Desegregation Costs Put Ga., Ohio Officials at Odds With Districts

By Peter Schmidt

Ohio and Georgia officials have become enmeshed in legal battles with school districts over who should foot the bill for rising school-desegregation costs.

Lawyers for the state of Ohio last month asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit to overturn a federal district court's ruling that expanded the state's responsibility to fund school desegregation in Lorain County under the terms of a consent decree.

In Georgia, state lawyers argued in a federal court last month that the state should not be required to pay to eliminate racial imbalances in the Savannah-Chatham County schools that, the state alleges, were the result of student-assignment policies enacted...