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Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2009

Houston schools continue to abide with 1960s court order

More than 40 years after a lawsuit was filed against the Houston County Board of Education to expedite its desegregation efforts, the school board still is under a court order to consider racial demographics when creating school zones.

Whether the county actually was subject to a court order recently became a matter of debate after discussion of the order elicited a strong response from parents at the school board’s zoning meeting last month. In addition, an erroneous report stating Houston never had been under litigation to desegregate further confused parents who sought court documentation.

In fact, the case that led to the court order was filed in the 1960s in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Georgia, Macon Division, according to a frequently asked questions document provided on the school board’s zoning page on its Web site.

Shortly after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, the school board outlined a graduated integration plan. The initial plan, which allowed students to apply to schools of their choice regardless of their status as a formerly all-white or all-black school, would integrate high school seniors during the second semester of the 1964-65 year and would continue integrating roughly at the rate of one grade per year, becoming fully integrated during the 1972-73 school year.

In August 1964, Houston County NAACP President Oscar C. Thomie Jr. wrote a letter to then-Superintendent David Perdue criticizing the system’s desegregation plan for not taking place at “all deliberate speed,” as mandated by the Supreme Court.

Several months earlier, Thomie addressed a letter to the chairman of the Houston County Board of Education, as well as a petition, discussing the system’s desegregation efforts.

“The desire to carry this struggle into the courts does not appeal to any of us. We are prepared, however, to do just that in the event this petition is ignored, as were previous petitions, and if this is the only method to ensure your compliance with the supreme law of the land,” Thomie wrote in the June 1964 letter.

By April 1965, Thomie filed a suit against the Houston County Board of Education in the case of Oscar C. Thomie Jr., et. al., Plaintiffs v. Houston County Board of Education, Defendants.

Houston County’s desegregation plan then was accelerated and fully operational in all grades by the 1967-68 school year, according to school and court documents.

During the late 1960s, there were about 16,000 students in Houston County’s schools. By September 1969, 903 of the system’s 3,387 black students, or 28 percent, chose to attend formerly all-white schools.

Along with integrating students, teachers were integrated across the system’s schools as well.

On Aug. 12, 1969, William Bootle, U.S. District Judge for the Middle District of Georgia, issued a court order ruling the board demonstrated it was “acting in good faith” in achieving desegregation of schools through its plan. The ruling in favor of the voluntary plan was later reversed and sent back to the lower court through the United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit.

In subsequent months, amended proposals and time lines to achieving desegregation were put forth by the school board, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, as well as a group of black and white residents.

Finally, Bootle ordered the district to “immediately implement the plan for the integration of faculties and students,” effective Feb. 25, 1970.

The paperwork related to the court order is more than 100 pages and includes letters sent home to parents during the 1960s, Thomie’s letters and petitions, and court rulings. The documents are available for viewing and copying at the Houston County Board of Education’s central office.

To comply with the court order, the Houston County school board has zoned its schools to reflect the 36 percent of the school system’s black population within 10 percentage points, based on a 2004 verbal recommendation from the Department of Justice, said Stephen Thublin, assistant superintendent for finance and business operations.

The breakdown of the black population varies across the high schools in Houston County within the proposed zoning plan for the 2010-11 school year. Veterans and Houston County high schools would have 26 percent black students; Perry High School would have 33 percent; Warner Robins High School would have 43 percent and Northside High School would have 46 percent, Thublin said.

The court order does not address zoning for other races beyond black and white.

Within the currently proposed zones, the projected enrollment of other minority students — made up of Hispanic, American Indian, Asian and multiracial students — ranges from 6 percent at Perry High School, to 14 percent at Houston County High School.

According a December 2007 report from the U.S. Commission of Civil Rights called “Desegregation of Public School Districts in Georgia,” 109 of Georgia’s 180 public school districts “have been subjected to litigation in the federal courts to desegregate the public schools in their districts.”

The report incorrectly states Houston County never has been under such litigation, concerning some parents seeking court documentation.

After speaking with Superintendent David Carpenter on Oct. 30, Peter Minarik, the regional director at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Southern Regional Office, wrote a letter apologizing for the error in the report. A copy of the letter is available in the school board’s FAQ document.

Minarik said the report was created after researchers consulted myriad sources over an 18-month period.

“The combination of a panoply of different litigants, the consolidation of school districts, and cases literally decades old and affecting hundreds of school districts throughout the South had precluded the existence of definitive source of information about which school districts were or continue to be affected by a school desegregation order. The Commission’s school desegregation project sought to close that information gap,” Minarik wrote.

The discussion about Houston County’s court order elicited a strong negative response from parents at the school board’s Oct. 27 zoning meeting.

“It’s understandable,” Carpenter said. “If I were a parent in Houston County that saw this report, I’d have questions about it as well.”

Carpenter said a motion to have the court order lifted, which would remove the county’s requirement to reflect its demographic populations through its zones, would require extensive research and consideration.

“Having been under court direction this many years, applying for us is a very big step,” Carpenter said. “We would need to research that before we start the process.”

To contact writer Andrea Castillo, call 256-9751.