Opinion ID: 500653
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Other Board Actions

Text: 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