Opinion ID: 427620
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Story Thus Far

Text: 2 The East Baton Rouge Parish school system was historically segregated by law. This action was filed in 1956, just after the Supreme Court's landmark Brown decisions. Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 74 S.Ct. 686, 98 L.Ed. 873 (1954) (Brown I ); Brown v. Board of Education, 349 U.S. 294, 75 S.Ct. 753, 99 L.Ed. 1083 (1955) (Brown II ). The early history of the litigation has been recounted in previous decisions of this court and need not now be repeated. See Davis v. East Baton Rouge Parish School Board, 570 F.2d 1260 (5th Cir.1978), cert. denied, 439 U.S. 1114, 99 S.Ct. 1016, 59 L.Ed.2d 72 (1979); East Baton Rouge Parish School Board v. Davis, 287 F.2d 380 (5th Cir.), cert. denied, 368 U.S. 831, 82 S.Ct. 54, 7 L.Ed.2d 34 (1961). 3 In 1970, acting pursuant to court order, the Board responded to our decision in Hall v. St. Helena Parish School Board, 417 F.2d 801 (5th Cir.), cert. denied, 396 U.S. 904, 90 S.Ct. 218, 24 L.Ed.2d 180 (1969), by formulating and instituting with district court approval a plan coupling neighborhood attendance zones with a majority-to-minority transfer provision allowing a student to transfer from a school in which his was the majority race to one in which his race was in the minority. Four years later, plaintiffs 1 filed what was by that time their fifth motion for further relief. They alleged that the 1970 plan was not desegregating the system effectively. Specifically, they cited the many one-race or substantially one-race schools remaining in the system, and asserted that the Board had built new schools in the white areas of the parish while allowing the black or predominantly black schools to deteriorate. They also alleged that the Board was assigning less experienced teachers to black or predominantly black schools. The Board opposed further relief, arguing that it imposed no affirmative racial barriers to admission to any of its schools and that conscious racial balancing was illegal under Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1, 91 S.Ct. 1267, 28 L.Ed.2d 554 (1971), and Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717, 94 S.Ct. 3112, 41 L.Ed.2d 1069 (1974) (Milliken I ). It also sought dismissal of the case on the ground that the EBRP schools had been operated as a unitary system during each of the four school years since the 1970 plan went into effect. 4 The district court held a hearing and on August 14, 1974 appointed the Louisiana Educational Laboratory (LEL) to review the EBRP school system and to recommend steps to bring it into compliance with the court's previous desegregation orders and with present constitutional requirements. 2 Upon receiving LEL's interim report, the district court granted preliminary relief in February 1975. It ordered the Board to appoint a black to fill a vacant policy-making position on the Board's staff and to provide public transportation to those students electing to take advantage of the majority-to-minority transfer provision. 3 After an evidentiary hearing and further briefing, the district court found that the Board had done everything constitutionally necessary to eliminate EBRP's dual school system. The court therefore declared the system unitary and dismissed the case. 5 We vacated the district court's judgment and remanded for more specific findings. 570 F.2d 1260 (5th Cir.1978). Addressing student assignment first, we noted the presumption under Swann against the maintenance of a school system with substantially one-race schools. Id. at 1263; see Swann, 402 U.S. at 26, 91 S.Ct. at 1281. With that presumption in mind, three facts led us to vacate and remand: first, of the 110 schools in the parish fully 20 had student bodies comprised solely of black children; second, over half of the parish's schools had student bodies that were ninety percent or more of one race; and third, over half of the black children in the parish attended schools that were essentially all black. 570 F.2d at 1263. For lack of specific findings, we could not conclude that the Board had met its heavy burden of justifying the continued existence of so many substantially one-race schools with so great an impact on the black children of the parish. We therefore directed the district court to evaluate whether any of the remaining one-race or essentially one-race schools could be eliminated by use of one or more alternatives to the neighborhood school concept. In this regard, we mentioned Swann 's examples of possible desegregation tools: the remedial altering of attendance zones or the pairing and clustering of noncontiguous school zones. Id.; see Swann, 402 U.S. at 28-31, 91 S.Ct. at 1282-83. Finally, we noted the importance of specific findings to allow us to determine rather than speculate that the law has been correctly applied. 570 F.2d at 1263-64 (quoting Golf City, Inc. v. Wilson Sporting Goods Co., 555 F.2d 426, 433 (5th Cir.1977)). 