; it enrolled nearly two-thirds of all Yonkers minority students attending academic high schools.
83 The Yonkers special education program provided special classes for students with mental or physical handicaps, including those with learning disabilities or emotional disturbances. Beginning in the 1960's, there was a growing and disproportionate number of minority students in special education classes. These classes, especially those for the emotionally disturbed, were viewed by many teachers, school officials, and community members as a dumping ground for black children. In general, white children would be placed in a special class only after having been referred first to a school psychologist for an evaluation, then to the principal for review of that evaluation, then to the school district's special education screening committee on the handicapped for a final decision as to what type, if any, special program was appropriate. A black child whose teacher considered him or her disruptive, however, would often (for the sake of discipline) be consigned immediately by the teacher and the principal to a class for the emotionally disturbed, without prior reference to a psychologist and with no effort to determine whether other options might meet the child's needs. 84 As a result, in 1961, when regular classes in Yonkers elementary schools had a system-wide minority population of 10%, minorities made up 22% of the special education classes. By the 1971-72 school year, when the system-wide minority population was 20%, the minority children made up 40% of all special education classes and more than 70% of the classes for those with emotional disturbances. 85 Location of the special education classes did not follow the Board's usual neighborhood-school policy; rather, these classes were placed in schools that had space available to accommodate them. Since most of the schools with high minority populations tended to be more crowded, most of the available space was found in schools having virtually all-white student populations. The principals of many of the latter schools resisted the placement of special education classes in their schools for reasons that, in the opinion of a former director of the program, were race-related. Nonetheless, most of the special education classes were placed in schools having few other minority students. In 1972, for example, classes for some 78% of the children classified as emotionally disturbed were conducted in schools whose regular student populations were at least 97% white. Three-quarters of the students in these special classes were minorities. 86 In most of the schools, there was no mainstreaming of the special education classes into the general school population. Because special education assignments were made without regard to residence, the students were often bused long distances, often well over an hour's trip, and sometimes up to two hours, in each direction. Thus they arrived at school later than the regular students and departed earlier. In some instances they entered the school through separate entrances and were kept in classrooms located in secluded areas of the school. In one school, for example, they had to file down two flights below ground and pass through a boiler room to reach their classroom in the subbasement. Special education students also generally took their lunch, gym classes, and recesses separately from the regular students. To the extent that school officials allowed contact between the two groups, the interaction was often purposely negative. One witness who had been a regular student at a 98%-white elementary school in the late 1960's recalled her perception that all special education students were black and that they were held up to the regular students as examples of poor, bad behavior. Thus the special education students were perceived as different and bad. Another witness, a parent and PTA president, testified that her children had thought the words retard and nigger were interchangeable because the children's only knowledge of blacks was of special education students bused into their school. 87 Nor was the negative reaction to special education students limited to the school's other students. One of the special education teachers and coordinators testified that parents and community members had thrown rocks at her car and shouted Take your niggers and get out. 88 In 1972, the Board hired Dr. Gary Carman, a special education expert, to direct the program. At trial, he testified that Yonkers, by busing its special education students long distances and physically segregating them from the regular student population, had the most inhumane program for handicapped children [he] had ever seen anywhere. Dr. Carman knew of no causes, medical causes, social causes, biological causes that could possibly account for the disproportionate number of minorities placed in the classes for the emotionally disturbed. The disproportionate referral of minority students to special education classes eventually prompted an investigation by state and federal education officials. The conclusion of the United States Department of Education was that the Yonkers special education program subjected minority students to discrimination and violated their civil rights. 89 From 1972 to 1975, Dr. Carman attempted to improve the special education program by reducing the amount of busing, returning some special education students to regular classes, to an extent mainstreaming the special education students into the general school population, and reducing the incidence of virtually all-minority special classes in virtually all-white schools. After Dr. Carman left in 1975, however, these efforts lapsed and the system reverted to one of long-distance busing and placement of blocs of minority special education students in virtually all-white schools. Dr. Carman testified that where the total experience of white children with blacks was their exposure to those in special education classes, the white children would view the special education children as less worthy and could well generalize that to all blacks.
90 Prior to 1974, Yonkers had two specialized vocational high schools, Saunders Trade and Technical High School (Saunders), and the High School of Commerce (Commerce). Saunders offered technical courses such as auto mechanics, carpentry, and electricity; Commerce, which was closed in 1974, offered courses such as stenography, bookkeeping, cosmetology, food trades, and dressmaking. Both schools were located in Southwest Yonkers. Neither was subject to the Board's neighborhood policy and each accepted students from anywhere in the City. 91 Although precise statistics with regard to vocational school enrollment by race are not available for years prior to 1967, the trial testimony indicated that, prior to 1958, Saunders had a large minority enrollment. From the 1930's until approximately 1958, it had a reputation as a school for problem kids or for academically retarded pupils, or as a dumping ground for minority students. Many black students from Runyon Heights attended Saunders or Commerce instead of Roosevelt, the school nearest their homes, often encouraged by their guidance counselor to do so even if they wanted an academic program. Similar steering usually did not occur with respect to academically undistinguished white students. 92 In 1958, the Board decided to establish entrance requirements for Saunders and Commerce based on grades, achievement and aptitude test scores, recommendations, and discipline records. The criteria for admission were not precise, however, and final decisions lay within the discretion of the respective principals. Apparently these entrance requirements had the effect of changing the community's perception of the schools as inferior, and by the early 1970's, Saunders, whose capacity was roughly one-half that of the smallest academic high school, was receiving nearly twice as many applications as it could accept. 93 At the same time, Saunders's minority enrollment was decreasing substantially, due in part to the heightened entrance requirements, the acknowledged inferiority of the educational programs available in Southwest Yonkers schools, the subjectivity of the school officials' evaluation of the applicants' credentials, and the absence of any effort on the part of the Board to see that minority students, most of whom attended schools in Southwest Yonkers, had an equal opportunity to get into Saunders. Robert Alioto, the school system's superintendent from 1971 to 1975, and other school district officials believed that Saunders's selection process  'appeared to systematically exclude minority youngsters.'  624 F.Supp. at 1450. The Board, though aware of the systematic exclusion of minorities which resulted from the Saunders admissions process, did relatively little until the late 1970's to eliminate the discriminatory impact of the methods by which students were chosen. Id. at 1452. 94
95 In support of their contention that Yonkers's segregated school system provided minorities with lower quality education than was given to whites, plaintiffs offered evidence of inferior and generally overcrowded facilities at schools with high minority populations, and of high faculty turnover and a lower overall level of teacher experience in such schools.
96 School officials testified that adequate facilities at a school are important not only to a student's physical development but also to his ability to benefit from the instructional aspects of the educational process. Inadequate physical facilities, including space for recreation, can cause disciplinary problems and cause the community to perceive the school as inferior. According to Alioto, the Southwest Yonkers schools had probably the worst facilities that one could imagine. 97 The predominantly minority schools had smaller buildings and sites, particularly in the amount of playground and recreation areas for each school, than the predominantly white schools. For example, the site size of the five most heavily minority elementary schools averaged 1.83 acres; the average site size of the nine most heavily white elementary schools was 4.84 acres. At the minority schools averaging 1.83 acres, the average school population was 413 students. At the white schools averaging 4.84 acres, the average school population was 308 students. 98 The three predominantly minority middle schools, all in Southwest Yonkers, were located on property totaling 7.2 acres. The two predominantly white middle schools located in East Yonkers were on a total of 19 acres. The total number of students attending each group of schools was nearly identical: 1299 in the Southwest schools, and 1312 in the East Yonkers schools. During the 1970's, crowded conditions forced one Southwest middle school to use storage closets as classrooms. 99 The 62% minority high school in Southwest Yonkers was located on 8.0 acres. The high school in Northwest Yonkers, 47% minority, was located on 6.38 acres. The two high schools in East Yonkers, averaging 95% white student populations, were located on 12.64 and 23.41 acres respectively. A total of some 350 fewer students attended these two East Yonkers schools than attended the Northwest and Southwest schools.
