Court
rules racial mix imperative for schools
Justices reject
pullout bid over concern for diversity
Thursday, August 12, 2004 • BY ROBERT SCHWANEBERG
• Star-Ledger Staff
Citing a "constitutional
imperative to prevent segregation in our public schools,"
the state Supreme Court ruled yesterday that a school
district may not withdraw from a regional high school if it
would hasten racial imbalance.
Chief Justice Deborah
Poritz said that in spite of the state's long-standing
rejection of segregated schools, far too many minority
students attend schools with few, if any, white classmates.
She noted in the unanimous decision that a study earlier
this year by the Civil Rights Project of Harvard University
ranked New Jersey's schools the fifth most-segregated in the
nation.
"As a state, we are losing
ground," Poritz wrote. "We have paid lip service to the idea
of diversity in our schools, but in the real world we have
not succeeded."
The ruling rejected an
effort by the mostly white North Haledon school district to
lower its property taxes by pulling its students out of the
Manchester Regional High School in Passaic County and
sending them to an "overwhelmingly white" high school in
Midland Park, at a savings of $10,000 per pupil.
In her ruling, Poritz said
concerns about racial diversity trump worries about high
property taxes.
"Students attending
racially imbalanced schools are denied the benefits that
come from learning and associating with students from
different backgrounds, races and cultures," Poritz wrote.
"We find that, in this case, withdrawal by North Haledon
will deny the benefits of the educational opportunity
offered by a diverse student body to both the students
remaining at Manchester Regional and to the students from
North Haledon."
Currently, 159 of New
Jersey's more than 600 school districts serve students from
more than one town. While no schools are petitioning to pull
out of these arrangements, the ruling would affect any
future requests.
"Going forward, any
petition to withdraw from a regional will be reviewed very
heavily to its impact on racial balance," said Frank
Belluscio, spokesman for the New Jersey State School Boards
Association. "The courts are going to be very
strict."
Lawyers in the case said
the court simply applied well-established legal principles
rejecting school segregation and broke no new ground on
racial diversity.
But several legal scholars
said the court seemed to be voicing a growing frustration
with New Jersey's inability to end school segregation.
Poritz noted that New Jersey had outlawed legally segregated
schools long before the U.S. Supreme Court declared them
unconstitutional 50 years ago in Brown vs. Board of
Education of Topeka, Kan.
"It certainly suggests
they're not content just to mouth constitutional platitudes
and let segregation continue," said Paul Tractenberg, a
professor at Rutgers School of Law in Newark.
Frank Askin, founder of
the law school's constitutional litigation clinic, said the
ruling "shows the court's frustration that despite its
historic commitment to school integration, it hasn't
occurred." He said the court might be signaling that it
would be sympathetic to lawsuits seeking more aggressive
remedies, such as regionalization to achieve racial
balance.
Lawyers for the districts
involved all found something to like in the
ruling.
Vito Gagliardi Jr., who
argued the case for North Haledon, was pleased the court
found it was a desire to cut property taxes, and not "white
flight," that prompted its bid to pull out of the regional
high school.
He was even happier that
the court instructed state Education Commissioner William
Librera to come up with a fairer way of dividing the
regional high school's costs among the three towns that send
students. The decision said North Haledon pays $18,400 per
pupil, compared to per-pupil costs of $5,300 for Haledon and
$3,400 for Prospect Park. The current formula is based on
each town's property values.
"This is a tremendous
result," Gagliardi said. "It gives the commissioner of
education both the right and the obligation to fix the
funding formula that has disproportionately burdened North
Haledon for decades."
Stephen Fogarty, a lawyer
for the Manchester Regional High School, said, "We're very
pleased with the outcome." The high school, located in
Haledon, opened in 1960.
The justices agreed with
the high school's arguments that North Haledon should be
required to continue sending students to the regional high
school to slow its transformation from mostly white to
mostly Hispanic. Poritz said if North Haledon were allowed
to pull out, the white population of Manchester Regional
High School would fall from 51 percent to 38 percent by
2005.
"For us, it has been about
the quality of the education," Fogarty said.
Allan Dzwilewski, who
argued for keeping North Haledon in the regional district on
behalf of Haledon and Prospect Park, called the decision "a
little bit of an extension" of existing rules that prevent
withdrawal from a multidistrict arrangement if racial
imbalance will result.
David Sciarra, executive
director of the Education Law Center, called the ruling "an
important signal that it's time" for state leaders to
address "the intense segregation in our public schools along
race and socio-economic lines."
Staff writer John Mooney contributed to this report.
Copyright 2004 The Star-Ledger. Used by NJ.com with
permission.
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