Court Opinion

ID: 9482290
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:45:43.73949+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:48:53.166521
License: Public Domain

WOLLMAN, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
Although I concur in the court’s judgment vacating the orders appealed from and remanding the case to the District Court for further proceedings, I write separately to voice my concern that our holding may be too restrictive with respect to the changes that the parties should be allowed to implement. By way of example, it seems to me that the parties have already offered sufficient justification for their intention to reduce the number of instructional aides in the incentive schools, to eliminate certain incentive-school themes, and to eliminate a full-time nurse at each *259school. These are matters, among others, that I consider to be mere details, the implementation of which should be left to the discretion of the parties.
The recurring theme expressed during oral argument was the knowledge and experience that the parties have gained during the past several years about those aspects of the desegregation plan that have been successful and those which have not. For example, counsel for Pulaski County Special School District stated (and I paraphrase) “What we have learned over the past two years is that brand new schools and a strong basic curriculum is what parents want.” Counsel for North Little Rock School District explained that North Little Rock had abandoned precision teaching because it was found not to be effective. Likewise, counsel for the Joshua Inter-venors stated (and again I paraphrase) “We have seen that certain things don’t work. We know what won’t work, for example, theme schools.”
Of course these are arguments that can (and no doubt will) be made to the District Court on remand. I mention them here only to illustrate the deference that we, and the District Court, should pay to those who are charged with the responsibility of educating the children within the several school districts.
Some might reply by saying that such deference represents a naive, too-trusting attitude, given the recalcitrance — nay, outright obduracy — of the parties in years past. Perhaps so. On the other hand, we should remember that this is not 1954 or 1957 — or even 1985, for that matter — and the time has come to cease excoriating the leaders of the present for the sins of their forebears and to vouchsafe them some credit for the efforts they have made to comply with the several decrees that have been entered in this long-standing case. The court’s opinion today takes this latter course, and I am pleased to join in it, differing only in the degree of detailed supervision that the District Court should be required to exercise over the parties’ revised plan.
If I thought that my somewhat more relaxed standard of supervision would lead to a cessation of the efforts that have heretofore been made to remedy the effects of legally-enforced segregation or a wholesale jettisoning of the plan that we approved in our opinion of last December, I would not espouse it. As it is, however, I would give the parties the opportunity of demonstrating that the changes they have proposed do not affect, in the court’s words, “the major substantive commitments to desegregation.” I view the continuing presence of the Joshua Intervenors as a powerful force to insure that the several school districts adhere to their commitments to desegregation. My views have not carried the day, of course, and so we will never know whether the greater latitude I would have allowed the parties would have resulted in a commitment fulfilled or a promise rung hollow.