100 Educators testified that it is generally desirable for a school to have a balance of experienced and newer teachers on its faculty and for its staff to be relatively stable from year to year. Relatively high rates of turnover and low levels of faculty experience are factors that contribute to a school's lower level of educational effectiveness. The evidence regarding the Yonkers public school system revealed that the predominantly minority schools in Southwest Yonkers had low levels of faculty stability, lower levels of teacher experience than the system-wide average, and produced the students with the lowest academic achievement test scores in the system. These schools also had much higher than average concentrations of minority staff as a result of a Board practice of race-based assignments. 101 The first minority teachers employed by the Yonkers school system, hired between 1946 and 1950, were assigned to School 1, then the only predominantly minority school in the system (91% minority student population in 1950). Until the late 1960's, the system had few minority teachers and no minority principals. The Board then began to recruit minorities, and the number of minority staff members (i.e., teachers, principals, and assistant principals) rose from 95 in 1967 (out of a total of 1416), to 174 by 1975. Consistently over the years, most of the minority staff members were assigned to the schools having the highest percentages of minority students. For example, in the 1967-68 school year, Yonkers had 28 elementary schools; seven of the eight with the highest percentages of minority students were assigned 40% of the minority staff members. In the 1972-73 school year, Yonkers had 30 elementary schools, including six whose student populations were predominantly minority. The Board assigned 61% of its minority staff members to these six schools. In the 1975-76 school year, Yonkers had 31 elementary schools, including nine whose minority student populations ranged from 60% to 98%. These schools enrolled 29% of all elementary students; they were assigned 75% of all elementary level minority teachers. 102 Similar patterns were evident in the middle and high schools. For example, in the 1972-73 school year, Yonkers had seven middle schools; the three that had the highest percentages of minority students had 34% of the City's total middle school enrollment but were assigned 69% of the Board's middle school minority staff members. In 1975-76, the City had eight middle schools; the four having the highest percentages of minority students, though enrolling only 43% of all middle school students, had assigned to them 81% of all middle school minority teachers. 103 The Board followed a similar practice in its assignments of minority principals. For example, at the elementary level in the 1973-74 school year, the City had six minority principals; four were assigned to schools whose minority student populations ranged from 68% to 96%. In the 1974-75 and 1975-76 school years, the City had five minority elementary school principals; in 1975-76 it also had one minority assistant principal; all of these persons were assigned to schools having minority student populations of 66% or higher. 104 While at no time was the faculty of any Yonkers school predominantly staffed by minority teachers, the disproportionate assignment of minority staff to schools having predominantly minority student populations increased the identification of those schools in terms of race. And to the extent that minority teachers were assigned to the virtually all-white schools of East Yonkers it was often to teach the special education classes, which themselves had become known as dumping grounds for minority students. The minority special education teachers were deliberately assigned to such schools because of the disproportionate number of minority students in Special Education classes. 624 F.Supp. at 1465. 105 Not surprisingly, in view of the assignment of a disproportionate number of the more recently hired minority teachers to the predominantly minority schools, the average level of teaching experience at those schools was usually lower than the system-wide average. In the year 1967-68, the system-wide average level of teacher experience was 8.45 years. In the elementary schools having minority student enrollments of 40% or higher, the teacher experience level averages ranged from 5.61 to 7.88 years. The only schools whose teachers averaged more than 10 years in experience were schools having 11% or less minority enrollment, four of which were less than 4% minority. 106 The disparity in teacher experience levels was aggravated in 1969 when the Board entered into a new collective bargaining agreement with the teachers' union. Notwithstanding the already clear trend of concentration of minority teachers in schools having predominantly minority student bodies, the Board agreed that before assigning any teacher hired from outside the school district to any vacant position within the system, teachers already employed within the system would be given the option, in order of their seniority, of transferring to the vacant position. Thus, as positions became available in East Yonkers schools, the most experienced teachers in Southwest Yonkers schools could, and often did, opt to change schools. 107 The effects in terms of minority staff concentration, staff turnover, and teacher experience levels were predictable. For example, School 10 was opened in 1972 as a predominantly minority, physically inferior elementary school in Southwest Yonkers (see Part A.II.E.2. below). Of the original 17 teachers, 15 were white; within two years, 14 had left the school. In the period 1971 to 1975, the total number of minority staff members employed by the City increased from 133 to 174; but in none of the 17 elementary schools having white student populations in excess of 90% did the number of minority teachers increase. Indeed, in 10 of these schools, the number of minority teachers actually declined; and the four schools that had had no minority teachers prior to 1971 still had none. 108 In 1971-72, when the system-wide average teaching experience was 7.15 years, the average levels of experience at six of the seven elementary schools having minority student enrollments of 40% or higher ranged from 3.33 to 6.19 years. In contrast, only two of the 13 elementary schools having white student enrollments of more than 95% had below-average teacher experience levels; four of the 13 had staffs averaging more than 10 years' experience. The disparity in teaching experience levels was, to an extent, decreased in 1976 when, because of the City's fiscal crisis, the Board laid off 250 teachers, a great number of whom were relatively inexperienced. But even by the school year 1979-80, when the system-wide average was 14.2 years, the average levels at the predominantly minority elementary schools ranged from 9.9 to 13.4 years. 109 In the 1969 collective bargaining agreement that gave teachers an option to transfer, on the basis of seniority, to vacant positions elsewhere in the system, the Board had reserved the right to compel a teacher to change schools, in certain enumerated circumstances, when judged to be in the best interest of the school system. The Board never sought to use this provision in order to decrease the concentration of minority teachers in schools with predominantly minority student populations. Indeed, in 1977, the Board agreed to additional limitations on its right to implement involuntary transfers of teachers. 110 As a result of the Board's race-based assignment practices, the eastward flow of the more senior teachers, and the Board's failure to take any steps to halt that flow or to correct the imbalance of its assignments, by 1980 most of the City's minority staff members were concentrated in one-quarter of the system's 36 schools. Of the City's 25 elementary schools, five that had minority student populations of 75-98% were assigned at least half of the system's elementary level minority teachers; no minority teachers whatever were assigned to five other schools, all of whose white-student enrollments exceeded 92%. Of the City's six middle schools, the three in Southwest Yonkers, which had minority student populations ranging from 62-94% and accounted for 42% of the total number of middle school students in the system, had 62% of the system's middle school minority teachers. Of the five high schools, the two that had the highest minority enrollments (47% and 62%) accounted for 46% of all the high school students in the system but had 77% of the system's high school minority teachers. 111
112 During the decades on which this litigation focused, the Board made many decisions with regard to opening and closing schools and realigning their attendance zones. Plaintiffs sought to show that many of these decisions evinced an intent to create or maintain segregation in the Yonkers public schools.
