News analysis: Is a school rezoning lawsuit near?

Nashville's historic significance with early Civil Rights Movement brings national eyes to Metro Schools' rezoning efforts. Nashville Banner archives photo

There’s been talk of a rezoning lawsuit for almost a year now. And talk may soon turn to action.

Leaders of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) have threatened litigation since before rezoning measures were passed by Metro Schools’ Board of Education over the summer. Now, local NAACP president Marilyn Robinson says the organization is working on depositions.

“We’re going to take this issue all the way,” Robinson said. “If we have to go to the Supreme Court, we will.”

Walter Searcy, local NAACP chair of legal redress, said a decision about a suit would be made in a matter of weeks.

But does this threat of a lawsuit against Metro Nashville Public Schools mean the racial composition of Nashville schools is likely to — once again — become fodder for the courts?

Civil rights attorneys contacted by The City Paper say there are no hard and fast rules about how situations such as that playing out in Nashville might fare in court.

Ashley Osment, a senior attorney at the Center for Civil Rights at the University of North Carolina School of Law, said courts are taking an increasingly “nuanced” view of public education desegregation issues. “Very viable claims” could be opened up if schools are failing large numbers of students, particularly poor students and students of color, she said.

Such claims might not directly challenge school district policies, but rather the effects of those policies.

“If I were a lawyer in Nashville, I would be looking at such things as teacher quality, what kind of curriculum poor and black kids get as opposed to their more affluent white peers, graduation rates, dropout rates, principal leadership, facilities, college attendance, and obviously scores on tests,” Osment said. “If you start sorting kids by race and class, you start experiencing unacceptable declines in the fortunes of the least advantaged kids.”

William Taylor, chair of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights in Washington, D.C., and an attorney who worked on Nashville desegregation cases in the 1960s, said plaintiffs could have to prove in court that district policies had the effect of segregating students, and that segregation was the intent of such policies.

Board of Education members say the plan was designed with the law in mind, and that it adds options and resources for the north Nashville kids most affected.

“It’s my understanding that the rezoning plan is designed in a way where it will be compliant with all relevant statutes. Key parts of our plan are to provide additional options for students,” said David Fox, chair of the school board. “Students aren’t losing any options at all. They’re gaining options, plus they’ve gained additional resources. It would be very difficult for me to see how any court could view our rezoning plan as disadvantaging at-risk students.”

Ramifications unfolding

Whether the plan will have the effect of contributing to racial segregation of Nashville students remains to be seen. However, according to statistics distributed with the rezoning plan before it was passed — which are based on 2007 attendance figures — the plan stands to bring about a decline in the percentage of African-American students attending every school in Bellevue’s Hillwood cluster.

The effects are more mixed in north Nashville’s Pearl-Cohn cluster, with some schools increasing in diversity and others declining.

These statistics don’t include the kids who might, according to the terms of the plan, opt to forego attending their north Nashville neighborhood schools and instead be transported, by choice, to schools in Bellevue.

The deadline for families to communicate school choice decisions passed just a few days ago, and data indicating the choices of families has not yet been released. Performance of schools affected by the plan obviously can’t yet be measured.

Director of Schools Jesse Register has directed some substantive implementation measures toward schools and families most affected. He has a “zero-default” goal for the school choices affected by the rezoning. If parents don’t submit any indication of a chosen school assignment, Register wants to continue contacting them until a decision is indicated and an “act of choice” is made by a parent.

Register also plans to take steps to ensure that schools affected by the rezoning are staffed with high-quality teachers. He has said his plans for MNPS reform district-wide include ensuring that talented teachers are in the classrooms where they’re most needed, and he told The City Paper that changes in teacher assignment are more likely to occur at schools affected by rezoning — as well as at Metro schools that are particularly low-performing — than at other Metro schools.

“We need to make sure, and I want to assure the public that, we will not settle for anything less than a very high quality of the teaching staff in those schools,” Register said. “But we also have to pay attention to other schools, that are in some kind of restructuring status. … We’ve got to look at schools that are low-performing, and see if there are any that need to be fresh-started or reconstituted.”

In addition, the district will soon begin negotiating with teachers union the Metro Nashville Education Association the differentiated teacher pay plan for instructors at affected schools that the rezoning plan recommends.

As for the intent behind the rezoning plan, the NAACP’s Robinson said she believes racial segregation was a motivator of the plan.

“We believe racial segregation is the intent,” Robinson said. “[Members of the school board] somehow have the feeling that if they remove those poor students, that it would attract other children to those neighborhood schools.”

School board member Mark North, an attorney who served as chair of the task force that created the rezoning plan, said any allegation that the plan was created with an intent to segregate would be “insulting,” both to him and to the racially and socio-economically diverse members of the task force.

“I’ve been practicing law long enough to know that almost anything can add up to a lawsuit, but the process was designed to make sure that the plan was legal,” North said. “That task force set out to make sure that every student in Nashville had equal and excellent academic opportunities.”

Regardless of whether Nashville’s new rezoning plan ends up in court, Vanderbilt University public policy and education researcher Claire Smrekar — who has studied how racial demographics have unfolded at Metro schools — said ongoing discussion of the issue is relevant nationwide.

Scholars in the fields of education and law, as well as policy-makers, are watching what happens here, she said.

“It’s not a local story. It’s a national story, with national significance,” Smrekar said. “There’s a lot of interest nationally in Nashville as a historically significant city in the South. [It was] one of the pillars of the early Civil Rights Movement. Like Charlotte, there is a lot of interest — a lot of scrutiny as well — in what happens in Nashville.”