6 We reserved decision on appellant's claim that the seniority-based teacher reassignment plan then in effect had left the more experienced teachers in the white schools and sent those with comparatively less experience to the essentially all-black schools. We directed the lower court to consider the effect of this plan in light of the two purposes to be achieved--desegregation and quality education. We also included in our remand all other contentions made in plaintiff-intervenors' motion for further relief, including their allegations of discrimination in new school site selection and construction, in funding decisions, and in the use of the biracial committee. 7 Immediately upon our remand, both the United States 4 and, later, plaintiff-intervenors moved the district court to set a hearing and to require the Board to consider the alternative desegregation methods mentioned in our opinion. In July 1979, the district court entered an order proposed by plaintiff-intervenors requiring the Board to submit a report on possible alternative desegregation methods. While the Board was preparing that report, the United States moved to intervene pursuant to section 902 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. Sec. 2000h-2 (1976). The district court granted leave to intervene on March 11, 1980. 8 The Board's staff report, submitted in November 1979, concluded that the EBRP school system had already attained unitary status. In the alternative, it found the prospect of pairing and clustering to be totally unsound from an educational and administrative viewpoint. It recommended the magnet school concept as the most viable and feasible of the alternatives. The possible use of magnet schools--those with special programs to attract voluntary attendance across racial lines--was described in somewhat greater detail in a separate report, but the Board submitted along with these reports a resolution of the biracial committee disagreeing with the Board's staff report and recommending instead that a plan be instituted to assign students in such a way as to achieve student populations at each school reflecting the racial percentages that existed throughout the system. 9 In a thoughtful minute entry dated March 28, 1980, Judge John V. Parker described the terms of our remand and set out the procedure he would follow to comply with our directions. He set a hearing, outlined in general terms the burdens each party would bear, and invited the parties to submit any specific proposals they might have to maximize desegregation of the system. 10 The United States submitted its plan on May 15, 1980. Developed by Dr. Gordon Foster, the United States' plan was later characterized by the district court as a classic pair 'em, cluster 'em and bus 'em plan. 514 F.Supp. 869, 873 (M.D.La.1981). Dr. Foster established that roughly 60% of the EBRP school system's students were white and 40% were black. He then defined a predominantly one-race school to be one with a student body 90% or more of a single race; he found 65 of the 98 schools in the system when Dr. Foster compiled his statistics that were predominantly one-race. Finally, he considered a school to be racially identifiable if the racial percentages reflected in the school's student body fell outside a range of 15 percentage points from the racial percentages reflected in the student population of the system as a whole. Thus, an EBRP school would be racially identifiable if the black students in its population comprised less than 25% or more than 55% of the whole; of the 98 schools, he found 81 identifiably white or black. The major objective of the Foster Plan, then, was to reassign students to minimize the number of racially identifiable schools to the greatest extent possible. This it would do with the remedial altering of attendance zones or the pairing and clustering of noncontiguous school zones. 570 F.2d at 1263. The plan was minutely detailed in its description of the pairs, clusters, and attendance zones it proposed to move the parish toward a unitary school system. Plaintiff-intervenors concurred in the Foster Plan a few weeks later. The only change they proposed was that Dr. Foster's plus or minus 15% formula be applied to magnet schools as well as those without magnet programs. 11 The Board also responded to the district court's request for specific proposals. On May 16, 1980, it submitted a memorandum arguing once again that its schools had been operated as a unitary system since 1970. It recognized the existence of some schools with student bodies composed of students of only one race. This the Board proposed to correct by establishing three magnet schools in the parish--one high school and two middle schools. Also, argued the Board, a sub-committee of its Magnet School Committee had just recommended that a second magnet be created at the high school level with a vocational-business program. Thus, the Board requested that the district court again declare the system unitary and dismiss the case. The court declined to do so. 12 A month later, on June 16, 1980, the Board submitted its critique of the Foster Plan. It attacked the plan as calling for disruptively long bus rides and for a massive reassignment of teachers. It urged that specific racial percentages not be applied to magnet schools, for such an admissions policy contradicted the whole concept of a magnet program. It also attached two reports. The Instructional Division objected to the plan because it paired schools with student bodies of diverse social, economic, curricular, and locational differences. The Transportation Division estimated that the plan would require a total of 182 new buses at a total cost of over $5 million. 