113 Among the attendance zone changes were several affecting Schools 16 and 25, elementary schools located in Northwest Yonkers, less than one mile apart. Between 1953 and 1968, the Board redrew the boundary between these two schools four times. In 1953, School 25 had a minority student population of 4%; that of School 16 was 0%. The 1953 boundary change resulted in the reassignment of 35 white students, and no minority students, from School 25 to School 16. Ten years later, the minority population of School 25 had risen to 14%; School 16 still had no minority students. A 1963 boundary change resulted in the reassignment of nine white students, and no minority students, from School 25 to School 16. In the following year, a boundary change resulted in the reassignment from School 25 of 23 white students and nine minority students, thereby bringing the minority population of School 16 to 2%. By 1968, Yonkers's system-wide percentage of minority students was about 15%, and School 25 had a minority population of 42%. A boundary change in that year resulted in the reassignment of six of its white students, and no minority students, to School 16. School 16's minority population was 1%. 114 The Board argued that these changes had been designed to avoid having the reassigned children traverse a steep hill between their homes and school. Board reassignments in other sections of the City, however, had been made though they forced the reassigned students to cope with similar topographical conditions, and in fact two of the boundary changes between School 25 and School 16 made the trip to school harder, not easier, for the students who were reassigned. No other explanation was offered by the Board. 115 A 1963 attendance zone change between Southwest Yonkers Schools 9 (15% minority) and 12 (42% minority) was similarly unexplained by race-neutral criteria. The attendance zone for School 9 was directly north of that for School 12. In 1963, the Board moved the boundary line farther north. While this change slightly lowered the minority percentage enrolled in School 12, it substantially lowered School 9's 15% minority percentage as it reassigned some 40% of School 9's minority students to School 12; even prior to the reassignment, School 12 had had the second-highest minority concentration in Yonkers. This boundary change was contraindicated by the relative student-capacities of the two schools. According to the Board's figures, prior to the change, only 77% of the capacity of School 9 was utilized; School 12 was 96% full. The boundary change caused School 12 to be overcrowded. 116
117 The Longfellow Middle School, located in Southwest Yonkers, has long been the Yonkers middle school with the highest percentage of minority students. In 1950, though only 12% of its students were minorities, these students constituted 41% of the City's entire minority middle school population. Housed in a relatively small facility with no outdoor recreational space, by 1969 the school had become underutilized as Burroughs Middle School was opened one mile away and the attendance zone for Longfellow shrank. The drawing of the attendance zone line between Longfellow and Burroughs decreased the number of white students attending Longfellow, and the increasing minority population of Southwest Yonkers led to increasing numbers of minority students. In 1967, Longfellow's student population was 38% minority; after the opening of Burroughs in 1969, Longfellow became 50% minority. By 1973, Longfellow had become 79% minority. 118 The combination of its disproportionately high minority student population, its inferior physical facilities, and its underutilization caused many education officials and community leaders to urge repeatedly, beginning at least as early as 1967, that Longfellow be closed. The Board rejected all proposals either to close Longfellow and transfer its students to other schools that were less heavily minority, or to expand Longfellow's attendance zone so as to achieve a desegregative influx of nonminority students. For example, in 1977, when the Board planned to close the nearby Burroughs as a middle school, the Longfellow PTA urged the Board to return to Longfellow the predominantly white area that had been rezoned from Longfellow to Burroughs in 1969; such a realignment would have made use of Longfellow's excess capacity and had a desegregative effect. The Board rejected this suggestion, deciding instead to reassign the Burroughs students--even those who lived within one mile of Longfellow--to Emerson Middle School, two miles away near the northwest corner of the City, or to Whitman Middle School, four miles away near the northeast corner of the City. Though the Board initially reached this decision while an overall school reorganization plan recommending the closing of Longfellow was under consideration, it adhered to the decision after the reorganization plan had been rejected, stating that Longfellow might still be closed. 119 Other proposals recommended closing Longfellow and reassigning its students to Mark Twain Middle School, located in the southeast corner of East Yonkers, some three miles from the site of Longfellow. The proposal had both fiscal and desegregative merit, for Twain was operating at less than its stated capacity, and it had only a 2% minority population. The Board refused, however, stating that the distance the students would have to travel to reach Twain would be too great and that Longfellow students' parents would not have the ability to carpool their children or pay for the necessary transportation. In fact, however, many students already within the Twain attendance zone were required to travel some 2 1/2 miles to school, and a one-way distance of some four miles had not deterred the Board from reassigning some Burroughs students to Whitman. Further, though the Board had arranged transportation several times in other circumstances, it made no effort to explore this possibility with respect to the proposed reassignment of Longfellow students to Twain. Finally, the net cost of providing transportation for reassigned Longfellow students would have been relatively low, both because the Board could have saved some $500,000 per year in operating and faculty costs by closing Longfellow, and because under New York law the state would have provided 90% reimbursement for transportation expenses incurred for purposes of school desegregation. 120 In sum, from the late 1960's, the Board rejected proposal after proposal for the reassignment of more white students to Longfellow or of Longfellow minority students to schools with lower percentages of minorities. It declined to desegregate Longfellow on the ground that the school might be closed; but Longfellow was not closed, even in 1976 when the City's well publicized fiscal crisis required the Board to close several schools. At the time this suit was commenced, Longfellow remained in inferior physical facilities, operated at 31-40% of its capacity, and had a minority population of 94%.
121 In 1973, in conjunction with the closing of the High School of Commerce, located in Southwest Yonkers a few blocks from the downtown area, the Board opened a new Commerce Middle School (Commerce Middle). Its student body consisted of junior high school students who theretofore had attended Gorton, a combined junior and senior high school located in the southern part of Northwest Yonkers. The initial enrollment in Commerce Middle was 53% minority. 122 Prior to deciding on Commerce Middle's attendance zone, the Board had been presented with a number of proposals that would have avoided this creation of yet another predominantly minority school in Southwest Yonkers. These proposals principally involved Emerson, a combined elementary and middle school in Northwest Yonkers located about 1 1/2 miles north of Gorton. Emerson then had a middle school minority population of 8%. One proposal was to assign to Commerce Middle the middle school students from Emerson who lived in the southernmost part of the Emerson attendance zone. There was strong opposition from white residents, however, to any relocation of white students to form an integrated Commerce Middle, opposition that the Board perceived as grounded principally in racial concerns. The Board was also well aware that transferring Gorton students to the proposed new Commerce Middle without reassigning students from any other school would have a distinctly segregative effect: memoranda assessing this alternative noted, Commerce may become an all-black school; Commerce could be all black; Commerce becoming basically a black school; Racial Distribution--all black. It decided to assign to Commerce Middle no students other than those from Gorton. 123 It also rejected proposals to reassign the Gorton junior high school students--41% minority--to Emerson instead of to Commerce Middle, a course that apparently was both feasible in terms of Emerson's capacity and consistent with repeated proposals from school officials and community members to convert Emerson from a combined elementary and middle school to an exclusively middle school. The Board declined to reassign Gorton students to Emerson, on the ground that tensions would be created, apparently a reference to racial concerns, for in 1973, one-third of the Emerson's middle school minority students were transferred to Burroughs 124 in response to race-related concerns of the Emerson community regarding the presence of minority students at the school. According to [school administration officials], this transfer was effectuated for the purpose of insuring the safety of minority students who had been enrolled at the school in light of altercations which had occurred between students at the school and the Emerson community's opposition to the attendance of minority students at Emerson. 125 624 F.Supp. at 1481. 126 After opening Commerce Middle as a 53% minority school in 1973, instead of expanding Commerce Middle's attendance zone northward to draw in any predominantly white neighborhoods, the Board redrew the zone boundary farther south, thereby reassigning to Commerce Middle students from Longfellow and another predominantly minority school. Commerce Middle's minority population thus increased to 70% in 1974 and to 77% in 1975. In 1976, the school was closed as part of the Board's response to the City's fiscal crisis.
