GALVESTON — U.S. District Judge Sim Lake approved Galveston public school district’s plan to redraw elementary school boundaries and urged the district to try to reach unitary status — a formal declaration of desegregation — by the end of next school year.
The judge’s ruling is the closest the district has come in 49 years to achieving unitary status, said Superintendent Lynne Cleveland.
Galveston public school district is one of a dozen Texas districts that are still considered segregated in the eyes of the federal court, even though it’s divided almost equally among three major ethnic groups.
The Houston-based judge urged the district and the U.S. Department of Justice to work together in the next two months to develop a plan showing the district is ready to be declared desegregated. Lake said it appears the district had fixed problems at Morgan Elementary School, which former federal judges called the last vestige of segregation in the district.
Brown and district officials must send Lake a status report every two weeks until the district submits the plan in two months. After the Justice Department responds, the judge could dismiss a decades-old desegregation lawsuit.
The rezoning plan, which Brown said she fully supported, alters elementary school boundaries west of 61st Street, but it includes a one-time grandfather clause allowing students to remain in the school zone they now attend. It also allows former students of Alamo Elementary School to ride buses to their new school.
Lake has ruled the district did nothing unconstitutional when it closed predominately Hispanic Alamo Elementary School. He also denied a local attorney’s request to substitute four women as new plaintiffs in the lawsuit in which the original plaintiffs are now dead. In his ruling, Lake said that he wasn’t able to determine what legal right the proposed plaintiffs — the mothers of four elementary students — had to intervene in the case.
He did allow the plaintiffs to file an amended motion to say why they can legally be allowed to intervene.
At the status hearing Thursday, Lake also asked the district to provide him with a map and timeline of the history of all Galveston elementary schools and their racial breakdown since 1959.
Trustees Andy Mytelka, Kelly Chambers and Carol Greaney-Wurst, and administrators Annette Scott, Terri Watkins and Mary Patrick attended the status conference that lasted less than 30 minutes.
Mytelka and Cleveland thanked trustees, administrators and the Justice Department for their efforts in helping the district achieve unitary status.
“It’s important for the city to move on, and we’re one step closer in that process,” Mytelka said. “It’s great news.”
In 1959, several African-Americans joined in a class-action lawsuit seeking full desegregation of Galveston’s public schools. In 1961, a judge ordered the district to dismantle the dual school system and implement a desegregation plan by 1973.
In 1968, the island’s two segregated high schools merged.
In 1975, a bond proposal passed, and L.A. Morgan was built to replace three former African-American elementary schools.
Still, when Morgan Elementary School opened in 1976, 90 percent of its students were African-American.
In 1978, the court ruled the elementary school was the district’s single vestige of segregation.
The district designed and implemented a student transfer program and a two-way language immersion program to attract students of other races to Morgan Elementary School.
In 1981, a judge ruled that vestiges of segregation remained at Morgan Elementary School and the district remained under judicial scrutiny.
In 1996, the district hired a civil rights consultant, who said that although the district was not in full compliance, it could still achieve unitary status.
Despite his recommendations, the district chose not pursue unitary status at that time.