13 The United States moved for partial summary judgment in August 1980 on the question of liability--whether the system remained dual--and proposed to leave the question of remedies for trial. As required by local rule, the Government submitted with its motion a list of 49 undisputed facts to support a finding that the system remained dual. These facts detailed the de jure segregation that existed in 1954. They described the Board's construction of new schools since 1954, revealing that for the quarter century since Brown I the parish had simply built schools for white children and schools for black children, with only a startlingly few placed to serve an interracial student population. They included the student attendance statistics mentioned in our 1978 opinion indicating that the parish school system remained a substantially segregated one. Finally, they indicated that the Board had assigned a disproportionate number of inexperienced teachers to predominantly black schools. 14 The Board responded to the Government's motion by admitting all but one of the undisputed facts. 5 The Board stated another undisputed fact--that it does not assign children to schools on the basis of their race--and asserted that there was factual dispute about whether assignment of disproportionately many inexperienced teachers to certain schools deprives the children at those schools of equal educational opportunities. 15 The district court granted the Government's motion on September 11, 1980, 498 F.Supp. 580, finding that the Board failed to meet its heavy burden to justify the continued existence of one-race schools in the parish. The first of the consolidated appeals now before the court involves the Board's challenge to this decision of the district court. 6 In light of its decision, the lower court found plaintiff-intervenors entitled to further relief from the vestiges of the dual system, and directed the Board to submit a proposed plan for the additional desegregation of the public schools. The court articulated nine criteria to be used in developing the plan, the very first of which was the need to achieve a unitary school system. Finally, it stated that trial of the case, then scheduled for the following month, would be limited to a consideration of the effectiveness of the Board's proposed plan, along with other matters left unresolved from plaintiff-intervenor's 1974 motion for further relief. 16 The Board submitted its plan in January 1980, and trial on its effectiveness began March 3, 1981. Judge Parker opened the proceedings with a statement, the spirit of which is captured in this assurance: As nearly certain as human events can be, when the public schools of East Baton Rouge Parish open in the fall of 1981, they will open under a court order for further desegregation of the races in this school system. He commented on the plans proposed by the Government and by the Board. The Government's was flawed in that it required transportation of young children over long distances, along and across some of the most dangerous traffic arteries in the parish. It also appeared unnecessarily to fractionate elementary schools, thereby sending young children from one school building to another throughout their early educational years. The Board's plan, on the other hand, appeared to Judge Parker to offer little chance of achieving an adequate measure of desegregation. It would leave 39 one-race schools after full implementation, and even that moderate success would come only after the plan had been in place for three years. Finally, the court noted the age of the case and the probable length of further proceedings on appeal should a plan be imposed by the district court, and heartily encouraged the parties to confer in an effort to resolve matters in a consent decree. To that end, he ordered the parties, including the members of the Board, to meet privately together in chambers at the close of trial to establish an agenda for negotiations. He directed the parties to continue to meet thereafter according to their agenda and in light of the court's previously stated criteria for developing a desegregation plan. 17 Trial on the nature and potential effectiveness of the Board's plan took five days. On the last day of trial, March 11, 1981, the district court directed that negotiations among the parties take place in the federal courthouse and ordered all persons attending the meetings to maintain absolute confidentiality of all matters reviewed, discussed or mentioned during the course of the negotiations. The negotiators were allowed to issue press releases, but only jointly and with prior approval of the court. 