127 Other Board decisions challenged by plaintiffs included the early rezoning and 1954 closing of School 1 in Runyon Heights, the 1969 opening of the Martin Luther King, Jr., School in Southwest Yonkers, and the fiscal-crisis-related closings of several schools in 1976. 128 School 1 was located in Runyon Heights, the predominantly black community in East Yonkers. For a time in the 1930's it was attended by students from the Homefield section immediately to the north as well as by students from other largely white neighboring areas; white students then made up one-half to two-thirds of its student population. In 1938, however, the Board redrew the School 1 zone to correspond more precisely with the boundaries of Runyon Heights. Students from Homefield were reassigned to School 22, increasing the distance of their trip but sending them to a virtually all-white school; students south of Runyon Heights were sent to the then-virtually all-white School 5. By 1950, School 1 was 91% minority; at the time of its closing in 1954, it was 99% minority. 129 As a result of the 1938 rezoning, described by the court as deliberate, racially motivated gerrymandering, done in a manner which carefully incorporated privately created residential segregation, 624 F.Supp. at 1411, the School 1 zone was the smallest in the City, and the school operated at less than 42% of its capacity. Meanwhile, two nearby virtually all-white schools, Schools 8 and 22, became overcrowded. Runyon Heights community members sought to have the Board expand the School 1 boundaries in order to draw in students from the surrounding areas, thereby decreasing its underutilization, relieving the surrounding schools' overcrowding, and having a desegregative effect on School 1. Instead, in 1954 the Board decided to close School 1 and send its students to Schools 5 and 24, which had a desegregative effect on those schools. None of the Runyon Heights students were sent to School 22, which remained virtually 100% white, thereby preserv[ing] an all-white school experience for Homefield students, consistent with the Board's deliberately segregative attendance zone boundary changes of prior years. 624 F.Supp. at 1413. 130 With respect to the Martin Luther King, Jr., School (King), the court found that the initial hope of the Board was, unlike its segregative intent in rezoning School 1, that the opening of King would serve as a significant step toward correcting racial imbalance in the schools of Southwest Yonkers. King was opened in 1969 for grades 4-6 with students reassigned from Schools 6 and 12, both of which were overcrowded and predominantly minority. The population of King at this point was 57% minority. The following year, in accordance with the Board's original plan, students from the predominantly white School 9 were added, thereby decreasing the minority population of King to 49%. 131 The assignment of children who had attended School 9 prompted a December 1970 petition signed by 434 of their parents to have the Board restore the prior attendance zones. The Board held fast for a year and then relented. In the interim, white students from the School 9 area began to withdraw from King, apparently either relocating or entering private schools, reducing the number of white students at King from 392 in 1970-71 to 224 in 1971-72. 132 In 1972, School 9 was eliminated as a King feeder school, and third-graders who would otherwise have gone on to King for fourth grade remained at School 9. Some 60% of this group were white. In 1973, King was converted from a grade 4-6 school to a K-5 school; its students came from the predominantly minority areas previously served by Schools 6 and 12, but not the predominantly white areas of School 9. King's minority enrollment rose from 49% in 1970, to 70% in 1971, to 78% in 1972, to 87% in 1973. By the time of this lawsuit, it had a minority student population of 98%. 133 Although the district court viewed the consequences of some of the Board's decisions with regard to King as foreseeably segregative, 624 F.Supp. at 1402, it was unpersuaded, in light of the surrounding circumstances and the Board's initial desegregative intent, that the later decisions of themselves bespoke a segregative intent. 134 The court explored Board decisions with respect to opening and closing other schools, including those closed in 1976 in response to the City's fiscal crisis. Most of these decisions had some segregative and some desegregative effects and the court was unpersuaded that the decisions themselves demonstrated a Board intent to preserve segregation. Rather, the court concluded that a major indicator of segregative intent was the Board's failure to adopt any proposal or plan to alleviate the segregated patterns its prior actions had achieved. 135
136 The first significant official recognition of the need to address the racial imbalance of the Yonkers public schools occurred during the 1968-1970 superintendency of Paul Mitchell, who expressed his concern that the racial segregation of the schools prevented equality in educational opportunity. During his tenure came the opening of King and School 10 (see Part A.II.E.2. below) in Southwest Yonkers, both of which, though they quickly became minority schools, had been planned by the Board as racially integrated schools. The Board also conducted a series of human relations workshops and sought the assistance of state education officials in addressing the problem of racial imbalance. Mitchell's successor, Alioto, hired a special consultant to serve as a liaison between school officials and community members, with particular emphasis on communicating the concerns of the minority community to school officials and alleviating the tensions at the racially troubled Gorton School. 137 Nonetheless, while Alioto recognized the increasing racial imbalance in the schools and the inequality of educational opportunity within the system, particularly with respect to the inadequate facilities and inexperienced teachers that characterized many of the Southwest Yonkers disproportionately minority schools, he and other officials noted that there was strong community opposition to desegregation. For example, the education specialist sent to Yonkers by New York State described a very hostile audience at one PTA meeting in East Yonkers and testified that white parents had stated explicitly,  'We don't want desegregation, I don't want my children going to school with black children.'  Accordingly, Alioto, having instructed his special consultant to gather information on the extent of racial imbalance in the schools, instructed him to cease work in this area because Alioto believed it would be politically infeasible to proceed with desegregative efforts in the schools at that time. The state specialist testified that Alioto informed him that there was great community resistance and that it was unfeasible to try to develop a desegregation plan and then implement it. A former Board member testified, There is no question [Alioto] said it and he said it to many people. He said it could never be sold in the Yonkers community. Any kind of totally city-wide racially balanced program would be politically infeasible. 138
139 In October 1971, the Board commissioned a study of the Yonkers public school system by the New York University (NYU) School of Education's Center for Educational Research and Field Services. The study team was not asked to address the issue of racial imbalance. 140 The NYU Report, delivered in 1972, made several recommendations, some of which, though not addressing racial issues directly, had desegregative implications. In this category were recommendations to (1) reorganize all schools into a uniform K-5, 6-8, and 9-12 grade configuration, one facet of which would involve a potentially desegregating school attendance zone change for students from Homefield; and (2) decentralize the vocational education program by (a) closing the High School of Commerce and having a new set of courses offered at Saunders, (b) having two complete sets of the existing vocational courses taught in the academic high schools, one set divided between the two high schools located in the northern part of the City and the other set divided between the two high schools located in the southern part of the City, and (c) allowing a student to take any of the vocational courses taught either in his own school or in the paired school located to the east or west (the variable access plan). 141 The NYU Report prompted strong community opposition to any revision of the vocational program that would either cause the predominantly white students from East Yonkers to have to attend classes in the disproportionately minority high schools in the western half of the City or allow the minority students from the west to attend classes at the 94-97% white high schools in East Yonkers. School officials characterized these objections as reflecting a [f]ear of racial encro[a]chments.Two weeks after the last public hearing on the NYU Report, Alioto presented his 1973 Reorganization Plan to the Board. In general, substantially as a result of community opposition to the desegregative facets of the NYU recommendations, the plan included the most segregative proposals that had been made either in the NYU Report itself or in the ensuing alternative suggestions. Thus, the plan adopted the suggestion to decentralize the Saunders vocational programs, but only in part: It rejected the east-west pairing-and-sharing proposal of the NYU Report, and instead incorporated the significantly more expensive approach of duplicating certain of Saunders's vocational courses in each of the four academic high schools. The opening of Commerce Middle as a predominantly minority school, discussed in Part A.II.C.3. above, was also part of this proposed 1973 Reorganization Plan. The Board promptly adopted the plan as recommended by the superintendent. 142 The only potentially desegregating feature of the NYU recommendations that was adopted was that part of the suggestion to standardize the grade configurations which entailed reassigning students from the predominantly white Homefield neighborhood, then attending the over-crowded Roosevelt High School (then 6% minority) in East Yonkers, to the soon-to-be-underutilized Gorton (high school population 24% minority). This recommendation was adopted over opposition of Homefield parents that school officials inferred was partly race-related. However, the major desegregative effect of even this change was delayed, as in the first year thereafter the Board permitted nearly half of the 132 reassigned Homefield students to remain at Roosevelt; later some Homefield students began using false addresses to avoid having to attend Gorton. In all, 143 the evolving segregation of the district's schools remained substantially unaltered. No student movement between the district's regular high schools was effectuated despite the recognition that racial integration would be an advantageous result of the variable access plan. The Saunders facility remained intact despite the realization that the school's physical inadequacies and screening process [were] presently resulting in the inaccessibility of vocational and occupational education opportunities to many minority students. The racially balanced High School of Commerce was closed and was replaced by a predominantly minority middle school. No desegregative reorganizations were effectuated at the elementary school level, as would have occurred under some of the NYU Report proposals. 144 624 F.Supp. at 1475-76.
