Ninth Circuit concludes half-century-old school segregation lawsuit

SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — An Arizona school district will be free from federal oversight for the first time in 46 years after a Ninth Circuit panel of judges ruled it has finally complied with a 1978 desegregation order from the courts.

In a 42-page order, the judges affirmed a lower court decision that the Tucson Unified School District no longer needs federal supervision because it has achieved “unitary status,” which occurs when a school system transitions to a nonracial system of public education.

The panel came to this conclusion after deciding that the school district complied with its order in good faith and had eliminated the vestiges of past discrimination “to the extent practicable.”

While the school district has not perfectly achieved its stated goals of racial equity, the district is under no requirement to be perfect in its outcomes, the circuit judges concluded.

“It simply is not the law that all racial disparity must be eliminated before a desegregation degree can be extinguished,” wrote U.S. Circuit Judge Danielle J. Forrest, a Donald Trump appointee.

The district, which operates 89 schools serving more than 48,000 preschool to high school students, has been under federal supervision since 1978 when a lower court ruled it acted with the intent to segregate and discriminate against Black and Latino students and ordered it to integrate.

In 2013, following another order by the Ninth Circuit, a unitary status plan was created that set out detailed plans to address various factors hindering the district’s racial equity.

Dr. Gabriel Trujillo, Superintendent for the Tucson Unified School District, told Courthouse News that the decision was a “landmark moment” in the district’s history.

“Today’s ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals also serves as the formal rejection of any remaining unfounded and uniformed claims that this district engages in practices and policies that perpetuate systematic segregation or any other discriminatory practices,” Trujillo said.

Ernest Herrera, an attorney who represented the appellants, called the decision “unfortunate.” However, he also recognized the progress made by the suit and pledged his organization, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, would continue to advocate for Latino students in Tucson.“While we disagree with this decision and are considering options for further appeal, we do note that TUSD made much progress over the decades that this case was in place, all thanks to the tenacious commitment of the class members and community leaders,” Herrera told Courthouse News.

In assessing the district’s remedies to past discrimination, the court looked at six factors, known as “Green Factors,” which included student assignments, faculty assignments, staff assignments, transportation, extra-curricular activities and facilities.

The panel ruled that the school district has demonstrated in each of these factors, characterizing arguments by the appellants as “vague,” lacking evidence or otherwise deficient in their reasoning.

Forrest further explained in the order that the appellees, many of them former students of the district, failed to show any inequalities that still existed in the district were the direct result of earlier segregation by the district.

“Critically, inequality is not automatically a vestige of segregation or discrimination,” the judge wrote.

The panel also rejected the students’ arguments that the district hasn’t operated in its unitary status long enough to justify terminating federal oversight, shooting down their argument that, based on a precedent in the Fifth Circuit, the district needs to spend three years at this stage.

“This brightline rule is not supported by our precedent or the decisions of the Supreme Court, and we decline to adopt it,” Forrest wrote.

The case stems from two lawsuits filed in 1974 on behalf of students and parents in the school district, which claim racial segregation and discrimination against Black and Latino students. A federal judge found after a 1977 trial that the district acted with segregative intent, and ordered the district to desegregate the following year.

U.S. District Judge David Bury, a George W. Bush appointee, initially ended the oversight in 2008, though he wrote in his ruling that the district had “failed to make a good faith effort to combat the demographic changes in the district,” and “exacerbated the inequalities of these racial imbalances because of its failure to assess program effectiveness.”

The Ninth Circuit reversed that order in 2011, citing Bury’s language as its main reason.

Bury found in 2021 that the district was close to compliance, lacking only in transportation and transparency. The following year, he found it had remedied those areas and declared the district was in compliance.

The students appealed in late 2022, claiming that unitary status had yet to be achieved.

Oral arguments were held in December 2023 at the James R. Browning U.S. Courthouse in San Francisco.

The panel was rounded out by Joe Biden-appointed U.S. Circuit Judge Jennifer Sung and Trump-appointed U.S. Circuit Judge Daniel Collins.