7 The negotiations continued through early April, but on April 15, 1981 the parties informed the court that they were unable to agree on a desegregation plan. The next day, the court terminated the settlement discussions, noting that the requirement of confidentiality would remain in effect. 18 The district court responded with laudable dispatch to the parties' inability to agree on a desegregation method. Only two weeks after negotiations failed, the court entered its order considering and rejecting both proposed plans and describing its own. 514 F.Supp. 869 (M.D.La.1981). First, the court described the Board's magnet school plan and reviewed the testimony adduced at trial in support of the Board's proposal. The magnet school plan could not be accepted, however, because it [left] nearly half the elementary students in one-race schools with no serious indication that the ratio [would] improve in the future. Id. at 873. Although the district court found greater promise in the Government's plan, it too was unacceptable because it proposed student transportation over distances too long and thoroughfares too dangerous. 19 The court's plan began with the three zones into which the Board had organized its magnet school proposal. Within those zones, it achieved desegregation of the elementary schools during the 1981-1982 school year by closing some older or inefficiently small schools and pairing or clustering the remaining elementary schools. The court found itself constrained by the facts of geography and by difficulties of transportation to allow eleven essentially one-race elementary schools to remain. As originally described, the court's plan desegregated EBRP's middle schools by transforming most into single-grade and a few into double-grade centers. 514 F.Supp. at 881-82. Considering this arrangement educationally unsound, the Board moved to amend the plan to return to three-grade middle schools. It first proposed several alternatives, no one of which enjoyed the full support of the Board. These were rejected because they failed to desegregate Scotlandville Middle School. On April 30, 1982, the court accepted the Board's second proposed middle school plan, but modified it to desegregate Scotlandville by mandatory assignment rather than by use of a language-development magnet program. Thus, the court's plan as actually implemented in the 1982-1983 school year desegregated EBRP's middle and high schools by establishing feeder patterns that would effectively eliminate all one-race middle schools and all but two one-race high schools. 8 Finally, the district court's plan contained a majority-to-minority transfer policy and several ancillary provisions relating, for example, to the Board's construction of new schools and use of temporary buildings. In the second of these consolidated appeals, every party except the United States challenges one aspect or another of the district court's remedial plan. 20 Two months after publication of the court's plan, on July 1, 1981, an organization called Parents for Neighborhood Schools, Inc. (PNS) moved to intervene as a defendant in the proceedings, arguing that the court-ordered confidentiality surrounding the March-April negotiations denied it and its members the right to be represented in the litigation and to confer with their elected representatives on the Board. Three weeks later, the Board moved the court to set aside the confidentiality requirement on constitutional and state statutory grounds. The court denied both motions after hearing, but eventually lifted the continuing requirement of confidentiality on November 22, 1982. Among today's consolidated appeals is PNS's challenge to the district court's denial of its motion to intervene. 21 The parties, the district court, and a master specially appointed for the purpose labored mightily during the 1981-1982 school year to implement the court's plan at the elementary level, to tend details of the plan such as use of closed school buildings, and to prepare for the plan's implementation at the secondary level. We have already noted the district court's April 1982 amendment of its plan for desegregating EBRP's middle schools. Since the plan's implementation at the secondary level in 1982, the court has retained jurisdiction to oversee its operation and to insure that desegregation proceeds satisfactorily. In August 1982, the United States moved to stay the two appeals then pending in this court--one from the summary judgment on liability and the other from the district court's remedial plan as originally imposed. We granted that motion to allow the parties and the district court time to reevaluate the desegregation plan in light of experience and to consider a new plan drafted by Professor Christine Rossell and proposed to the Board by the United States. Although it claims still to be interested in the new plan, a newly elected Board rejected the United States' proposal in early 1983. We granted the Government's motion to lift the stay in March 1983.