NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorneys set meeting for parents in St. Mary school desegregation case

NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorneys representing the plaintiff class in the decades-old St. Mary Parish school desegregation case have called a Thursday night meeting for parents of public school students.

The attorneys hope to hear views on whether students of all ethnicities are treated equally when it comes to factors such as school discipline and educational opportunity.

The meeting will be 7-9 p.m. Thursday at Mount Pilgrim Baptist Church, 113 Federal Ave. in Morgan City.

Since 2016, the U.S.Justice Department has made a push to resolve old school desegregation cases, many of which date to the 1960s.

The St. Mary case, Boudreaux et al v. St. Mary Parish Board of Education, was filed in 1965 and resulted in the end of separate public schools for black and white children. The case was later certified as a class-action suit on behalf of the parish's black students. But the case was never definitively resolved.

Typically, such cases resulted in consent decrees among the parties setting out a process for eliminating segregation. A period of meetings under the direction of a federal court would follow to see how much progress was being made toward ending bias in facilities, student and faculty assignments, extracurricular activities and transportation.

Those areas of potential bias are called "Green factors" after a Supreme Court ruling that defined the process.

Once the court agreed discrimination had been eliminated in all those areas, the school district was said to have achieved "unitary status" and was free of direct federal oversight.

At a federal court proceeding in January in Lafayette, NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorneys representing the plaintiffs argued that other factors, such as differences in educational opportunity afforded to minorities and the impact of the district's disciplinary policies on minority students, should be taken into account.

U.S. District Judge Robert R. Summerhays, the latest in a long line of judges who have presided over the case, indicated that he's inclined to gauge the district's progress based on the original Green factors.

The parties agreed on a timeline that indicates work on the St. Mary case, including talks and site visits, will continue until at least October.

There is evidence in the court record that a federal judge was prepared to say the St. Mary system had achieved unitary status as far back as the 1970s, and an order to that effect was actually prepared. But the order was withdrawn for reasons the court record doesn't make clear.