Opinion ID: 500653
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: school remedies

Text: 317 Each defendant makes one major challenge to the court's remedy for school segregation. The Board contends principally that the court should not have ordered it to implement a system-wide redistribution of students in light of the nature of the constitutional violations found by the court. The City argues that it should not have been ordered to fund a plan that is more expensive than a simple mandatory busing plan would be. We see no abuse of discretion in the district court's ordering the desegregation of all of Yonkers's public schools or requiring the City to fund the ordered plan. 318 Although the Board argues against a system-wide remedy on the premise that certain of its segregative actions, such as the zone realignments between Schools 16 and 25, affected only discrete geographic areas and that its system-wide discriminatory practice of assigning minority staff members disproportionately to predominantly minority schools did not have a direct effect on the distribution of students, it is quite plain that many of the Board's actions or practices did have comprehensive segregative effects that the court could properly seek to eliminate. For example, the Board's disproportionate assignment of minority teachers to schools having a disproportionately high number of minority students and its refusal to invoke its contractual right to stem the flow of more experienced white teachers to the more attractive schools outside of Southwest not only skewed the distribution of teachers but also contributed to the identification of some schools as minority schools and others as white schools and contributed to the inferior quality of education available at the Southwest Yonkers schools. Similarly, the discriminatory placement of minorities in special education classes and the inhumane treatment of special education classes were shown to have far-reaching effect. The Board's pattern of placing the heavily minority special classes in virtually all-white schools served to stigmatize all minorities, giving many regular students at predominantly white schools the idea that minorities in general were less worthy, and making it more difficult for regular minority students to gain peer acceptance at predominantly white schools. 319 Further, even Board actions whose immediate segregative effect may have been visited upon just one school often had secondary effects elsewhere. For example, with respect to the Board's refusal to close Longfellow, the district court was not required to focus narrowly on the segregated status of that school alone. The disproportionately high number of minority students at that school was exacerbated when Longfellow was rezoned to send some of its white students to the newly opened Burroughs; when Burroughs was closed, students from Burroughs were not reassigned to the nearby Longfellow with desegregative effect, but were allowed to attend schools in far corners of the City, with further segregative effect. 320 Finally, the Board's general cooperation with the City's effort to maintain segregated neighborhoods, the effect of which was to enhance segregation in the schools, in itself provided added justification for the court to order a system-wide remedy. Cf. Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. at 755, 94 S.Ct. at 3132 (Stewart, J., concurring) (Were it to be shown, for example, that state officials had contributed to the separation of the races ... by purposeful, racially discriminatory use of state housing or zoning laws, then a decree calling for transfer of pupils across district lines ... might well be appropriate.). 321 In sum, the district court found that there had been system-wide constitutional violations and its detailed findings support its conclusion that a system-wide remedy was needed. 322 We also reject the Board's contention that it will be impossible to attain the remedial order's goal of desegregation of all schools, i.e., bringing each to within 10-15% (for magnet schools) or 20% (for nonmagnet schools) of the system-wide proportion of minority students. We see nothing inherently impossible in the goal, and we note, in any event, that it is a goal rather than an immutable directive. The order states that the Board shall seek to achieve this desegregation of the system. 323 Nor do we find merit in the City's complaint that it is improperly being required to pay for a desegregation plan that is more expensive than a simple mandatory busing plan would be. Although there is no question that the court-ordered plan is more expensive, that simple fact provides no basis for altering the relief ordered. The cost of a mandatory busing plan does not provide a benchmark that is relevant here, since that is not a remedy the City at all prefers. As late as the eve of implementation of the plan ordered by the court, the court asked the City's attorney whether the Council had in fact made any determination that it preferred a more mandatory but less expensive plan. The answer was short and plain: No, it has not. In view of community opposition to busing proposals over the years, it is hardly surprising that the City does not support a mandatory busing program, even to save money. Throughout the period covered by this lawsuit, the City repeatedly eschewed desegregative courses of action, both in housing and education, in favor of segregative alternatives that were far more expensive. In all the circumstances, we see no abuse of discretion in the district court's rejection of the City's attempt to provide less funding than is needed to implement the adopted plan, simply because of the lower projected cost of a plan the City is not willing to endorse. 324 In selecting the desegregation plan ordered here, the district court plainly made appropriate efforts to eliminate any expense that was not necessary to remedy the violations found and to minimize the degree to which the remedy would interfere with the autonomy of the City and the Board. The voluntary magnet-school plan was adopted only after all of the parties had been given an opportunity to submit proposals; the approach chosen was essentially that proposed by the Board. The court required the Board to submit a separate itemized budget for the desegregation expenses; it made appropriate findings that the proposed budget represented the reasonable and necessary estimated cost of implementing the plan; and it has taken appropriate care to ensure that the Board's projected expenditures for the ordered plan, insofar as they exceed the normal budgetary appropriations, are in furtherance of the desegregation remedy rather than of the general enrichment of the school program. It appointed a monitor to oversee compliance and it has retained jurisdiction to ensure that the parties carry out their respective responsibilities. The City, though given an extra opportunity to do so, did not show that any part of the adopted plan was duplicative or unnecessary to the plan's success. 325 Finally, because of the voluntary aspect of the school plan ordered by the district court, that remedy, while more costly than another plan might be in terms of dollars, is both less intrusive and more likely to achieve long-term success in desegregating the public schools. Since the City is responsible for funding the public schools and is responsible in part for the segregated condition of the schools, it was not an abuse of the court's discretion to require the City to fund the more expensive, but practically more effective, remedy.