Desegregation of Public School Districts in Florida: 18 Public School Districts Have Unitary Status, 16 Districts Remain Under Court Jurisdiction

摘要

The Florida Advisory Committee submits this report, Desegregation of Public School Districts in Florida: 18 Public School Districts Have Unitary Status, 16 Remain Under Court Jurisdiction, as part of its responsibility to study pressing civil rights issues in the State and report on its findings to the Commission and the public. The Florida Advisory Committee is independent, bipartisan, and diverse with respect to political philosophy and this report was unanimously adopted by all members of the Committee. In 2005, the Commissioners unanimously adopted a project to study school desegregation in support of a pending FY2007 nationwide Commission project on the subject. This study is intended to provide both the Commission and the public with an accurate reporting of the school desegregation status of school districts in Florida ever subject to judicial intervention and those public school districts in the State that have obtained Unitary Status from the Court. To that purpose, we report that of the 67 public school districts in Florida, almost half, 34, have been subject to litigation in the courts with respect to school desegregation. Eighteen (18) of those districts have received a declaration of Unitary Status from the courts and have been released from further jurisdiction. Sixteen (16) school districts remain subject to court supervision, and of those only four indicate that they intend to pursue Unitary Status. As part of this study, we include a second part that contains an analysis on the impact of Unitary Status with respect to school integration. In recent years there has been speculation by some that the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dowell and Freeman in the early 1990s have allowed formerly segregated school districts to more easily obtain Unitary Status and without judicial constraint and independent from oversight these districts are reverting to de facto segregated school systems. To the Committee, the suggestion held the possibility of some relevance since in Florida 10 of the 18 school districts with Unitary Status received their declaration after 1990. To examine these assertions we statistically analyzed the integration patterns among the three different groups of schools, those with unitary status, those still subject to court jurisdiction, and those never engaged in litigation. We did this as a static analysis for the 2003-04 school year.