Opinion ID: 435100
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: Overcrowding, Faculty Assignment and Educational Priorities.

Text: 49 The Board response to overcrowding was two-fold--the use of portables and double sessions. At one point, the Board instituted double sessions in overcrowded southern schools even though some northern schools were operating under capacity. 12 The district court found this disturbing because of the known educationally disadvantageous effects of double sessions. Diaz III, 518 F.Supp. at 635. 50 Defendants admit that faculty and staff were intentionally assigned to schools on the basis of race. The Hispanic teachers were concentrated in the downtown schools. The district court found that assignments were not made in order to assign Spanish-speaking teachers to predominantly Mexican-American schools where their language skills might be needed. Diaz III, 518 F.Supp. at 640-41. The district court concluded that the assignment of teachers or staff was not the result of a racially-neutral policy. Id. at 641. 51 A discriminative pattern of assignment of faculty and staff is among the most important indicia of a segregated school system. Swann, 402 U.S. at 18, 91 S.Ct. at 1277. The district court correctly observed that the law does not permit assignment of faculty on the basis of race even if motivated by a neutral policy, Diaz III, 518 F.Supp. at 640. The district court found the staff and teacher assignments had no effect on student segregation because of the small number of Spanish-surnamed faculty. Its observations may be accurate, but it neither negates the illegality of the assignment policy nor diminishes the inference of racial bias. 52 The Board rejected an opportunity to reduce segregation through use of portable classrooms. The district owns over 400 portable classrooms and leases others. Portable classrooms, because they are not fixed in one place, provide an inexpensive and flexible way to alter attendance boundaries to reduce overcrowding and ethnic imbalance in particular schools. The district court found that the use of portables to increase integration was always an alternative available when a need for portables arose; the school district could always have opted to place new portables at the other end of the district from the area of overcrowding.... Diaz III, 518 F.Supp. at 635. Nevertheless, the Board rejected numerous suggestions for portable siting to alter attendance patterns involving transferring Hispanic students from northern schools to schools farther south. The district has never used portables to improve ethnic imbalance. 53 In one instance in 1974 the Board did depart from its neighborhood school policy when Anglo parents in the southern schools complained about the double sessions. The Board allowed them to go out of the district rather than transfer to the northern schools in which Hispanic students predominated. 54 At a school board meeting on May 2, 1974, a group of Anglo parents demanded that their children be relieved of double sessions at Muir and Bret Harte junior high schools. On May 16, the board responded by authorizing inter-district transfers permitting Anglo students to attend schools outside their neighborhood attendance areas for the 1974-1975 and 1975-1976 school years. Executive sessions of the board met with the district superintendent and the board attorney to reevaluate the newly-enacted authorization of inter-district transfers. Counsel for the board advised the district that the court in this litigation might adversely interpret deviation from the board's stated adherence to a neighborhood school policy, in circumstances which relieved crowding while perpetuating ethnic imbalance. On June 20, 1974, after receiving this advice, the board rescinded its transfer resolution. 55 Diaz I, 412 F.Supp. at 323. 56 We agree with the advice the Board received from its counsel that the resolution could be interpreted as evidence of segregative intent. The later recission of the resolution because of counsel's advice does not lessen the implication. 57 The Board argues that the segregation in district schools results solely from its neighborhood school policy. The evidence in the record, however, demonstrates that the pattern of decisions relating to school siting, school closings, designation of attendance areas, busing, use of portable classrooms, double sessions and transfers maintained or exacerbated ethnic imbalance. None of these decisions was required by the neighborhood school policy; indeed, the Board rejected numerous alternative proposals that were consistent with the neighborhood school policy. The Board's willingness to depart from its neighborhood school policy in assigning students from the Little Orchard neighborhood to Washington rather than Riverglen and permitting students from the Anglo-dominated Muir and Bret Harte Schools to transfer to other Anglo-dominated schools indicates that the Board was willing to forego its neighborhood school policy in order to maintain segregation. Plaintiffs have presented additional evidence that suggests that the neighborhood school policy itself was a pretext for the Board's hostility to integration. 58