Opinion ID: 619919
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: NLRSD's Petition for Unitary Status

Text: The sole area in which the district court denied a finding of unitary status to NLRSD is the area of staff recruitment. Section 2 of the 1992 Plan requires NLRSD to take numerous actions intended to increase the number of black teachers, principals, and administrators throughout the district, including conducting surveys within the district to identify black teachers interested in advancement to administrative or principal positions; targeting regional colleges and universities which have strong teacher education programs with significant black enrollment with promotional recruiting kits and on-campus recruiting visits; contacting [b]lack community leaders and community organizations to obtain employment referrals for black teachers and administrators; providing professional associations of teachers and administrators with recruiting materials; producing a ten-minute slide or video presentation for use in recruitment activities; and advertising vacancies in newspapers and other media in communities that have colleges and universities targeted for recruitment efforts. In addition, section 2A of the 1992 Plan requires NLRSD to employ a labor economist to conduct an analysis of the pool of qualified applicants in the relevant labor market for each hiring category (teachers, principals, administrators, and coaches), and then to set numerical hiring goals for blacks in each category and a timetable for reaching those goals. There appears to be little dispute that NLRSD has satisfied the 1992 Plan with respect to black principals, administrators, and coaches. The parties' dispute turns instead on NLRSD's efforts to recruit black teachers. The district court denied unitary status in this area based on the good-faith prong of Freeman, finding that NLRSD had failed to document its compliance efforts sufficiently to prove its commitment. NLRSD presented extensive testimony and other evidence regarding its efforts to comply with the teacher recruitment provisions of the 1992 Plan, which may be summarized as follows. NLRSD complied with the 1992 Plan's requirements regarding job postings and advertisements, publicity materials, and internal training and promotion opportunities. For five or six years, NLRSD also recruited heavily at colleges throughout the South with strong teacher education programs with significant black enrollment, as required by the 1992 Plan. NLRSD's recruiters made many on-campus recruiting visits to such schools and even were authorized to hire black applicants on the spot, but NLRSD discovered that qualified black graduates from outside Arkansas generally were not receptive to relocating to the Little Rock area. Market competition for black teachers is intense, as other school districts throughout the South likewise have been making efforts to increase black staff. One NLRSD recruiter described the typical on-campus minority recruiting visit as involving a hundred recruiters and [twenty] graduates. Moreover, NLRSD did not have the resources to compete with many other districts. For example, some school districts in Texas were offering signing bonuses to minority candidates, while others offered starting annual salaries as much as $11,000 higher than NLRSD. Thereafter, NLRSD refocused its efforts to in-state colleges and had slightly more success, although it faced similar market pressure from out-of-state districts recruiting at Arkansas colleges. In addition, NLRSD faced in-state market pressure, as Arkansas itself has about 280 school districts, and only about 100 black education majors graduate from Arkansas colleges each year. Through 2006, NLRSD's starting salaries remained significantly lower than LRSD and PCSSD, hampering its efforts to compete even locally. Around 2006, NLRSD changed strategies again. It subscribed to a number of advanced tracking services for potential black applicants, reduced costs, and redirected funds to increase its starting salaries. The number of newly hired black teachers has increased markedly as a result. While the percentage of newly hired employees who were black was 9.9 and 6.0 percent in 2004-2005 and 2005-2006 respectively, in the next four fiscal years the percentages rose to 21.3, 12.6, 17.7, and 23.3 percent respectively. As a result, blacks now comprise 16.7 percent of the certified educators at NLRSD (up from 13 percent), while only about 9 percent of the certified educators in the state are black. Despite this extensive testimony and evidence describing NLRSD's efforts, the district court found that NLRSD did not submit sufficient documentation of those efforts and that its evidence was too anecdotal to prove good faith. For example, NLRSD's chief recruiter could not recite yearly statistics for the number of offers made to, and rejected by, black candidates. As a result, the district court ordered NLRSD to continue its efforts, but keep more detailed records, for 24 additional months and then ask for reconsideration of unitary status. The Joshua Intervenors bemoan the absence of firm statistics on employment offers, but they do not direct us to any evidence that would tend to discredit the extensive evidence of NLRSD's efforts. [3] Notably, the district court did not suggest that any portion of NLRSD's testimony was not credible, nor did it suggest that some different or additional action by NLRSD would be necessary for compliance. Instead, the district court simply asked for the same actions, but with more detailed documentation, for an additional 24 months. While the goal of documenting compliance over time is a laudable one, the district court abused its discretion by imposing new data collection and reporting requirements with respect to staff recruitment that were not agreed to by the parties in the 1992 Plan. When construing a consent decree, courts are guided by principles of contract interpretation and, where possible, will discern the parties' intent from the unambiguous terms of the written consent decree, read as a whole. Pure Country, Inc. v. Sigma Chi Fraternity, 312 F.3d 952, 958 (8th Cir.2002). Here, the 1992 Plan contains a separate section on desegregation monitoring that required NLRSD to design a detailed reporting/monitoring system describing the information to be collected and reported, the format of reports and the frequency of reports. The district court found that NLRSD followed these requirements in good faith, stating that nothing came close to controverting this finding. Because NLRSD satisfactorily complied with its duty to specify and maintain the information to be collected and reported as expressed in the 1992 Plan, there was no basis for the district court to impose upon NLRSD, with no advance notice, a more extensive set of collection and reporting requirements with respect to staff recruiting. See Holland v. N.J. Dep't of Corr., 246 F.3d 267, 281 (3d Cir.2001) (A court should interpret a consent decree as written and should not impose terms when the parties did not agree to those terms.); EEOC v. N.Y. Times Co., 196 F.3d 72, 78 (2d Cir.1999) ([A] court may not replace the terms of a consent decree with its own, no matter how much of an improvement it would make in effectuating the decree's goals. (quotation omitted)). Apart from the perceived deficiency in record-keeping, the district court found no fault with NLRSD's efforts to comply with the staff recruitment provisions of the 1992 Plan. Our examination of the record confirms that NLRSD's staff recruitment efforts, as described at the hearing, are sufficient to demonstrate[], to the public and to the parents and students of the once disfavored race, its good-faith commitment to the whole of the court's decree. Freeman, 503 U.S. at 491, 112 S.Ct. 1430. Therefore, we turn to the question of whether the vestiges of past discrimination ha[ve] been eliminated to the extent practicable in the area of recruitment. Freeman, 503 U.S. at 492, 112 S.Ct. 1430 (quoting Dowell, 498 U.S. at 250, 111 S.Ct. 630). The district court noted that, statistically, the percentage of teachers employed by NLRSD who are black actually declined from 20 percent in the 1984-85 school year [4] to as low as 13 percent in the 2006-07 and 2007-08 school years. However, as the district court correctly observed, the proper standard under Freeman is not statistical outcomes, but rather good-faith compliance with the 1992 Plan and elimination of the vestiges of past discrimination to the extent practicable. See 503 U.S. at 492, 112 S.Ct. 1430. The required labor market study, performed in 1988, determined that the relevant labor market is the State of Arkansas and that the percentage of qualified blacks in that market was 11.9 percent. [5] The fact that NLRSD has maintained levels of black teacher employment (and levels of new hiring of black teachers, at least since 2006) that exceed the percentages in the relevant labor market, viewed in the light of NLRSD's goodfaith efforts, suggests that the vestiges of past discrimination have been eliminated to the extent practicable in the area of recruitment. As a result, we reverse the denial of unitary status for NLRSD in the area of staff recruitment.