NAACP v. Duval County School, No. 99-12049

• Citation: 273 F.3d 960
• Decision Date: 19 November 2001
• Docket Number: No. 99-12049
• Parties: (11th Cir. 2001) NAACP, JACKSONVILLE BRANCH, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. DUVAL COUNTY SCHOOL, Defendant-Appellee
• Court: United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (11th Circuit)

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273 F.3d 960 (11th Cir. 2001) NAACP, JACKSONVILLE BRANCH, Plaintiff-Appellant,
v.
DUVAL COUNTY SCHOOL, Defendant-Appellee. No. 99-12049 UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE ELEVENTH CIRCUIT November 19, 2001

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Appeal from the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida

Before BARKETT, HILL and KRAVITCH, Circuit Judges.

HILL, Circuit Judge:

Forty-one years ago, this litigation began. The original complaint sought the desegregation of the Duval County, Florida school system. Five district court judges have presided over the case since

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its inception, and, four times, two different circuit courts of appeals have been asked to review one of their decisions.¹ In this fifth appeal, we must decide whether the present district court correctly determined that this litigation should come to an end because the school system has achieved unitary status. We agree with the district court that the answer is "yes."

I.

The original complaint in this case was filed on December 6, 1960. See Braxton v. Bd. of Pub. Inst. of Duval County.² It sought an injunctive order desegregating the Duval County public schools. In 1963, after a finding that the county was operating a de jure dual school system, in which black and white children were required to attend separate schools, the district court began supervising the desegregation of the county's schools.

In 1971, after the Supreme Court held that mandatory busing of students to eliminate racial disparities was a permissible, and sometimes necessary, desegregation remedy, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Bd. of Educ., 402 U.S. 1, 22 (1971), the district court ordered the Duval County School Board (the "Board") to implement the mandatory reassignment of students. Mims v. Duval County Sch. Bd., 329 F. Supp. 123 (M.D. Fla. 1971). Elementary and junior high schools were clustered into groups which were converted to grade centers to produce student bodies with 21% to 34% black students. Id. at 134-35. Students were bussed within each cluster to achieve the mandated racial balance. Id. at 130-31.

The judgment was affirmed on appeal, 447 F.2d 1330 (5th Cir. 1971) and, as amended from time to time, primarily to accommodate the opening of new schools, the decree governed the parties for the remainder of the 1970's and well into the 1980's.³

During the pendency of the Mims injunction over the next 19 years, every school in the entire school district, which previously had been all-black or all-white, had substantial numbers of students of the other race in attendance for one or more years. By 1989, only 18 of the 142 schools operating in Duval County were identifiably black.⁴

By 1990, however, both plaintiffs and the Board had come to the conclusion that mandatory busing was particularly onerous to the students of Duval County and not in their best interests.⁵ After almost

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thirty years of litigation, the parties entered into settlement negotiations. They agreed that mass busing should come to an end. They also agreed that future desegregative efforts by the Board should focus almost entirely upon the elementary schools.⁶ Finally, they agreed that they wished to measure the Board's success in achieving unitary status by the goals outlined in the "Stipulation and Agreement," filed on June 18, 1990.⁷ After some technical corrections and refinements, the "Corrected Stipulation and Agreement" (the "CSA") was established as the defining document outlining the goals that the Duval County School Board (the "Board") must achieve in order to attain unitary status.⁸

The CSA, thus, represents a roadmap to the end of judicial supervision of the Duval County school system. Its 33 paragraphs contain a series of steps which the Board agreed to undertake to achieve unitary status for the school district.⁹ Most of these steps are addressed to attaining greater racial balance in student enrollment in the county's schools, especially its elementary schools.

"Attachment C" to the CSA lists 28 elementary schools that the parties expected to become identifiably black with the end of the Mims injunction's mandatory student assignment and bussing. Prior to the injunction, thirteen of these schools had been all-white; fifteen had been all-black. During the years of mandatory student assignment, all the Attachment C schools were attended by students of both races. After mandatory student assignment was replaced with the CSA's "local attendance zones," these schools became identifiably black because their attendance

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zones had become 96% black.¹⁰ The parties, therefore, directed much of the CSA to improving the racial balance at these schools.¹¹

The CSA established "a desegregative goal of at least 20% black students and 45% white students"¹² at these Attachment C elementary schools.¹³ The Board was required, with community input, to implement and aggressively promote magnet programs¹⁴ as incentives to attract white students to these schools. In addition, the CSA required the Board to permit majority to minority transfers in order to improve the racial balance at these schools.¹⁵ The Board was also required to commit $60,000,000 for the "renovation, substantial rehabilitation, or replacement of core city schools."

