Court Opinion

ID: 9490218
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 13:36:30.957047+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:53:57.645711
License: Public Domain

BARKETT, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
Although I believe this is a very close case and guidance in this area of the law is vague, I respectfully differ from the court’s decision to rehear this ease because I am concerned about the Muscogee County School District’s actions, and inaction, during the last fifteen years that it was subject to the desegregation decree.
Regardless of the age of a desegregation decree, such á decree may only be terminated upon a showing that a school district has eliminated all vestiges of prior de jure segregation to the maximum extent practicable and has complied in good faith with both the decree and the spirit of Brown’s mandate.1 Board of Ed. of Oklahoma City v. Dowell, 498 U.S. 237, 249-50, 111 S.Ct. 630, 638, 112 L.Ed.2d 715 (1991); Lee v. Etowah County *845Bd. of Educ., 963 F.2d 1416, 1425 (11th Cir.1992).
No one disputes that de facto segregation now exists in the school district. It is also clear that prior de jure segregation resulted from unconstitutional practices by the school district. The school district had the burden of demonstrating that the current imbalances are not vestiges of those past policies or practices. See Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklen-burg, 402 U.S. 1, 25, 91 S.Ct. 1267, 1281, 28 L.Ed.2d 554 (1971). The district court determined that the racial imbalances were not caused by the school system but, in doing so, focused only on demographic changes in the county. The court failed to consider whether the school board’s total curtailment of any desegregation efforts after about 1980 helped preserve or perpetuate the effects of its prior unconstitutional policies. The district court’s narrow approach erroneously assumed that as long as a school district can point to some force not directly related to a school district’s overt actions which is causing or exacerbating racial imbalances, then the resulting imbalance is not traceable to past practices. I do not believe that this approach comports with the proper burdens of proof or the analytic framework set out in Freeman v. Pitts, 503 U.S. 467, 494, 112 S.Ct. 1430, 1447, 118 L.Ed.2d 108 (1992).

. In its Petition for Rehearing, the School Board repeatedly suggests that a school district satisfies its obligations once it adopts a racially neutral system of student assignment. See Petition for Rehearing at 7 ("federal courts simply have no authority to enforce orders solely to achieve racial balance once a racially neutral system of student assignment has effectively been adopted”) & 12 ("there is no affirmative duty [to remedy racial imbalances] after a school system has successfully implemented a school desegregation plan”). However, I believe Petitioner confuses the means of its remedial obligations with the ends. Although implementing a racially neutral attendance pattern is a necessary remedial device, "[a] remedy is, justifiable only insofar as it advances the ultimate objective of alleviating the initial constitutional violation.” Freeman, 503 U.S. at 489, 112 S.Ct. at 1445 (emphasis added).