145 A serious official proposal for the desegregation of the Yonkers public schools was made in 1977 by then-superintendent Joseph Robitaille. In late 1975, in response to concerns expressed by the Yonkers NAACP over the increasing racial imbalance in the schools, the Board had established a Task Force for Quality Education (Task Force) to explore the system's problems, including declining enrollment, underutilization of school facilities, and fiscal constraints. Announcement of the initial formation of the Task Force omitted any mention that the group would explore racial problems, an omission designed to avoid arousing community hostility. Nonetheless, public resistance quickly materialized, with East Yonkers residents expressing concern that transfer of western Yonkers students into their schools would lead to a decline in educational standards and student achievement and create disciplinary problems; they took the position that the Task Force should be more concerned with improving the schools' overall educational quality than with correcting racial imbalance. Nonetheless, the Task Force's final report, concluding that the Yonkers schools were racially and ethnically segregated ... due to segregated housing patterns, socio-economic deprivation, and systematic racism, made a number of remedial recommendations. 146 In August 1977, Robitaille issued his Phase II School Reorganization Plan, which recognized the interrelationship among the system's fiscal, enrollment, utilization, and racial problems, and incorporated some of the Task Force's recommendations. The principal changes proposed in the Phase II plan were (1) the reorganization of the below-high-school grade configuration to K-6 and 7-8; (2) the closing of three middle schools, Longfellow, Fermi, and Burroughs; (3) the relocation of Saunders to the to-be-vacated Burroughs facility; (4) the closing of Southwest Yonkers's School 6, then 98% minority, and reassignment of its students to underutilized elementary schools to the north, with a view to improving racial balance; and (5) the Yonkers Plan for school desegregation. The Yonkers Plan was essentially to limit the size of each elementary and each middle school, drawing its attendance zone accordingly, and to bus students residing outside the redrawn zone lines to other schools in a pattern that would improve the overall racial balance of the system. It was anticipated that no more than 20% of the students would have to be bused and that the greater efficiencies would result in savings to the City, over a 10-year period, of nearly $29 million. 147 Phase II in general, and the Yonkers Plan in particular, met with overwhelming community opposition. Many statements from residents of East Yonkers focused on the loss of neighborhood schools, the lack of any planned improvement in the quality of education, and the failure to present possible alternatives to busing, such as the use of magnet schools. Residents of Southwest Yonkers objected to the plan because of the loss of neighborhood schools and because the burdens of traveling to school by bus would be borne disproportionately by the minority students from that area. 148 Some statements from East Yonkers residents presented explicitly race-related opposition, including flyers protesting the busing of East Yonkers students and busing of the black children (3,000 in number) to our neighborhood schools; a letter from a community group that was unalterably opposed to compulsory (non-voluntary) busing for racial purposes as an end in itself; a letter expressing concern that busing  'blacks & hispanics' into our east side schools would be detrimental to the neighborhood, and suggesting that the Task Force be renamed  'Racist Force us' to take our children and go!; and a letter from a neighborhood association stating the residents' desire to preserve the nature of our neighborhoods and their opposition to mov[ing] children about for the sole purpose of ethnic and racial mixing (emphasis in original). 149 Similarly, at community meetings in East Yonkers, school officials were presented with comments expressing concern that the plan would result in Yonkers's becoming another Bronx, referring to the perceived community deterioration and slum-like conditions that speakers associated with the increase of minority population in that New York City borough. The audience punctuated these and similar statements by local residents with cheers and applause. In contrast, proponents of Phase II were booed and hissed upon introduction, upon mentioning such matters as the inferior books used in Southwest Yonkers schools, and throughout their presentations. One elderly black woman, upon mentioning the prospect of busing students from west to east and stating that children should learn from one another, was booed and shouted at to such an extent that a recess had to be called. 150 While no explicit racial epithets were used by persons making public statements at the hearings, several trial witnesses testified that community members made specific racial slurs both inside and outside the hearing room, such as, they are going to send blacks, and they are going to send niggers and they are going to send spicks out here, and we don't want those children. 151 Without ever taking a formal vote, the Board unanimously disapproved of all of the desegregative aspects of Phase II. The Yonkers Plan was rejected; School 6 was not closed; Longfellow was not closed; no students were bused. 152 The stated basis for the rejection of Phase II's desegregative components was the Board's preference for the use of magnet schools and open enrollment plans for achieving voluntary desegregation. Although it appears that all of the Board members acknowledged that at least some of the community opposition to Phase II was racially motivated, and some believed that racism was the principal basis of that opposition, there was no express discussion by Board members of the race-related community opposition to Phase II except by Quentin Hicks and Anne Bocik, members whose recent appointments to the Board had been extremely controversial, see Part A.II.E.3. below. Hicks, a black whose appointment had been protested by members of the black community because he did not represent their interests, stated that black parents were concerned about having their children transported out of their neighborhoods into a white jungle. Bocik, a former principal who had been forced to retire in part because of her use of racial slurs and other racially insensitive behavior toward minority students, 624 F.Supp. at 1507, stated that minority students and administrators from minority schools would like to be with their own. 153 Notwithstanding its stated preference for voluntary methods of desegregation, the Board took no steps to develop or implement any of the desegregative alternatives suggested by its own members or by members of the community. Thus, despite its professed enthusiasm for magnet schools or open enrollment, no magnet school, open enrollment, or other voluntary plan for desegregation was implemented at any time. 154 As a result, in 1980, the schools of East Yonkers, many of which were operating at less than 60% of their planned capacities, remained predominantly (overall 95%) white in student population, with superior and spacious physical plants, and experienced faculties. The schools of Southwest Yonkers remained predominantly (overall 67%) minority in student population, some overcrowded and some seriously underutilized, housed in inferior physical facilities, staffed with less-experienced staff members and more than half of the minority teachers employed by the school system, and providing their students with concededly inferior educational opportunities. 155
156 In contending that the City as well as the Board should be held liable for segregation in the Yonkers public schools, plaintiffs pointed to, inter alia, the interrelationship between housing segregation and school segregation, the City's control over school budgeting and plans, and the mayor's appointments to the Board of persons opposed to desegregative action. 157
158 In an effort to refute the contention that its actions in concentrating subsidized low-income housing in Southwest Yonkers had had the effect of enhancing school segregation, the City offered a study that concluded that if none of the subsidized housing projects in Southwest Yonkers had been built and each of the project sites had remained vacant, the racial balance in Southwest Yonkers's schools would not have differed significantly from the actual 1980-81 figures. In contrast, plaintiffs' expert testified that building low-income housing to be occupied principally by minority families tends to create a school that, while not necessarily showing an immediate dramatic increase in minority students, soon becomes identified as a minority school. Such an identification encourages resident white families to move out of the neighborhood and discourages other white families from moving in. 159 The relationship between schools and housing was hardly lost on the City while it was making its various decisions as to whether and where to construct subsidized housing. One Council member testified that nearly all of the East Yonkers councilmen had indicated that their constituents objected to subsidized low-income housing partly because [i]n order to keep the schools nice, you know, you'd have to keep out the minorities. Further, as described in the previous section, a common theme of East Yonkers residents' opposition to the Yonkers Plan for school desegregation was the desire to preserve the nature of our neighborhoods. As described in Part A.II.E.3. below, Mayor Martinelli explicitly opposed desegregation of the schools by busing in part because it would diminish the stability of the residential patterns. 160 There was also evidence that City officials had requested that the Board make several school attendance zone changes that would have enhanced segregation at the schools to be affected. For example, in 1974, Martinelli urged that a small nonminority area of a neighborhood be moved from the attendance zone of an elementary school that was 60% minority to one that was 88% white. A few months later a Council member suggested that several predominantly white blocks be redistricted from a school that was 28% minority to one that was 97% white. In 1976, another City official made a similar request at the behest of a landlord who had complained that his ability to attract tenants was detrimentally affected by the location of his property within the zone of a school that had a substantial minority enrollment. The Board declined to implement any of these requested changes.
