Opinion ID: 2659247
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: analysis

Text: “Failure on the part of school authorities to implement a constitutionally prescribed unitary school system brings into play the full panoply of the trial court’s remedial power.” Valley v. Rapides Parish Sch. Bd., 702 F.2d 1221, 1225 (5th Cir. 1983) (citing Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1 (1971)). We review the district court’s implementation of desegregation remedies for abuse of discretion. Id. We review conclusions of law de novo, and findings of fact for clear error. Id. Here, neither party challenged the district court’s determinations that a new plan should be administered to desegregate D.M. Smith Middle School and East Side High School, and that further remedies were not necessary in the District’s elementary schools. On appeal, the United States asks us to remand so that the district court can consider alternative plans to desegregate D.M. Smith and East Side High, including consolidation, while the District requests that we affirm the implementation of the freedom of choice plan. In desegregation cases, the objective is “to eliminate from the public schools all vestiges of state-imposed segregation.” Swann, 402 U.S. at 15. “The transition to a unitary, nonracial system of public education was and is the ultimate end to be brought about. . . .” Green v. Cnty. Sch. Bd. of New Kent 3 The district court also determined that, despite its good faith effort, the District was not in compliance with the faculty assignment component of the extant desegregation orders. The district court ordered the District to submit a plan with “real prospects for achieving a ratio of African-American to Caucasian teachers and administration in each school to approximate the race ratio throughout the districtwide school system.” However, the subsequent order regarding the desegregation remedy failed to address faculty assignment, an issue the parties only briefly mention on appeal. On remand, the district court should clarify the status of this issue, particularly whether there is a continuing violation, and if so, the remedy to be implemented. 7 Case: 13-60464 Document: 00512581384 Page: 8 Date Filed: 04/01/2014 No. 13-60464 Cnty., Va., 391 U.S. 430, 436 (1968). The duty is not simply to eliminate express racial segregation: where de jure segregation existed, the school district’s duty is to eliminate its effects “root and branch.” Id. at 437-38. Now, six decades after Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), “[t]he burden on a school board today is to come forward with a plan that promises realistically to work, and promises realistically to work now.” Green, 391 U.S. at 439; see Davis v. E. Baton Rouge Parish Sch. Bd., 721 F.2d 1425, 1437 (5th Cir. 1983). A freedom of choice plan is not necessarily an unreasonable remedy for eliminating the vestiges of state-sponsored segregation, but it has historically proven to be an ineffective desegregation tool. See Green, 391 U.S. at 439-40. Likewise, some racially homogeneous schools within a school system do not necessarily violate the federal Constitution. See Swann, 402 U.S. at 25-26; Valley, 702 F.2d at 1226; see also Flax v. Potts, 915 F.2d 155, 160-62 (5th Cir. 1990). However, “[t]he retention of all-black or virtually all-black schools within a dual system is nonetheless unacceptable where reasonable alternatives may be implemented.” Valley, 702 F.2d at 1226. The retention of single-race schools may be particularly unacceptable where, as here, the district is relatively small, the schools at issue are a single junior high school and a single high school, which have never been meaningfully desegregated and which are located less than a mile and a half away from the only other junior high school and high school in the district, and where the original purpose of this configuration of schools was to segregate the races. Apart from the fact that Cleveland has not sought a declaration of unitary status and has not challenged the district court’s conclusion that further remedies are necessary, on the record now before us, the situation in Cleveland is distinguishable from those where we have found that the retention of some one-race schools did not preclude a declaration of unitary status. See Flax, 915 8 Case: 13-60464 Document: 00512581384 Page: 9 Date Filed: 04/01/2014 No. 13-60464 F.2d at 161 (finding that fourteen schools that were over 80% black did not preclude declaration of unitary status in large urban district with 98 total schools, where it was “essentially uncontroverted” that the district had succeeded in “removing the vestiges of the dual system”); Ross v. Houston Independent School District, 699 F.2d 218, 226-28 (5th Cir. 1983) (finding that thirty-three schools that were 90% black did not preclude declaration of unitary status in large urban district with 226 schools facing “unusual, perhaps unique, problems,” including rapidly changing demographics and housing patterns). We acknowledge that confecting a remedy in these types of cases can be especially difficult. No matter how noble the effort, the effect can be less than adequate. Unlike the district court’s earlier opinion finding that further remedies were necessary, the remedial order adopting the freedom of choice plan lacks explanation. While we are “mindful that the scope of a district court’s equitable power to remedy past wrongs is broad, for breadth and flexibility are inherent in equitable remedies,” Valley, 702 F.2d at 