A judge on Tuesday ordered a small south Mississippi school district to stop allowing hundreds of white students to transfer out of majority black schools, calling the practice a violation of a desegregation order and federal law.
U.S. District Judge Tom S. Lee sided with the Justice Department in its complaint against the Walthall County School District.
The Justice Department contended the school district had for years allowed hundreds of white students to transfer from Tylertown to Salem.
Thomas E. Perez, assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights, said Tuesday that the actions by the school district led local residents to regard certain schools as “white schools” or “black schools.”
He said officials in certain district schools grouped white students together in particular classrooms, resulting in large numbers of all-black classes at every grade level in those schools.
According to the Mississippi Department of Education, during the 2008-09 school year, the most recent year for which data is available, Walthall County School District’s schools in Tylertown had 1,649 students, and blacks outnumbered whites by a 3-to-1 margin there.
Salem Attendance Center, meanwhile, had 624 students in grades K-12 in 2008-09, of which 431 (69 percent) were white and 187 (30 percent) were black.
Salem and the Tylertown schools are about 10 miles apart.
Walthall County School District Superintendent Danny McCallum said as many as 300 students transfer from Tylertown to Salem.
McCallum and some Salem parents have said that because of the way the school district lines are drawn, some students who are assigned to Tylertown actually live closer to Salem, and that was the reason for the transfers.
Perez said Lee’s order requires the school district to change its transfer policy to allow transfers to a school outside a student’s residential zone only if students can justify it as a well-documented medical emergency or if students have a parent working full-time at a school outside their zone.
Exceptions also would be made for students transferring to a school where they would be a racial minority. For example, a white student attending a majority white school would be allowed to transfer to a school where most students are black.
Lee also ordered the district to adopt policies that would ensure students are not assigned to segregated classrooms and have the policies in place for the 2010 fall term. He said the new policy would not apply to students who have already transferred to Salem Attendance Center and will graduate in 2011.
Reached for comment Tuesday, McCallum said it’s too early to tell what the impact will be on schools at Salem and Tylertown, as the school board may decide to appeal the judge’s ruling when it meets again at 4:15 p.m. Tuesday in Tylertown.
School board attorney Conrad Mord could not be reached for comment.
McCallum said that barring an appeal, the 300 or so students who would be ordered to attend Tylertown instead of Salem wouldn’t cause too much of a shift in burden from Salem to Tylertown, estimating an extra 25 to 30 students students per grade — about the size of a large classroom — would be added to the rolls at Tylertown.
However, McCallum didn’t say what effect the ruling would have on the campus at Salem, which stands to lose half its population in a time of steep funding cuts.
McCallum said he knew a judge’s order was pending but he didn’t expect it to be rendered so soon.
“I really didn’t think it was going to be this quick,” he said. “It hadn’t been long when I got word of it. I read it enough to see what it meant.”
Clennel Brown, president of the Walthall County NAACP, said the transfers had been a longstanding problem and he was pleased with the judge’s ruling. He said the transfers had sent the wrong message to the community — one of injustice.
“If our school board members had done what they were supposed to have done, then this issue would have been resolved before it got to the court system,” Brown said. “It shouldn’t take a judge to tell them they are doing wrong when they’re reading what the law says.”
Roger Ginn, whose stepdaughter has attended Salem all her life and will be a sophomore in the fall, said an agreement the school district struck with the Justice Department in 1992 allowed conditions under which students could be transferred, including proximity to another campus.
Under the agreement, the school board provided the Justice Department with a list of students who were granted transfers as “a way for (Justice Department officials) to monitor the transfers in the county,” he said.
Ginn said he and other Salem parents believe an ideal solution would be to allow kids currently attending Salem to remain there until they graduate and have all new students attend school according to district lines.
“Let those kids continue their education. That’s fair,” he said. “In the end, the only one who suffers is going to be the kids. I still believe those kids who are there now should be grandfathered in.”
Ginn said a big reason for the transfer requests deals with commutes, not race.
“The biggest part of it is the proximity,” he said.
He spoke to one man who lives north of Sartinville who said the ruling that sides with the Justice Department will result in him having to bring his first-grade grandson to Tylertown, “while driving right by” Salem School.
“That’s over 20 miles one way. They’re going to have to drive right past Salem to get to Tylertown,” Ginn said.
He added that the school district lines in Walthall County were drawn based on supervisors’ district lines in 1970, which have since changed, along with Walthall County’s demographics.
Asked if the ruling could mean the death knell for Salem, Ginn said, “I think down the road it is. I talked to someone today who posed that very question.”
And if the school goes, the small community of Salem itself will all but fade away, Ginn said.
As for his stepdaughter, “She’s very, very upset — crying, distraught, just like any other normal child.”
