Opinion ID: 500653
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: The School Remedy

Text: 197 After receiving remedy proposals from the parties and conducting an evidentiary hearing, the court issued its school remedy order, reported at 635 F.Supp. 1538 (1986). As an overall goal, the order provided that the Board shall seek to achieve desegregation throughout the Yonkers public school system by the 1987-88 school year. To this end, the court ordered the creation of a system of magnet schools that students could choose to attend voluntarily. It defined a desegregated school as (a) a magnet school whose minority enrollment was within 15 percentage points of the system-wide proportion of minority students for the first year of that school's operation and within 10 percentage points thereafter, or (b) a nonmagnet school whose minority population was within 20 percentage points of the system-wide proportion. 198 The court prescribed the methods to be used in administering the magnet school system [i]n order to maximize the extent to which the integrative goals of this order will be reached through voluntary student assignments. Id. at 1544. They included an intense publicity and recruitment phase, id., and a system whereby parents must submit for each child a list of three school choices, at least one of which must further the goals of desegregation, id. at 1545. The court also established the admissions criteria to be used in the magnet schools, ordered the Board to make every effort to achieve a specified racial composition of teachers at each school, explained the guidelines to be followed in the special education program, and ordered that the Board provide transportation for specified students. Id. at 1545-50. 199 The court ordered the City to provide the necessary funding for implementation of the ordered desegregation program. It appointed a monitor to oversee compliance with its orders and retained jurisdiction of the action in order to enforce compliance. Id. at 1551-53. 200 The court overruled a belated objection by the City that the plan ordered by the court was too expensive. The court noted that the City had made no such objection at the hearing when the desegregation plan budget was presented, had not contended that any part of the proposal was not required for desegregation, and was unable, despite being given an additional opportunity to do so, to show that any part of the desegregation plan budget either was not necessary or was duplicative of the regular budget. 201 A stay motion was denied, and the desegregation program was commenced in the 1986-87 school year. B. LIABILITY 202 In these appeals, the City mounts several challenges to the district court's ruling that it is liable for segregation in housing. Principally it contends that the court erred (1) in ruling, in effect, that it had an obligation to build subsidized housing outside of Southwest Yonkers; (2) in finding that the City's housing decisions were made with the intention and the effect of perpetuating housing segregation; and (3) in holding the City liable for making decisions that merely responded to the wishes of its citizens. 203 The City challenges the ruling that it is liable for segregation in the schools, contending principally (1) that the segregation was caused not by City actions but rather by Board policies for which the City may not be held liable; (2) that the record reflects at most the foreseeability that City actions would perpetuate and enhance school segregation, but not any intent on the part of the City to achieve those effects; and (3) that the court could not properly take into account, in assessing City responsibility for school segregation, the mayor's pattern of appointing to the Board individuals who espoused the maintenance of segregation in the schools. 204 The Board challenges the district court's ruling that it is liable for school segregation on the principal grounds that (1) there was insufficient evidence of its intention to discriminate, and (2) the court could not properly take into account the intentionally segregative conduct of the City in determining whether the Board should be held liable. The Board also contends that minority should have been defined to include only blacks, not hispanics, and that with that redefinition, the schools could not be found to be in fact segregated. 205 As discussed in Part C. below, both the City and the Board contend that various aspects of the district court's remedial orders go beyond the proper bounds of discretion. 206 We have considered all of the arguments made by the City and the Board on these appeals and find all of them to be without merit. Only those mentioned above warrant discussion.