The nation’s largest and longest-running school desegregation program that has allowed more than 60,000 African-American students in St. Louis to attend suburban schools over several decades will be coming to an end.
Starting in fall 2019, the only children that will be admitted as new students will be those with siblings already enrolled.
In the early 1980s, thousands of black children from St. Louis began attending predominately white schools in St. Louis County as the result of a federal school desegregation lawsuit. The program also allows white county students to attend city magnet schools. In 1999, a federally approved agreement turned the school desegregation program into a voluntary one.
