UNIVERSITY OF PUGET SOUND LAW REVIEWVolume 1, No.1FALL 1977
Case Comment: Desegregating a Demographically Changing School District - Pasadena City Board of Education v. Spangler.
Ellen Bowman Welsch
In Swann v. Charlotte - Mecklenburg Board of Education(fn1) the Supreme Court suggested, by negative implication,(fn2) that a court supervising the desegregation of a school district can require school officials to eliminate resegregation(fn3) caused solely by natural demographic changes if school officials have not yet achieved a unitary(fn4) system. The Court's holding in Pasadena City Board of Education v. Spangler,(fn5) however, demonstrates that the Court did not intend this negative implication. Under Spangler, once school officials have eliminated state-imposed(fn6) segregation from student assignment, the supervising court cannot require school officials to redraw attendance zones to eliminate nonstate-imposed resegregation even though the school district's transition from a dual(fn7) to a unitary system is incomplete.(fn8) Although Spangler is constitutionally justifiable, the decision is unsound because it did not require school officials to prove that the re-segregation was not state-imposed.
In Spangler v. Pasadena City Board of Education,(fn9) the district court ordered school officials to eliminate segregative state action affecting three components of the school system: staff assignments, hiring, and promotion; facility location and construction; and student assignments.(fn10) The portion of the court order relating to student assignment prohibited any school from enrolling a majority of any minority students.(fn11) School officials, acting according to a court-approved desegregation plan, redrew school attendance zones to comply with the no-majority requirement. No school had a majority of any minority students during the first year of the plan. Natural demographic changes,(fn12) however, soon caused some schools to have a majority of black students before school officials brought other components of the system, such as its administrative personnel hiring practices,(fn13) into compliance with the order.(fn14) Four years later, school officials sought changes ' in the court order, including elimination of the no-majority requirement.(fn15) The district court refused to modify its order.(fn16)
The Supreme Court held that the district court exceeded its authority and acted contrary to Swann in continuing to impose the no-majority requirement upon school officials.(fn17) The Court said the district court did not view the no-majority requirement merely as a starting point in fashioning a remedy, as Swann allowed;(fn18) rather, the district court viewed the no-majority requirement as an inflexible requirement with which school officials would have to comply each year.(fn19) Such an inflexible requirement must fail because Swann expressly disapproved of requiring a particular degree of racial balance as a matter of substantive constitutional right.(fn20)
Spangler faulted the district court for continuing to impose the no-majority requirement not only because it was inflexible, but also because the continued imposition of the requirement would have forced school officials to remedy nonstate-imposed resegregation. The Court said the school officials' implementation of the court-approved desegregation plan had eliminated segregative state action affecting student assignment.(fn21) Absent further segregative state action, of which there was no showing, school officials had fully remedied the constitutional violation as to the student assignment component of the school system.(fn22) The Court acknowledged that the school system may not have been unitary because segregative state action still appeared to exist in at least one other component.(fn23) Nevertheless, the Court, again relying upon Swann, said the district court had no basis for imposing a remedy where there was no constitutional violation.(fn24)
The traditional view, which allows a supervising court to exercise broad remedial powers until the dual school system becomes unitary, perceives a single constitutional violation which is not remedied until the school system becomes unitary.(fn25) Spangler, however, departs from the traditional view and suggests that for the purpose of effectuating a remedy, courts should treat the existence of state-imposed segregation in discrete components of a school system as discrete constitutional violations.(fn26) The Spangler approach is constitutionally justifiable because it recognizes that state action is an essential element of an equal protection clause violation.(fn27) The Spangler approach prevents a supervising court from forcing school officials to remedy non-state-imposed segregation, while the traditional view does not.
Although Spangler is constitutionally justifiable, the Court apparently did not consider its decision in Keyes v. School District No. 2(fn28) in reviewing the findings of fact upon which Spangler was based.(fn29) In Keyes, the Court considered whether a district court that found state-imposed segregation in one geographical area of a school system could conclude that the entire school system was dual. The Court held that a finding of intentionally segregative school board actions in a "meaningful portion" of a school district creates a presumption that segregation in other portions of the...
