FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—The Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division dismissed more than 50 desegregation cases which sat on court dockets for more than half a century.
“In this administration, we are ending prolonged federal oversight of these school districts because the effort does not reflect the reality of those classrooms today,” said Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon. “In some cases, school districts have been under federal control for more than 60 years.”
“Now these local school districts can redirect taxpayer dollars back to benefitting students,” she added, “instead of funding onerous and outdated consent decrees.”
As of the start of the Trump administration, about 150 school districts were still under desegregation court orders, most of which were in the South.
Court orders have been dismissed in Tuscumbia City, Alabama; St. Clair County, Alabama; Tarrant City, Alabama; Rankin County, Mississippi; and Dyersburg City, Tennessee.
The DOJ is doing a case-by-case review of pending desegregation cases. Cases still on the docket in federal courts were filed in the 1960s and 70s.
After concluding that a school district has achieved unitary status, the DOJ will seek dismissal of the case.
“It’s been more than 50 years since desegregation happened, and in every school district in the South that we’ve worked with, it’s clear that black students are welcome in every school and that administrators and the community make sure of it,” a DOJ official told the Daily Signal. “It also seems to us that many southerners are tired of being called racist by the media because of things that happened more than 50 years ago.”
Most districts under court orders are in rural Southern towns, and complying with the court orders has entailed responding to several dozen statistical questions from DOJ Civil Rights every few years and filing court motions whenever they want to change their school feeder patterns or build a new high school.
This costs those districts an average of about a few thousand dollars a year on average.
But in a minority of districts, like Huntsville and Jefferson County, Alabama, the cost has been up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and millions of dollars in other investments.
Schools have had to write extremely detailed statistical reports and adopt woke policies, a DOJ official said.
For example, schools have been forced to selectively hire and recruit black teachers without openly acknowledging it, adopt non-merit based criteria for identifying students as gifted, change school discipline protocol by not suspending misbehaving students, build new race-based magnet schools, scrap high school construction plans, block student transfers between schools or between school districts unless they are “majority to minority,” and more, according to the official.
DOJ civil rights lawyers even asked about the races of bus drivers and scrutinized high school yearbooks to determine the race of students participating in extracurriculars and selected for homecoming royalty, the official said.
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[ H/T The Daily Signal ]
