Opinion ID: 500653
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Board's Liability

Text: 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.