U.S. v. Desoto Parish School Bd.

• Decision Date: 02 June 1978
• Docket Number: No. 76-3471,76-3471
• Citation: 574 F.2d 804
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. DeSOTO PARISH SCHOOL BOARD et al., Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fifth Circuit

Page 804

574 F.2d 804

UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. DeSOTO PARISH SCHOOL BOARD et al., Defendants-Appellees.

No. 76-3471.

United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit.

June 2, 1978.

Rehearing Denied Aug. 2, 1978.

J. Stanley Pottinger, Asst. Atty. Gen., Daniel L. Jennings, Atty., Brian K. Landsberg, Mark L. Gross, Attys., App. Sect., Civ. Rights Div., U. S. Dept. of Justice, Washington, D. C., Donald E. Walter, U. S. Atty., Shreveport, La., for plaintiff-appellant.

A. Mills McCawley, Asst. Atty. Gen., Shreveport, La., John F. Ward, Jr., Baton Rouge, La., James L. Davis, Dist. Atty., Many, La., Thomas W. McFerrin, Asst. Atty. Gen., Baton Rouge, La., for defendants-appellees.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana.

Before BROWN, Chief Judge, MORGAN and GEE, Circuit Judges.

JOHN R. BROWN, Chief Judge:

In this appeal, we must determine whether the United States is entitled to the additional remedial measures it seeks in this school desegregation suit. Litigation began in January, 1967, when the United States filed a complaint under Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 2000c-6, to desegregate the public schools in DeSoto Parish, Louisiana. The District Court approved a desegregation plan in 1970. In 1975, the United States filed a motion for further relief, alleging that the plan had failed to eliminate the dual school system and asking the District Court to order and implement comprehensive modifications. Specifically, the Government claimed that the defendants had failed to eradicate racially identifiable schools, failed to comply with the faculty assignment requirements established for this Circuit in Singleton v. Jackson Municipal Separate School District, 5 Cir., 1969, 419 F.2d 1211 (en banc), and continued to operate a segregated student bus system. After an evidentiary hearing, the District Court found that four of the parish's eleven schools were attended by only black students and that the racial balance of teachers required by Singleton had not been achieved. The District Court Judge nonetheless denied the Government's request for broad relief, ordering only that the defendant school board reexamine and modify the student transportation system. The Judge did not order any changes concerning other methods of student assignment and refused to require additional measures to integrate the faculty. The Government appeals from this limited grant of relief.

We affirm the District Court's finding that the 1970 desegregation plan has not cured the constitutional violation established over a decade ago and the conclusion that further relief is required. Given this finding and conclusion, and absent any sufficient finding that no effective, workable alternative to the 1970 plan can feasibly be implemented, we hold that the District Court erred in refusing to order additional remedial measures to correct the extreme racial imbalances that continue to exist in the DeSoto Parish schools. We therefore reverse and remand. ¹

I. The DeSoto Parish School System

DeSoto is a rural parish located near the border between Louisiana and Texas. ² In 1967, when the United States began this suit, the school system consisted of eight all-white and seven all-black schools. ³ In 1976, when the District Court ruled on the Government's motion for further relief, the school board operated eleven schools. ⁴ Five of these schools All Saints High School (grades K-12), DeSoto High School (grades 7-12), Second Ward High School (grades K-12), Logansport-Rosenwald High School (grades K-12), and Johnson Elementary School (grades K-6) were originally built for blacks. ⁵ The District Court Judge found that, in the 1975-76 school year, four of these schools were still attended by only black students, and the fifth had a student population that was 97 percent black. ⁶ The schools originally built to serve white pupils exclusively Mansfield High School (grades 8-12), Stanley High School (grades K-12), Pelican High School (grades K-12), Stonewall High School (grades K-12), Logansport High School (grades K-12), and Mansfield Elementary School (grades K-7) had student bodies ranging from approximately 67 percent to 85 percent white. In 1975-76, the parish schools were attended by a total of 5,880 students, of whom 60 percent were black and 40 percent white, a ratio that has remained constant since this case began. ⁷