161 Under state law, the Yonkers school district is fiscally dependent upon the City, and the Board's annual budget is subject to approval, line by line, by the Council. N.Y.Educ.Law Sec. 2576 (McKinney 1981). Because of the Council's fiscal control over the Board, in the public mind there [were] two boards of education actually operating, with citizens often looking directly to the Council in school matters. There was no evidence, however, that the Council in any particular instance disapproved a school budget that included a desegregation plan; there could be no such evidence because the Board never sought to implement a plan that had any significant desegregative elements. 162 The Board's willingness to put specific proposals before the Council was not constrained solely by fiscal considerations. For example, in 1973, the superintendent recommended to the Board, and the Board submitted to the Council, recommendations for vocational program modifications that were more expensive than the pairing-and-sharing proposal of the NYU Report. Both the East Yonkers community and a number of Council members had publicly opposed the NYU Report's recommendation. The Board's spurning of the less expensive NYU proposals was influenced by the perceived infeasibility of obtaining City Council approval. 624 F.Supp. at 1506. Similarly, in the Phase II proposals, the school closings and the state's substantial subsidization of transportation costs would have resulted in a net reduction of the school system's annual expenditures, and fiscal concerns thus could not explain the Board's rejection of those proposals. As a practical matter, however, East Yonkers community opposition to Phase II was strong, Council members and the mayor had publicly expressed their opposition, and the Board always had an eye on what was politically, not just fiscally, feasible. As one Board official put it, we, in essence, had to convince another series of people, most of whom were elected by the community, and to the extent that the community resisted the idea, any idea, it seems to me that that would have some impact upon the people who owed election to those same individuals. 163 The City's influence on the Board was also visible in certain decisions as to school sites and configurations. For example, in the late 1960's the Board commenced plans for School 10, which it intended to open as an integrated elementary school in Southwest Yonkers, drawing students from School 3 (then 34% minority), School 19 (then 68% minority), and School 27 (then 5% minority). Planned as an experiment in the open school concept, in which the interior space would be flexible, unstructured, and without walls, the building was to be located on a five-acre site having a general openness of environment harmonious with the openness to be found within. As eventually constructed, however, School 10 was a mean and inadequate ghetto school, due largely to changes urged by the City which the Board grudgingly felt compelled to accept. 164 Without recounting the many events that occurred en route to the birth of School 10, which are described in detail in the district court's opinion, 624 F.Supp. at 1403-10 and 1542-43, suffice it to say that first, the Board agreed to change its preferred site to one in the middle of an urban renewal project (in order to allow the City to use the construction of School 10 as a statutorily permitted noncash contribution to the urban renewal area); later it accepted a one-acre site instead of the originally approved five acres (because the City decided to erect additional apartments on part of the site); as the site was developed, the front of the school could not be seen from the street (because the City wanted that frontage for an apartment-retail-store complex); and in the end, the school had virtually no outdoor recreation area (because the City needed more garage space for apartment residents). Though the Board objected to the City's inroads into the School 10 facilities, it eventually capitulated to each demand. 165 Because of its location behind other buildings and its lack of outdoor play area, School 10 became known as the airshaft school and was characterized immediately as a new ghetto school. By 1980, it had the fourth largest minority percentage enrollment in the City.
166 Although the Board was an independent municipal corporation under state law, its nine members were appointed by the mayor. Prior to the election of Mayor Martinelli, many Board members served more than one term, frequently being reappointed by a mayor other than the one who had originally appointed them. In the 25 years just prior to the advent of Martinelli, two-thirds of the Board's 33 members had been reappointed by a successor mayor. In 1973, after HUD had made clear that further federal funds for housing would be withheld unless the City allowed low-income housing to be constructed outside of Southwest, Martinelli won election on a campaign platform that included a promise that no more subsidized housing would be constructed in Yonkers. Once in office, Martinelli, who opposed busing and favored the policy of neighborhood schools, set out to appoint members based on his philosophy of education, so that it would be his Board. He did not reappoint a single person who was serving on the Board at the time he was elected. Many of his appointments were controversial. 167 His first appointment, in 1974, was Angelo Paradiso, who had been the principal at Saunders from 1964 to 1973. Paradiso had resigned in 1973 after a dispute with Alioto concerning the Saunders screening process and Paradiso's unwillingness to address the problem of disproportionately low numbers of minority students at the school and what Alioto perceived as the systematic exclusion of minorities. 168 In 1975, Martinelli appointed as Board members Morton Wekstein and Anne Bocik. Wekstein was the Mayor's personal attorney, and his appointment drew criticism in part because Wekstein's law partner was then representing a number of school administrators who had been considered ineffective by Alioto. A year later, Wekstein resigned because of a conflict of interest. 169 Bocik was a former teacher and elementary school principal who had retired in 1974 after Alioto requested her resignation. As a principal, Bocik had vowed that there would never be a full-time minority teacher of academic subjects in her school; she had received unfavorable job evaluations because of her ineffectiveness in planning and her common use of racial slurs and other racially insensitive behavior toward minority students. Bocik's treatment of minority students in this manner had been the subject of complaints to school administrators from both minority and white teachers; at trial, one teacher described in detail incidents in which Bocik terrorized or humiliated minority students, used racial epithets in referring to minority children, described them as animalistic, and threatened to buy bleach, Clorox, Purex to bleach them, their skins, because perhaps that would improve their behavior. Soon after Bocik's forced retirement, a state senator wrote Martinelli, recommending that she be appointed to the Board based on her experience and her Slavic background; her appointment was supported by the United Slavonian American League. It was opposed by the Board's president, by Alioto, and by community members, especially from the minority community. Martinelli appointed Bocik to the Board and defended the appointment by reference to her ethnic background. 170 The mayor made several appointments in 1976. First, after Wekstein resigned, Martinelli was asked to consider appointing an hispanic to the Board. Notwithstanding his recent justification of the Bocik appointment on grounds of her ethnicity, he responded by stating that his appointment would be based on the quality of the individual irregardless [sic ] of racial background. He appointed to the recently vacated seat a white realtor from Northeast Yonkers. 171 In the same year, the mayor replaced two Board members who had been movers behind the Task Force and were generally regarded as being among the Board's strongest advocates of school desegregation in Yonkers. Both members had expressed their interest in continuing to serve on the Board, and the reappointment of one or both was supported by the Council of PTAs, the Yonkers NAACP, the new superintendent Robitaille, and the Clergy of Yonkers. Martinelli appointed instead John Romano, a candidate supported by the Congress of Italian-American Organizations, and Joseph Spencer, a supporter of the mayor in his previous election campaigns. Once on the Board, Romano and Spencer promptly voted against even applying for state funding for the Task Force; Romano opined that state funding was a waste[ ] because Yonkers has no racial problem.... unless the state hands down a ruling stating there is a problem. 172 By the time of the 1977 Phase II proposal, Martinelli was routinely quizzing prospective Board members about their views on busing; he admitted at trial that these views probably weighed very heavily with [him] in deciding whether or not to appoint. In 1977 and 1978, Martinelli appointed four persons, all of whom were opposed to the Phase II Plan. They included Quentin Hicks, a black opposed to busing, whose appointment was immediately protested by members of the black community on the ground that his views did not represent theirs; the appointment was later acknowledged by the mayor to have been an embarrassment to the black community. 173 By May 1978, the Board was composed solely of Martinelli's appointees. In that month, the Board held a special workshop at which Board members unanimously expressed their opposition to the desegregation proposals of Phase II. As indicated in part A.II.D.2. above, the Board neither accepted any desegregative aspect of these proposals nor took any other steps, including those it avowedly preferred, toward desegregating the Yonkers public schools. 174 In 1979, Martinelli lost his bid for reelection. In his valedictory State-of-the-City address, he began his description of his administration's achievements in education by stating that [d]iscussion of neighborhood stability would not be complete without attention to our public school system. After mentioning three factors that he predicted would ensure sound and healthy schools, he stated, [m]ost importantly, we now have a Board of Education fully committed to neighborhood schools which is of critical importance to neighborhood stability in this city! 175
176 The district court found that the Yonkers public school system as a whole was in fact racially segregated, with few of the public schools in Yonkers fairly reflecting the racial balance of the City's overall student population. Using the term minority to include both blacks and hispanics, the court found that most schools in the district were either identifiably white or identifiably minority. Most of the schools in Southwest Yonkers had student populations that were predominantly minority, and the community and the Board's administrative personnel generally associated Southwest Yonkers with minority schools. 624 F.Supp. at 1384-87. 177 School authorities acknowledged that the quality of the education available at the identifiably minority schools was inferior to that available at the identifiably white schools, due in part to the inferior physical facilities and the concentration of less experienced teaching staffs at the former. Id. at 1530. The court found that the identifiability of certain Southwest Yonkers schools as minority schools had become inseparable from the perception of those schools as educationally inferior, and that [t]his confluence of racial identifiability and relative educational opportunity has served to reinforce the segregative demographic patterns which have evolved in the City. Id. at 1444. 178 The court found that the segregation of the schools was attributable to the conduct of both the Board and the City and that each defendant had acted with the intent to perpetuate or enhance school segregation.
