Desegregation ends for Georgia district

ATLANTA — A federal judge is releasing a southwest Georgia school system from a racial desegregation order, ruling that its overwhelmingly African American enrollment isn’t its fault.

U.S. District Judge Louis Sands Sr. on Wednesday signed an order declaring that, 57 years after black parents sued the Dougherty County school system, it has reached unitary status. That means the judge can no longer find any evidence that racial imbalances in the school system are related to discriminatory intent or the district’s onetime status of being segregated by law.

That doesn’t mean Dougherty County schools have achieved racial balance. Sands noted that when desegregation plans were implemented in 1980, in one of a series of court orders in the case, 45% of the district’s 20,000 students were white and 55% were black. Last November, 89% of the county’s 13,000 students were black, 5% were white and 6% identified as other racial classifications. In the district’s 21 schools, white students make up more than 10% of the student body in only one elementary school.

Some white families have moved north into Lee County or sent their children to private schools. Education researchers have highlighted school district lines as big contributors to segregation in recent years, but a 1974 U.S. Supreme Court ruling found judges couldn’t order desegregation across those lines.

The line between the Dougherty and Lee districts was determined to be a “highly segregating” school district border by education group EdBuild, which evaluated where poor nonwhite districts butted up against more affluent white districts nationwide. Lee County’s enrollment is 70% white and has only a 13% poverty rate, while Dougherty County has a 39% poverty rate. EdBuild CEO Rebecca Sibilia argues that the 1974 ruling, called Milliken v. Bradley, erodes the promise of the court’s earlier desegregation rulings.

“That’s why school district borders matter,” said EdBuild CEO Rebecca Sibilia. “As we start to see our communities splinter apart, we’re starting to see more and more racial isolation.”

In a hearing on the school board’s motion to have the suit dismissed, Sands wrote that Dougherty County Superintendent Kenneth Dyer testified “there was nothing more DCSS could do to comply with the desegregation orders or to encourage families to enroll their children in DCSS.”

The district asked Sands to end court supervision because the order called for the district to make schools as close to 50% white and 50% black as possible, which the district said had become impossible because of the increased African American majority. The district also said getting court approval for new buildings or realigning attendance zones “places a substantial burden on school operations primarily because the school district cannot make decisions efficiently.” The court has also overseen staffing and transportation.

Relatives of Shirley Gaines, the original plaintiff who led the class-action lawsuit, objected to its dismissal. But Sands wrote that the plaintiffs couldn’t show the district was acting with discriminatory intent or that the racial imbalances “were the result of anything other than demographic changes in the county.”