As the District Court's 1970 order points out, there is little concentrated residential segregation in the parish; the black population is scattered throughout the area. Since all the schools were built under the dual system, they are located so that each area of the parish is served by at least one traditionally white school and one traditionally black school. As a result, several of the all-black schools are located in close proximity to schools that remain predominantly white. ⁸

During the 1975-76 term, 324 faculty members taught at the DeSoto public schools. The systemwide ratio of black to white teachers was fifty-fifty. The segregated condition of the schools extended to the faculty as well as the students; until 1968, no white teachers were assigned to traditionally black schools, and no black teacher taught at a school built for white students. In 1976, after five school years of operation under a desegregation decree, the faculties of the traditionally black schools ranged from 59 percent to 79 percent black, while the faculties of the six traditionally white schools ranged from 81 percent to 71 percent white. ⁹

The 1970 Desegregation Plan

In 1970, after protracted litigation, ¹⁰ the school board was ordered to comply with a desegregation decree based on a plan it submitted to the District Court. ¹¹ This plan assigned students to schools under one of three alternative arrangements. Students living within attendance zones established by the plan had to attend a designated school, subject to a majority-to-minority transfer proviso. ¹² Students who did not live within a zoned area attended school according to the destination of the bus they rode. Finally, any student who did not live in a zoned area and provided his own transportation could attend the school of his or her choice. ¹³

Attendance Zones

The 1970 plan established four zones within the parish. At the 1976 hearing, the United States presented evidence showing that the zones are noncontiguous, that in several instances the zones are drawn around racially homogenous residential areas ¹⁴ and assign the children living there to a school originally designated for students of that race, and that frequently children are zoned to schools attended primarily or exclusively by students of their own race when other schools are located closer to their homes. The pattern of the zones is consistent with this evidence.

The city of Mansfield constitutes one zone, and contains three subzoned areas: one surrounds an all-black residential area and assigns children living there to Johnson Elementary School and DeSoto High School, which are completely black; the second assigns students to DeSoto High School from an all-black residential area; the third zone covers the remainder of the city, and assigns students to the predominantly white Mansfield High School and Mansfield Elementary School. At the hearing, school officials admitted that many of the white students zoned to Mansfield Elementary live closer to Johnson Elementary, and those zoned to Mansfield High School live closer to DeSoto High School (Tr. at 33-35.)

The second zone comprises the city of Logansport, located in the west and southwest portion of the parish. The plan drew boundaries for one subzone within Logansport around the only black residential part of the area and assigned students to the principally black Logansport-Rosenwald High School. The remainder of the city was zoned to the traditionally white Logansport High School. The third zone in the parish encompasses the Stanley area, also located in the southwestern region. The students living within this zone, most of whom are white, are assigned to the traditionally white Stanley High School. The fourth zone covers the Stonewall-Second Ward area in the northern section of the parish. The zone is divided into two parts: the first encompasses a principally white residential area and assigns students living within it to the traditionally white Stonewall High School, and the second surrounds a largely black residential area and directs students within it to the wholly black Second Ward High School.

To assess the Government's contention that the zones must be altered in any constitutionally sufficient plan, the other methods of student assignment included in the 1970 plan must also be examined.

Bus Routes

As in many rural school districts, a large portion of the students attending public school in DeSoto Parish ride school buses. ¹⁵ The 1970 plan provided that students living outside a zoned area who did not furnish their own transportation would be assigned to a school by virtue of the bus they rode. This provision contained two further limitations: no black student was to be transported "past" a formerly all-white school, and no white student was to be transported "past" a formerly black school; and no student would be permitted to use a bus stop other than the one closest to his home in order to avoid riding a particular bus.

The school board projected that under this plan 352 white students would ride buses routed to formerly black schools. In 1974-75, the school board's reports revealed that 129 white students should be on buses routed to formerly black schools. No white student actually rode such buses; none attended a formerly black school. Of the 2,544 black students who used the buses in the 1975-76 term, only 449 (or 17 percent) rode to formerly white schools. Based on such figures and the testimony of bus drivers and school officials presented at the 1976 hearing,...