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Race in Public Education
School Busing in Post-Segregation America
Is the Jefferson County Public Schools' Desegregation Plan Unconstitutional?
(Excerpted from Supreme Court Debates, January 2007)

In the landmark 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the principle of "separate but equal" in public education was inherently unconstitutional. In the decades that followed, Federal courts instituted mandatory desegregation plans that required public school districts to bus children, sometimes across town, to achieve racial balance in their classrooms.

The mandatory desegregation plans were not intended to be permanent, and over the past decade, many school districts and their residents have successfully petitioned the courts to do away with them. In 2000, in Louisville, Kentucky, a Federal court suspended a 1975 desegregation mandate. Although no longer under court order, the Jefferson County Board of Education decided to continue a similar plan intended to prevent its schools from becoming resegregated. While children were given preference to attend nearby schools, the Board's plan required that no school in the district have a black population of under 15 percent or over 50 percent.

In 2002, four parents of Louisville children who were not allowed into their school of choice sued the Jefferson County School District, alleging that the Board's plan violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution when it used race as the determining factor in assigning students to schools.

On June 29, 2004, a Federal district court upheld the Jefferson County plan, stating that it did not constitute a quota system, but rather used race, along with a variety of other factors, in assigning students to their schools. Crystal Meredith, one of the parents, appealed the case to the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of appeals, which ruled on July 21, 2005, in favor of the School Board.

Meredith then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. During oral arguments, lawyers for Crystal Meredith argued that the Jefferson County plan posed an undue burden on her child, who was forced to attend school across town solely because of his race.

Lawyers for the Jefferson County Board of Education countered that their student assignment plan was a reasonable and narrowly tailored method of ensuring that its schools did not become resegregated.

This case presents an interesting contradiction: A school district is facing a court challenge to a desegregation plan that had been imposed upon it by a court to begin with.

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