St. Louis School Desegregation in the News June 22, 2007
Posted by Webmaster in Courts and Judiciary, Desegregation in Schools, Education, St. Louis Local.comments closed
First, from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
Former federal district judge William L. Hungate, who presided over the beginning of the city-county school transfer program, died about 9:30 a.m. today at St. Luke’s Hospital in Chesterfield of complications from surgery. He was 84 and had lived in Town and Country.
Judge Hungate served on the U.S. District Court in St. Louis from 1979 to 1992. In 1983, he approved the consent decree for the voluntary school-desegregation plan that allows black students from the city to attend suburban school districts.
Second, from the same source:
The 16 school districts involved in the voluntary student transfer program voted unanimously today to extend the program for five years.
And in a development more critical to the program’s success, 13 of the districts have opted to continue to accept new students during the extension.
The program was scheduled to stop taking on new students after the 2008-09 school year in accordance with a 1999 settlement in the city-county desegregation court case.
(snip)
Three districts have decided that they will no longer accept new students, with Ladue and Lindbergh citing lack of space and Pattonville asserting that the growth of the minority population within its district boundaries already qualifies it as racially diverse.
This is in spite of previous rhetoric from most of the school district officials in St. Louis County, and in spite of the fact that a bill in the Missouri State General Assembly to force school districts within a 30-mile radius of an unaccredited school district to accept students from that district’s service area, introduced and sponsored by Rep. Jane Cunningham (R-Chesterfield), died.
