Court Opinion

ID: 9552330
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 19:08:52.902442+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:26:07.762637
License: Public Domain

NEWMAN, J.,
Dissenting. — Trial courts never should act as school boards. Yet in Crawford v. Board of Education (1976) 17 Cal.3d 280, at page 286 [130 Cal.Rptr. 724, 551 P.2d 28] this court said: “In those instances ... in which a court finds that a local school board has not embarked upon a course of action designed to eliminate segregation in its schools or, having done so, has not implemented a plan that provides meaningful progress toward that goal, a court has no alternative but to intervene and to order the school board to undertake immediately a reasonably feasible desegregation program.” (Italics added.)
Only when it “finds that a school board has implemented a program which promises to achieve meaningful progress toward eliminating the segregation . . .,” this court also said (id.), may the trial court “defer to the school board’s program and . . . decline to intervene”; and it may continue to decline to intervene only for “so long as such meaningful progress does in fact follow.” (Italics added.)
In this case did the trial court find that the board had implemented a program promising to achieve meaningful progress toward the elimination of segregation? The answer is No. The majority here state (ante p. 94, fn. 9): “We have no occasion to decide whether proposal III [see id. at p. 89, fn. 4] promises to achieve ‘meaningful progress’ toward the elimination of segregation in the District.” Why have we no occasion to *103decide that? Because, say the majority: “Plaintiffs failed to challenge the substantive adequacy of proposal III in the trial court, and are therefore foreclosed from doing so for the first time on appeal.” (Id. p. 94, fn. 9.)
In paragraph 18 of their complaint, however, plaintiffs allege that “defendants have failed to comply with the requirements of those regulations and in assigning the pupils in the manner they propose to follow are acting in violation of mandates contained in those sections.” (See §§ 90-101 of tit. 5, Cal. Admin. Code.) Further (in their points and authorities supporting the complaint): “Plaintiffs . . . contend that there remains a substantial question of whether the schools which are involved in the proposed plan are in fact segregated and whether the requirements of the regulations respecting an equitable sharing of the burden of attempting to desegregate [have] been accomplished among the schools of the defendant district where the one school with the statistically greatest racial isolation has been left out of any participation in the proposed plan.”
Referring impliedly to that allegation and that contention, plaintiffs’ opening brief in the Court of Appeal argued that plan III “[suffered] from such numerous substantive and procedural defects” that there was, in effect, no plan at all. (Italics added.) And the Court of Appeal opinion considered at length whether the plan “promises to achieve meaningful progress” (see pp. 10-17).
On that record, I cannot agree that plaintiffs were foreclosed from raising the issue here.
Regarding the statement that “plaintiffs .. . appear to challenge the substantive correctness of the determination that Camarillo High School was not segregated” (ante, p. 88), the majority comment: “Insofar as they do, we recognize that courts apply a deferential standard of review to such determinations” (id.). Yet the citations that follow, concerning “a quasi-legislative function,” are hardly consistent with these words from Crawford (17 Cal.3d at pp. 306-307): “The key to judicial deferment to the judgment of a local school board in this area ... must lie in a school board’s demonstration of its commitment to the necessity of immediately instituting reasonable and feasible steps to alleviate school segregation.... [If] If, however, a court finds that a local school *104board has not implemetited such a course of action, the court is left with no alternative but to intervene to protect the constitutional rights of minority children.”