Desegregation busing stops after 30 years

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- After 30 years of running its schools under a court-ordered busing plan meant to desegregate, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district has been ordered to stop basing school assignments on race.

The 7-4 decision Friday from the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ends a system of busing innercity students to mostly-white suburban schools and suburban students to the innercity.

The 105,000-student school system was the first major urban district in the nation to use busing to achieve racial balance. Similar plans were later imposed on other school districts across the nation.

"This is a great decision and a great day for everyone of all races and national origins who have an interest in quality education for all," said attorney William Helfand, who represents Bill Capacchione, a white parent who filed suit challenging his child's kindergarten assignment.

Officials won't appeal

District officials, who had fought in court to keep the 1971 busing order in place, met privately for an hour before announcing they would not appeal the court's decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"We want to move to the next stage," school board chairman Arthur Griffin said Friday.

Attorney James Ferguson, who represented black parents seeking to keep the busing plan, said he needed more time to review the case before deciding whether to appeal.

Black parents and the school board argued before the court in February that the desegregation order should remain in place. The school board said much had been accomplished but more needed to be done.

"We still have disparities in resources," Terry Belk, one of the black parents in the case, said at the February hearing. "We have to bus the kids to where the resources are."

Helfand argued that the busing plan had actually kept innercity schools from getting the resources they need.

"This started out as an important mechanism to provide quality education to students of all races. It became dormant and a mechanism to deny children these things," he said. "It denied African-American children good schools in their own neighborhoods and forced them to be bused across town. And it denied white children the opportunity to attend magnet schools because of their race."

Achieving racial balance

The case came to the appeals court after a federal judge ruled in the white parents' lawsuit that the school system had achieved the goals of racial balance. On appeal, a three-judge panel of the appeals court agreed with black families and the school system and reversed the ruling. The white families appealed that ruling to the full court.

In its ruling Friday, the court wrote: "This case is hopefully the final chapter in the saga of federal court control over the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools."

School desegregation plans like Charlotte-Mecklenburg's stemmed from the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kan., which declaring segregated schools to be unconstitutional. A year later, the court ordered school districts to move "with all deliberate speed" to end segregation.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools were first ordered by a federal judge to start busing in 1969, a ruling upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971.

In a study released this summer, Harvard University researchers found a trend back toward segregation in schools, despite the nation's growing racial diversity.

The study found that while the average black student or Latino student in 1998-99 attended a school that was 53 to 55 percent black or Latino, the average white student attended a school more than 80 percent white.