179 The court found that the Board was well aware of the City's practice of confining subsidized low-income housing to Southwest Yonkers and indeed had urged the City to select scattered sites for such housing. It found that the Board's adherence to a neighborhood-school policy in the face of the City's known segregative practice suggested an intent on the part of the Board to preserve a similar segregation in the schools. Id. at 1535-37. It found confirmation of segregative intent in many of the Board's affirmative acts. 180 The Board's disproportionate assignment of minority teachers and staff members to the predominantly minority schools served to enhance the racial identifiability of those schools as minority schools; the enhanced identifiability had the effect of perpetuating and increasing the predominance of minorities in the student populations of those schools. Id. at 1527-28. The staff assignments were not explainable by reference to rationales offered by the Board to explain its assignments of students, for neither the neighborhood-school concept nor concerns for transportation played a role in staff assignments. Id. at 1467. Nor was the court persuaded by the Board's reliance on its agreement with the teachers' union as an explanation for the staffing pattern, first because the racial skewing of the staff assignments predated that agreement, and second because the agreement gave the Board a certain amount of retransfer power that the Board never attempted to use. Id. at 1463-67. The court found that 181 [t]he foreseeability of the increased racial segregation of staff members and the district's limited efforts to alleviate the imbalance together suggest that the resulting assignment of minority staff to minority schools was a practice which the Board approved of and intended to continue.... Given the school district's deliberately segregative pattern of administrative staff assignments and the racial disproportionality in teacher assignments prior to the collective bargaining agreement, it is reasonable to infer that the subsequent pattern of assigning minority teachers to disproportionately minority schools was considered desirable and was deliberately unaltered. 182 Id. at 1464-65. 183 The court also found that the Board's special education program, which resulted in the placement of a disproportionate number of minority children in classes for the emotionally disturbed, was operated in an unlawfully discriminatory manner. Id. at 1461. The evaluative process was particularly prone to unwarranted racial assumptions and was unusually discriminatory in its impact. No race-neutral factor was likely to explain the disproportionately high numbers of minority children in such classes, id. at 1454, and the discriminatory treatment and the consequent stigmatization of the children so placed was not educationally justifiable, id. at 1461. In addition, the assignment of these disproportionately minority-populated special classes to schools that were predominantly white, and the isolation of and refusal to mainstream the special class students increased the stigmatization. Id. at 1455. Minority students enrolled in regular school programs have had difficulty in gaining acceptance among their white schoolmates as a result of the Board's placement of disproportionately minority special education classes in the school. Id. at 1456. Even without reference to the special education program, the court noted that a Board study revealed significantly more racial prejudice among students attending schools that were disproportionately black or disproportionately white than among students attending schools that were racially balanced. Id. at 1444. 184 The court also found that many of the Board's actions and inactions with regard to school openings, closings, and attendance zone changes evinced a segregative intent. It found, for example, that the racial imbalance between School 16 (90% white) and the nearby School 25 (88% minority) had been caused in part by the Board's deliberately segregative conduct in repeatedly redrawing the attendance zone boundary between the two schools. It found that the Board's proffer of a race-neutral basis for the rezoning was pretextual. Id. at 1526-27. 185 Though the court was unpersuaded that the isolated act of closing School 1 in 1954--by then 99% minority--evinced a segregative intent, it found that the Board's earlier changes in the attendance zone of School 1, whose student population had theretofore been as much as two-thirds white, had constituted deliberate, racially motivated gerrymandering for which there was no evidence of any race-neutral justification. Id. at 1411. 186 The court found that the Board's refusal to close or desegregate Longfellow, the underutilized, inferior middle school with a heavy minority population, was difficult to explain in race-neutral terms, id. at 1426, and found the Board's proffered explanations fiscally unsound, inconsistent with other Board actions, and pretextual. It found that by the late 1970's, racial considerations played an increasing role in the Board's refusal to close the school. Id. at 1426-28. It also found that racial factors played a significant role in the Board's segregative opening of Commerce Middle School. Id. at 1482; see also id. at 1472-79. 187 The court found that the Board's rejection of the NYU Report's recommendation of a variable access vocational program was designed to be responsive to racial concerns. The community opposition, which argued that any east-west pairing of schools would result in a decline of the quality of education offered at the schools in East Yonkers, took on a pretextual hue in the context of vocational courses. Though test scores indicated a disparity between whites and minorities in achievement levels in academic courses such as English and mathematics, no such disparity was indicated with regard to vocational courses such as auto mechanics. The court found that the Board recognized that community opposition to the pairing-and-sharing proposal stemmed from racial concerns and that the Board's selection of the more expensive alternative of duplicating the vocational courses in each of the four academic high schools reflected a desire not to take steps that would be desegregative. Id. at 1476-78. 188 The court found that the Board's persistent rejection of other desegregative proposals, including those recommended in Phase II and all proposed alternatives that would have had any desegregative effect, was similarly the result of the Board's responsiveness to race-based community resistance to school desegregation. Id. at 1497. The court found it significant that the Board did not always yield to public pressures, most notably in connection with its decisions as to what schools to close in connection with the City's fiscal crisis. Thus, when the Board proposed to close Schools 4 (98% white) and 15 (100% white), there was massive protest from the affected communities, from councilmen, and from the mayor. These protests were not construed by the Board as principally race-based, and the Board held firm and closed the schools. Id. at 1416-17. Whenever a proposed change was for purposes of desegregation, however, and the pressure was perceived as racially motivated, the Board acquiesced. Id. at 1493-94. 189 The court found several indications that much of the community opposition to busing was race-related and that its phrasing in race-neutral terms was pretextual. For example, East Yonkers parents' emphasis on allowing their own children to attend schools in their neighborhoods and on not usurping after-school recreational time by requiring busing, could not explain their opposition to having Southwest Yonkers children attend schools in East Yonkers. Moreover, the allegedly race-neutral objections would, in many instances, have been equally applicable to the objectors' proposed alternatives such as the formation of magnet schools and open enrollment. The sincerity of their advocacy of magnet schools was further belied by their earlier vehement opposition to the NYU Report's pairing-and-sharing proposal, which would have effected a limited magnet-school program. All of these factors persuaded the district court that the stated preferences of both the community and the Board for such busing alternatives as magnet schools were pretexts designed to obscure the race-based nature of their opposition to desegregative changes. Id. at 1489-90. The court's inference that the Board's own stated preference for such alternatives was pretextual was also drawn from the Board's failure, for more than three years following its rejection of Phase II's desegregative aspects, to take any action whatever to implement any of its allegedly preferred desegregative alternatives. Id. at 1493-95. 190 In sum, the district court found that the Board's refusal to implement such proposals in the late 1970's occurred in [a] temporal and factual context which renders a finding of deliberate perpetuation of racial segregation appropriate: the increased racial imbalance among the district's schools; the increasingly visible racial opposition to correcting this condition; the increased demands for desegregative action; an increasing realization that such action was an important ingredient in eliminating disparities in educational opportunities in the district; a community increasingly afflicted by segregative governmental housing practices animated by community opposition to the presence of subsidized housing in areas outside of Southwest Yonkers; and the failure to address the problem of racial imbalance in the schools in any meaningful fashion in the years following the rejection of Phase II in a manner consistent with the Board's stated reasons for rejecting the plan. In our view, the record makes clear that the initial reluctance to implement desegregative school reorganization plans evolved into a persistent failure to adopt measures to correct recognized educational and racial imbalances in the district in part because of their desegregative consequences. From the foregoing, we find the Board's failure to meaningfully address the problem of racial imbalance subsequent to its consideration of Phase II is more readily explainable as a reflection of the community's resistance to desegregation rather than the race-neutral concerns of the community. 191 624 F.Supp. at 1497. The court concluded that the conduct of the Board violated the rights of minority school children under Titles IV and VI and the Equal Protection Clause.