With respect to middle and high schools, the CSA specifically designated three middle and four high schools, which, based on their attendance areas, were expected to remain or become racially identifiable and directed that they operate magnet programs to attract other-race students.

The CSA also set goals with respect to achieving racial equality in faculty and staff hiring and placement; transportation; extracurricular activities; and facilities and capital expenditures.

On July 14, 1990, the district court approved and adopted the CSA. It retained jurisdiction to monitor its implementation and to enforce it.

The CSA was implemented during the 1991-92 school year.¹⁶ In 1996, the Board

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moved the district court to declare that the Duval County school district had met the constitutional requirements for unitary status as set forth by the Supreme Court in Bd. of Educ. of Oklahoma City Pub. Sch. v. Dowell, 498 U.S. 237 (1991), Freeman v. Pitts, 503 U.S. 467(1992), and Missouri v. Jenkins, 515 U.S. 33 (1995), and also that it had fulfilled its contractual obligations under the CSA. After a three-week evidentiary hearing in 1997, and over a year for the preparation of briefs, the case was orally argued on August 24, 1998. In a 140 page opinion that exhaustively catalogued every paragraph of the CSA and carefully evaluated the record evidence of the Board's efforts and success in achieving each paragraph's stated goal, the district court found that the Board had acted in exceptional good faith in its efforts to comply with the CSA and that it had substantially achieved its goals. The court also held that the Board had fulfilled its constitutional obligation to eliminate the vestiges of de jure segregation and to desegregate Duval County's schools in good faith and to the extent practicable. Accordingly, the district court declared that the school district was unitary in all respects, vacated all prior injunctions, and dismissed the case. This appeal followed.

We review the district court's conclusion that Duval County has achieved unitary status for clear error. Manning v. Sch. Bd. of Hillsborough County, 244 F.3d 927, 940 (11th Cir. 2001) petition for cert. filed, 69 U.S.L.W. 3792 (U.S. June 14, 2001) (No. 00-1871) (unitary status is a finding of fact); Lockett v. Bd. of Educ. of Muscogee County, 111 F.3d 839, 841-42 (11th Cir. 1997) (Lockett II). Under this standard of review, a district court's findings are entitled to substantial deference. "Where there are two permissible views of the evidence, the [district court]'s choice between them cannot be clearly erroneous." Manning, 244 F.3d at 940 (quoting Lockett II, 111 F.3d at 842) (internal quotation and citation omitted)). Moreover, only in circumstances when "a district court applies an incorrect legal standard which taints or infects its findings of facts, [do] such findings lose the insulation of Rule 52(a) and judgment based thereon cannot stand." Id. at 940-41 (internal quotations and citations omitted). We review the district court's interpretation and application of the law de novo. Id.

II.

School boards that formerly operated a dual school system, in which black students attended one set of schools and white students another, have been "clearly charged with the affirmative duty to take whatever steps might be necessary to convert to a unitary system in which racial discrimination would be eliminated root and branch." Green v. County Sch. Bd. of New Kent County, 391 U.S. 430, 437-38 (1968) (emphasis added). A unitary system is one in which there is presently no de jure racial segregation, and the vestiges of former de jure segregation have been eliminated to the extent practicable. Freeman, 503 U.S. at 494 ("If the unlawful de jure policy of a school system has been the cause of the racial imbalance in student attendance, that condition must be remedied"). Until these goals are achieved, the Supreme Court has ordered district courts to supervise the desegregative efforts of school boards that formerly practiced de jure segregation. Lockett II , 111 F.3d at 842 (citing Brown v. Bd. of Educ., 349 U.S. 294, 301 (1955)).

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To be entitled to the end of federal court supervision, a formerly dual school system must be able to prove that it has (1) complied in good faith with the desegregation decree, and (2) eliminated the vestiges of prior de jure segregation to the extent practicable. Jenkins, 515 U.S. at 88 (quoting Freeman, 503 U.S. at 492). See also Manning, 244 F.3d at 942; Lockett II, 111 F.3d at 843. In this case, the parties and the district court have agreed that the CSA defines the specific goals the Board must meet and the steps it must take in...