A federal appeals court has declared that the Tucson, Ariz., school district, after nearly 50 years under a court-supervised desegregation plan, has reached the point where it’s considered legally desegregated.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, in San Francisco, unanimously upheld a 2022 decision by a federal district judge in Tucson that court supervision was no longer necessary.
“Today we conclude that the district court’s work is done,” the appeals court said in its Jan. 15 decision in Mendoza v. Tucson Unified School District. “We agree that the district is now operating in unitary status under the test established by the [U.S.] Supreme Court, and, therefore, it is time to return control of the district back to local authorities.”
(Unitary status means that the district is legally desegregated.)
Unless a larger panel of the 9th Circuit or the Supreme Court intervene, the decision will bring an end to nearly a half century of court supervision for the 40,000-student district, which in 2023-24 had an enrollment that was 62 percent Hispanic/Latino, 18 percent white, 10 percent Black, 4 percent Native American, 2 percent Asian/Pacific Islander, and 4 percent multiracial.
Tucson once had, as a matter of state law, separate schools for white and Black students, and was sued in 1974 by separate classes of Black and Latino plaintiffs, leading to a comprehensive desegregation decree in 1978.
A federal district judge made preliminary findings in 2007 that the district had reached the point of being legally desegregated, but a 9th Circuit panel reversed that ruling in 2011, determining that Tucson Unified had not met all its desegregation obligations in good faith. In 2013, a plan overseen by a special master effectively became the new desegregation decree for the district, dealing in detail with students’ school assignments, transportation, staff, discipline, technology, “quality of education,” and other areas.
In rulings in 2018 and 2021 , the district court released the school system from monitoring in some of those areas, followed by its 2022 decision granting full unitary status. In those rulings, the district court recognized that in the area of student enrollment, the school district had reduced the number of schools considered racially concentrated schools and increased the number considered integrated.
The district court recognized that because Arizona has a broad school choice policy, with charter and out-of-district schools competing for student enrollment, “student assignment strategies aimed at remediating segregation are more limited, less direct, and less effective.” Since 2022, all Arizona families have had access to public funds to use at private schools or for home schooling.
Both the Black and Latino classes of student-plaintiffs appealed the district court’s unitary finding on enrollment and other areas. They argued that more could be achieved in each of the areas and that the district had not always acted in good faith in carrying out the plan.
“There was not an overall [effective] use of data by the Tucson Unified School District to show that it complied with each element of the plan,” Ernest I. Herrera, a lawyer with the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund, who argued the case for the Latino plaintiffs, said in an interview.
Black and Latino plaintiffs considering an appeal
The 9th Circuit court panel addressed each area raised in the appeal, ultimately concluding that the Tucson district was acting in good faith and had achieved compliance with the desegregation plan to the extent “practicable,” the term used by the Supreme Court in several of its 1990s-era decisions that made it easier for school districts to free themselves from court supervision.
“In sum, as ongoing racial disparities become more remote in time from de jure segregation, the degree to which racial imbalances continue to represent vestiges of a constitutional violation may diminish,” said the opinion by Judge Danielle J. Forest, a 2019 appointee of President Donald Trump. “Here, the seven decades that have passed since there was legally mandated segregation must be given some weight.”
A lawyer for the Tucson district didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Herrera said: “This is an unfortunate decision.”
He said the plaintiffs are considering whether to appeal, and he agreed the district “made much progress over the decades that this case was in place, all thanks to the tenacious commitment of the class members and community leaders.”
“It’s true that some of these longer-standing desegregation cases have been coming to an end in recent years,” Herrera said. “We will continue to advocate for Latino students in Tucson and around the country.”
