Otero v. Mesa County Valley School District No. 51
| Decision Date | 30 December 1975 |
| Docket Number | No. 74-W-279.,74-W-279. |
| Citation | 408 F. Supp. 162 |
| Parties | Stephanie OTERO et al., Plaintiffs, v. MESA COUNTY VALLEY SCHOOL DISTRICT NO. 51 et al., Defendants. |
| Court | U.S. District Court — District of Colorado |
Vilma S. Martinez and Sanford J. Rosen, Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund, San Francisco, Cal., Paul A. Baca and Federico F. Pena, Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund, Arthur S. Lucero, Colorado Rural Legal Services, Denver, Colo., Jose D. L. Marquez, Colorado Rural Legal Services, Grand Junction, Colo., for plaintiffs.
Nelson, Hoskin, Groves & Prinster by John W. Groves and Jon E. Getz, Grand Junction, Colo., for defendants.
On October 4, 1974, this case was certified as a Rule 23(b)(2) class action with the following stipulated class definition:
"All persons attending or entitled to attend Mesa County Valley School District No. 51 having a Spanish surname, and all other persons attending or entitled to attend such schools who consider themselves or are considered by the school or the community to be of Mexican-American origin or ancestry, who are being denied an equal educational opportunity because of their race or national origin in that the District's curriculum, personnel, and other programs provide an inadequate or unequal educational service which does not take into account their linguistic or cultural differences."
As will be seen presently, this class definition stems directly from the so-called "Cardenas Plan" which is discussed in Keyes v. School District No. 1 (1975), 10 Cir., 521 F.2d 465, and it was obviously phrased by plaintiffs' counsel in anticipation of the testimony of Dr. Cardenas in the trial of this case. Plaintiffs here make no claim of segregation, and, as plaintiffs' position is summarized in counsel's opening statement, plaintiffs say that "the cultural and linguistic makeup of Chicano students has posed an educational incompatibility between District 51's educational program and the learning style of these students to the degree that they do not effectively and equally benefit from the school's program as compared to Anglo students." Later in his opening statement counsel said, "Plaintiffs' case will unveil the principal cause for Chicano students' poor performance in school, namely, that District 51 has created a school system oriented for middle class, Anglo Children, has staffed that system with non-Chicano personnel who do not understand and cannot relate with Chicano students who are linguistically and culturally different, to the extent that Chicano students and their parents do not feel that School District 51 is `their' school." Plaintiffs say that these accusations, if proven, would violate their constitutional rights and would violate rights given them under certain federal statutes. Plaintiffs seek injunctive relief requiring the school district to provide a type of bilingual/bicultural education acceptable to plaintiffs and their counsel, and, collateral to that relief, plaintiffs want injunctive relief conforming the district's employment practices to plaintiffs' views. Plaintiffs want to restructure the curriculum of Mesa Valley School District No. 51, and they want to tailor it to accommodate plaintiffs' concept of the alleged needs of an astonishingly small number of students. What plaintiffs really want is to substitute their judgment for the thoughtful, independent judgment of the elected school board which, for the most part, has acted only after obtaining recommendations of qualified, duly appointed school officials and recommendations of qualified independent experts hired by the school board.
At the outset, the parties should be identified, or, in the case of the defendants, at least grouped, and, since the trial was largely a battle of experts, the principal experts should be identified, because time and space just do not permit a summary of all of the expert testimony. Plaintiffs are all students of or former students who dropped out of District 51 schools.1 All bring the action through their parents as next friends. Stephanie Otero was a kindergarten student; Brenda Otero was in the first grade; Wilford Trujillo was in the fifth grade; Sara Jane Trujillo was in the sixth grade; Rebecca Trujillo dropped out of the tenth grade; Jeanette Romero dropped out of the eleventh grade and John Martinez was in the ninth grade. The defendants are an assorted group. The school district is named; the school board members are named; the superintendent is a defendant; the personnel director is being sued; the director of federal programs is another defendant, and the remaining defendants are school principals.
Coming now to an identification of the chief expert witnesses, plaintiffs called the most experts, but defendants called the experts who to me gave the more logical, believable testimony. Certainly, if the expert testimony proved anything, it proved that educational theory is not an exact science, and an expert can be found who will testify to almost anything. Listening to these experts causes one to conclude that if psychiatrists' disagreements are to be compared to differences between educators, psychiatrists are almost of a single mind. Beyond peradventure, in considering the need for and the type of bilingual/bicultural education, no school board could ever devise any plan which would not be subject to vehement attack by experts employed by persons who didn't like the school board's plan. With equal certainty, any plan mandated by a court would rest on the same shaky foundation. Be that as it may, among others, the following independent experts testified:
Their testimony as to educational theory was applied to these facts. Geographically, School District No. 51 is one of the largest school districts in the state. It covers 65% of Mesa County and it includes an area of 2,150 square miles in which 95% of Mesa County's school population resides. Of the total enrollment of the District, 89.8% of the pupils are Anglos, 2% of the pupils are either Black, Oriental or Native American, and 8.2% of the students are Mexican-American. The Mexican-American population is spread throughout the District, although there is some concentration of Mexican-Americans in the southwestern part of Grand Junction and in Fruita. The distribution of minority students in the District's schools is:
High School. The distribution ranges from 6.4% to
9.4% among the three high schools
Junior High. The distribution ranges from 6.4% to
11/8% in the six junior high schools
Elementary. The distribution ranges from 1.1%
to 30.1% among the 19 elementary
schools. Of the 19 elementary schools
only two have minority concentrations
of more than 16%
On a socio-economic basis, Mexican-American students rank very low. Almost four times as many Mexican-Americans as Anglos are enrolled in the free lunch program, and the same comparison applies to the number of Mexican-American families having incomes below the federal poverty level. Undeniably and unfortunately, the socio-economic level of the Mexican-American students makes the obtaining of an education more difficult, but, although the record establishes this, the record does not establish that language barriers are holding back any significant number of Mexican-Americans, and, in fact, the record is quite weak in proving that the problems of a single Mexican-American in District 51 are fairly attributable to language deficiency. Although the experts battled at length over the quality of the school board's tests, and I shall devote a few words to this battle later 628 students were tested. Of the tested students, eight (.0127%) were found to be Spanish dominant, five (.0080%) were found to be essentially bilingual, and four (.0064%) were found to be Spanish proficient. Dr. Garrett concluded (and I accept his conclusions despite the attacks made by plaintiffs on Dr. Garrett's conclusions and testing procedures) that only an extremely small number of Mexican-American students have any problem in speaking or comprehending English; that less than three percent of all elementary Mexican-American students have any proficiency in speaking or comprehending Spanish, and Thus, accepting the validity of the tests, as I do, there is no deficiency on the part of a significant number of Mexican-American students in English language proficiency, and the...
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