1225 (internal quotation marks omitted) (quoting Swann, 402 U.S. at 15), we are unable to evaluate the soundness or reasoning of the decision, where it is not discussed in the opinion. Although we do not hold that the freedom of choice plan is necessarily inadequate, there are apparent deficiencies in the plan that were not addressed by the district court. First, there was no evidence or explanation indicating that the freedom of choice plan was likely to work, and all the available empirical evidence indicates that the plan is not likely to contribute to meaningful desegregation at D.M. Smith Middle School or East Side High School. African-American students residing in the eastern attendance zone have availed themselves of the now abolished majority-tominority transfer policy over the years, but in the nearly five decades in which the District has been under federal court supervision, not one white student 9 Case: 13-60464 Document: 00512581384 Page: 10 Date Filed: 04/01/2014 No. 13-60464 has ever voluntarily transferred to D.M. Smith Middle School or East Side High School. The pre-enrollment data for the 2012-13 school year, submitted while the Rule 59 motion was pending, indicated that the order had no effect on the status quo: no white student pre-enrolled at D.M. Smith or East Side High. Albeit not part of the record before the district court, the District at oral argument acknowledged that the plan has now been in effect for over a year, and no white student has enrolled at D.M. Smith or East Side High. In defending the freedom of choice plan on appeal, the District does not even forcefully argue that the plan is likely to work at D.M. Smith Middle School and East Side High School, instead focusing on its successes at other schools in the district. Lastly, the district court did not explain its reasoning for rejecting the District’s proposed desegregation plan of revitalizing and expanding magnet programs at the black schools, or the United States’s proposed remedy of consolidation, and instead adopted a freedom of choice plan that neither party had suggested. The district court encouraged the District to continue to strengthen its magnet programs but did not order the magnet program plan to be implemented. “The findings and conclusions we review must be expressed with sufficient particularity to allow us to determine rather than speculate that the law has been correctly applied.” Davis v. E. Baton Rouge Parish Sch. Bd., 570 F.2d 1260, 1263-64 (5th Cir. 1978). The district court did not make clear its conclusion that the problem of the continuing racial isolation and racial identifiability of D.M. Smith Middle School and East Side High School would be resolved by the implementation of a freedom of choice plan. We do not hold that the freedom of choice plan is constitutionally inadequate or could form no part of a desegregation plan. But the district court should consider, review and explain why it is discarding some remedies in favor of others. If the district court concluded that the freedom of choice plan was likely to be successful, it 10 Case: 13-60464 Document: 00512581384 Page: 11 Date Filed: 04/01/2014 No. 13-60464 must explain why and consider the contradictory evidence in the record. On appeal, the District strongly implies that, essentially, there is no more that it can do to desegregate D.M. Smith and East Side High. The district court, however, concluded that the District should remain under federal supervision and ordered the District to propose a new desegregation plan for those two schools. Further, the District has not moved for unitary status. However, if the district court’s remedy is premised on a conclusion that, aside from the freedom of choice plan, there is nothing more that the District can or should do to desegregate D.M. Smith and East Side High, that conclusion should be justified. If the district court’s order is premised on avoiding “white flight” that may occur as a result of other proposed remedies such as consolidation, it must grapple with the complexities of that issue. See United States v. Pittman by Pittman, 808 F.2d 385, 391 (5th Cir. 1987) (noting that white flight may be one legitimate concern “when choosing among constitutionally permissible plans” but “cannot be accepted as a reason for achieving less than complete uprooting of the dual public school system”). While we do not require the district court to provide us a granular report regarding every option considered, the district court should sort through the various proposed remedies, exclude those that are inadequate or infeasible and ultimately adopt the one that is most likely to achieve the desired effect: desegregation. Given the available statistics showing that not a single white student chose to enroll at D.M Smith or East Side High after the district court’s order, and that historically, over the course of multiple decades, no white student has ever chosen to enroll at D.M. Smith or East Side High, the district court’s conclusion that a freedom of choice plan was the most appropriate desegregation remedy at those schools certainly needed to be expressed with sufficient particularity to enable us to review it. See Davis, 570 F.2d at 126364. We therefore reverse and remand for a more explicit explanation of the 11 Case: 13-60464 Document: 00512581384 Page: 12 Date Filed: 04/01/2014 No. 13-60464 reasons for adopting the freedom of choice plan, and/or for consideration of the alternative desegregation plans proposed by the parties, as appropriate.