Parties in the Pitt County school desegregation case are back before the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond this morning to argue their second appeal in three years, this time over a September 2013 order from U.S. District Judge Malcolm Howard removing the school district from federal court oversight.
In reaching that decision — which restores independence withheld since a 1965 court order — Howard found that the school district had eliminated the effects of past segregation and had moved from a system of dual schools for the races to a unitary one.
But parents in the district say that Howard handed down his ruling without first reviewing a 2011-12 school assignment plan which expressly failed to consider race as a factor and left several schools there with high-minority student populations. They are asking the appeals court to send the case back to district court for a further review of the effects of the new plan.
Becoming unitary
Pitt County is a microcosm of a multiracial and class-stratified population growing in eastern North Carolina. Fifty-nine percent of its approximately 170,000 residents are white, 34 percent black and five percent, Latino. Unemployment there hovers at the ten percent mark, and nearly 24 percent live in poverty – higher than the state’s 15 percent average. That includes more than one in four children, and more than 60 percent of those enrolled in public schools qualify for free or reduced meals.
African-American students make up the majority in those public schools, according to district records. In 2012-13, close to 48 percent of its students were black, 38 percent white, and 10 percent Latino.
The county school board (which merged with Greenville City Schools in 1986) has been subject to a desegregation order since 1965, when a federal court found that the district was operating racially-segregated, dual and unconstitutional school systems, and required it to submit plans which would achieve balanced enrollment similar to the school age population in the district and “eradicate the vestiges of the dual school system and eliminate the effects of segregation.”
Although the county remained under that order and subject to ongoing supervision, the court in 1972 removed the district from its active docket pending objections over any new plans that might be brought to its attention.
Things remained quiet until 2006, when the Greenville Parents Association filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights, contending that the district’s 2006-07 assignment plan discriminated against white students because it used race to balance some of its elementary school population. In federal court proceedings that followed, those parents asked to have the school district removed permanently from supervision, while the county board asked for approval of its proposed plan as well as a new policy reducing race as a separate factor to be considered in assignment plans, incorporating it instead under the umbrella of “student diversity.” A settlement followed in November 2009, with the court approving both the plan and the new policy but reiterating the district’s continued desegregation obligations under earlier orders.
Round trips to the Fourth Circuit
On the heels of that settlement, the district approved a new school assignment plan for 2011-12 that considered race and student diversity only under the rubric of a new broader “student achievement” category.
Several parents then asked the district court to reject that plan, saying it left some schools with high minority, low-achieving student bodies and violated previous desegregation orders.
County school officials responded that the new plan complied with court orders and added that the district had largely achieved racial balance throughout the district in terms of student assignment, faculty composition, comparable school facilities and resources and transportation.
In August 2011, just days before school began, U.S. District Judge Howard denied the parents’ request for a stay of the new plan, but by the end of that school year the case was back in his court after the Fourth Circuit reversed that ruling.
With a nod to the district’s admission that it had not yet achieved unitary status, the panel in a 2-1 decision wrote:
Given that there is no dispute that the school district has not attained unitary status, the evidentiary burden should have been on the School Board to prove that the 2011-12 Assignment Plan is consistent with the controlling desegregation orders and fulfills the School Board’s affirmative duty to eliminate the vestiges of discrimination and move toward unitary status.
The parties returned to Howard’s courtroom, where challengers renewed their request that Howard block the new plan. But parents from the Greenville Parents Association again asked the judge to declare instead that the county had achieved unitary status and, with that, need not have the 2011-12 plan approved.
Judge Howard held five days of hearings in July 2013 and then, two months later, gave the Greenville Parents Association what they wanted.
In a 42-page decision that barely mentions the 2011-12 plan, Howard ruled that the district had attained unitary status some time before that plan came into existence, rendering his consideration of its merits moot.
The judge wrote:
The School Board has proven that the vestiges of state-mandated discrimination practiced over forty years ago have been eliminated to the extent practicable and that the School Board, as well as its predecessor boards, has complied in good faith with this court’s desegregation orders and possesses a good faith commitment to the eradication of dejure discrimination in its schools.
That decision is now the focus of argument before the Fourth Circuit this morning.
Those challenging the plan say Howard erred by putting the cart before the horse and declaring the district unitary without first considering whether the 2011-2012 plan met prior orders and moved the schools there further along the path of integration.
The school board, in turn, says the court correctly seized the moment to review the county’s progress in eradicating the effects of past discrimination and appropriately determined that it had reached the point where court intervention was no longer necessary.
Following argument, a decision is likely to come by the spring.
For more on the Pitt County case and other continuing desegregation battles in the South, read here.