192 The court found that the City's segregative housing practices had been a contributing cause of the racial segregation of the schools. It found that the failure of the Board to take action to minimize the school segregation in no way negates the fact that, as a factual matter, the City's housing practices contributed to the perpetuation and aggravation of residential segregation and the resulting segregation of the schools. Id. at 1501. 193 The court found that the segregative impact of the City's segregative housing practices on the schools was not unavoidable, unknowing, or inadvertent. It noted that the link between the racial identifiability of a school and the residential segregation of the surrounding neighborhood was recognized by City officials, id. at 1443, and found that in light of the school district's historic neighborhood school policy, the perpetuation and exacerbation of racial imbalance in the school district was a natural, probable and actually foreseen consequence of the City's discriminatory housing practices.... Id. at 1542. Indeed, in the racially motivated community opposition to the construction of low-income housing in non-minority areas, there was frequent mention of the effect of such housing on schools, and express objection by white parents to having their children schooled with minorities. 194 Further, the court found that the pattern of appointments by Mayor Martinelli of Board members, screened for their opposition to busing, was an exercise of power over school board appointments as a means of furthering the city's segregative objectives. Id. at 1534. Though the City was not initially responsible for the Board's neighborhood-school policy, it opposed construction of housing for minorities outside of Southwest Yonkers, and it advocated keeping all children assigned to schools in the neighborhoods in which they lived. Martinelli consistently appointed Board members who shared this view and who steadfastly refused to take any action that would have had any desegregative effect on the schools. Thus, the court found that the City not only was aware of the overall impact of its subsidized housing practices on Yonkers public schools but also intended to preserve the racially segregative impact of these practices on the schools. Id. at 1501. 195 In all, the court found that the City's segregative housing practices and the mayor's appointments contributed significantly both to the confinement of minority students to schools in Southwest Yonkers and to the Board's failure to undo the segregative effects of these and other practices on the schools. And in a city where the segregated condition of 'neighborhood schools' is in part the product of official municipal design, the commitment to the neighborhood school system by the head of that same municipality can hardly be considered race-neutral. Id. at 1513. 196 The court concluded that the conduct of the City in intentionally perpetuating segregation in the schools violated the rights of minority schoolchildren under Title IV and the Equal Protection Clause.
197 After receiving remedy proposals from the parties and conducting an evidentiary hearing, the court issued its school remedy order, reported at 635 F.Supp. 1538 (1986). As an overall goal, the order provided that the Board shall seek to achieve desegregation throughout the Yonkers public school system by the 1987-88 school year. To this end, the court ordered the creation of a system of magnet schools that students could choose to attend voluntarily. It defined a desegregated school as (a) a magnet school whose minority enrollment was within 15 percentage points of the system-wide proportion of minority students for the first year of that school's operation and within 10 percentage points thereafter, or (b) a nonmagnet school whose minority population was within 20 percentage points of the system-wide proportion. 198 The court prescribed the methods to be used in administering the magnet school system [i]n order to maximize the extent to which the integrative goals of this order will be reached through voluntary student assignments. Id. at 1544. They included an intense publicity and recruitment phase, id., and a system whereby parents must submit for each child a list of three school choices, at least one of which must further the goals of desegregation, id. at 1545. The court also established the admissions criteria to be used in the magnet schools, ordered the Board to make every effort to achieve a specified racial composition of teachers at each school, explained the guidelines to be followed in the special education program, and ordered that the Board provide transportation for specified students. Id. at 1545-50. 199 The court ordered the City to provide the necessary funding for implementation of the ordered desegregation program. It appointed a monitor to oversee compliance with its orders and retained jurisdiction of the action in order to enforce compliance. Id. at 1551-53. 200 The court overruled a belated objection by the City that the plan ordered by the court was too expensive. The court noted that the City had made no such objection at the hearing when the desegregation plan budget was presented, had not contended that any part of the proposal was not required for desegregation, and was unable, despite being given an additional opportunity to do so, to show that any part of the desegregation plan budget either was not necessary or was duplicative of the regular budget. 201 A stay motion was denied, and the desegregation program was commenced in the 1986-87 school year. B. LIABILITY 202 In these appeals, the City mounts several challenges to the district court's ruling that it is liable for segregation in housing. Principally it contends that the court erred (1) in ruling, in effect, that it had an obligation to build subsidized housing outside of Southwest Yonkers; (2) in finding that the City's housing decisions were made with the intention and the effect of perpetuating housing segregation; and (3) in holding the City liable for making decisions that merely responded to the wishes of its citizens. 203 The City challenges the ruling that it is liable for segregation in the schools, contending principally (1) that the segregation was caused not by City actions but rather by Board policies for which the City may not be held liable; (2) that the record reflects at most the foreseeability that City actions would perpetuate and enhance school segregation, but not any intent on the part of the City to achieve those effects; and (3) that the court could not properly take into account, in assessing City responsibility for school segregation, the mayor's pattern of appointing to the Board individuals who espoused the maintenance of segregation in the schools. 204 The Board challenges the district court's ruling that it is liable for school segregation on the principal grounds that (1) there was insufficient evidence of its intention to discriminate, and (2) the court could not properly take into account the intentionally segregative conduct of the City in determining whether the Board should be held liable. The Board also contends that minority should have been defined to include only blacks, not hispanics, and that with that redefinition, the schools could not be found to be in fact segregated. 205 As discussed in Part C. below, both the City and the Board contend that various aspects of the district court's remedial orders go beyond the proper bounds of discretion. 206 We have considered all of the arguments made by the City and the Board on these appeals and find all of them to be without merit. Only those mentioned above warrant discussion.