More court action looms in St. Mary school desegregation case

After nearly six decades, court action continues in the St. Mary Parish public schools desegregation lawsuit after a ruling that could expand the case into a new aspect of the school system.
The School Board’s regular monthly meeting was Thursday, after the deadline for this edition. The agenda included a possible closed-door session to discuss the 57-year-old desegregation case, Boudreaux, et al v. School Board of St. Mary Parish.
On Feb. 9, a federal court ruling in Lafayette rejected an attempt by the School Board’s attorneys to prevent discovery, the process by which attorneys provide information through documents and depositions, from moving into the makeup of the district’s special education program.
The School Board argued that special education is not among the benchmarks by which school districts have been judged in determining whether they have been desegregated.
Those factors, called Green factors after the Virginia case in which they were outlined, gauge desegregation progress in staff assignments, faculty assignments, facilities, extracurricular activities and transportation.
The School Board had noted that the plaintiffs didn’t bring up special education until May 2021 in the 1965 lawsuit.
The plaintiffs argued that the School Board is obligated to operate its student programs in a nondiscriminatory way, including gifted education, discipline policies and special education.
The court ruling cited previous cases in which rulings allowed examinations of racial balance in areas not explicitly identified as Green factors.
“After considering the arguments of the parties, and specifically considering the posture of this case, the Court agrees that the topic of special education is relevant to the analysis of the Green factors,” the ruling said. “The Court further finds that the School Board has not shown good cause to limit the discovery, that is, the School Board has not shown that the plaintiffs’ requests are annoying, embarrassing, oppressive, or unduly burdensome.”
The ruling does require the plaintiffs to tailor their requests for information to be more specific about what information about policies they’re seeking and the time frames involved.
Attorney Robert L. Hammonds, who represents the School Board, said Wednesday that the ruling, while it doesn’t outright block discovery related to special education, it left open the possibility of objections at later proceedings.
The Green factors are the key to a resolution in the case. When a district can show that it has successfully dealt with segregation in each of the five Green factor areas, it can be found to have achieved “unitary status.” That means freedom from direct judicial oversight of the district as a result of the lawsuit.
Court filings in the case indicated that in 1975, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Putnam was ready to rule that the St. Mary school system had achieved unitary status. But he didn’t sign the order, and the case seemed to drift away into legal limbo.
In the last few years, the case has become more active again in what attorneys described as part of a move to resolve decades-old desegregation cases.
But attorneys for the plaintiffs have been joined by attorneys from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the new lawyers have not gone gently into the legal texts of closed lawsuits.