The case for forced school merger in Halifax County

In a Halifax courtroom earlier this month was this interesting scene: Nine attorneys from California and Washington D.C. seeking to intervene in a civil rights lawsuit that accuses the Halifax County commissioners of systematically depriving poor and minority students of a decent education.

The attorneys, from one of the largest law firms in the United States and the D.C.-based Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, want to join forces with the UNC Center for Civil Rights in a legal battle to force the merger of three racially segregated school districts in Halifax County. The case could have national repercussions.

The Civil Rights Center, part of the UNC Law School, is serving as the lead attorney for African-American parents and grandparents in Halifax County who accuse the Halifax commissioners of preserving a system that allocates educational opportunity based on race.

The “three-district system is a relic of the Jim Crow era, divides the children of Halifax County into the ‘good’ district and the ‘bad’ districts along racial lines and fails to meet the fundamental educational mandates recognized by the North Carolina Supreme Court,” says the lawsuit filed by the UNC center.

The Halifax commissioners are fighting the action, which is also backed by the NAACP and a local citizens group.

The face of public schooling in Halifax looks more like the North Carolina of the 19th century than the 21st. In a county with fewer than 7,000 students, the Halifax commissioners maintain three separate school districts that vary starkly in terms of student performance, per-pupil funding and, not coincidentally, racial makeup.

The Roanoke Rapids district is 65 percent white, while the Halifax County and Weldon districts each is 96 percent nonwhite. Out of 115 school districts in North Carolina, Halifax County this year ranked 113th on student performance tests and Weldon ranked 114th. The Roanoke Rapids district ranked 75th.

A last resort

Mark Dorosin, managing attorney for the UNC Civil Rights Center, says the litigation comes as a last resort, after years of unsuccessful efforts by Halifax parents to remedy the situation through other channels. Local activists lost a referendum to create a supplemental tax for Halifax schools, lost a merger vote before the Board of Commissioners and failed in an effort to elect pro-merger candidates to the board.

“There was certainly an effort by the activists on the ground to find a community-based, small-p ‘political’ solution,” Dorosin told me. “They tried nobly to take that path.”

Meanwhile, conditions in the schools deteriorate. Test scores continue to lag, buildings crumble, teacher turnover is high and total enrollment in all three districts is declining by 200 students a year. The Roanoke Rapids district seeks to build a new elementary school, even while the Halifax County district has closed two elementaries because of declining enrollment.

“I think Halifax is so unique in the circumstances and its history and the severe educational impacts the students experience that this really requires the courts’ intervention,” said Dorosin, who is a member of the Orange County Board of Commissioners.

The suit rests on the long-standing state “Leandro” court case, which found that the state and counties are obligated to provide all students a sound basic education. If the Halifax lawsuit succeeds in bringing about forced merger, Dorosin said, it would add new teeth to the Leandro doctrine that could affect other counties in the state. “If this is successful, it will be the first step in broadening the scope and impact of Leandro by putting additional substance into the responsibility of providing a sound basic education,” he said.

Success in the courts would also for the first time, he said, link the legal requirements for educational equity and student achievement, as set forth in Leandro, to the broader issues of race and economic disparity. That would give advocates for disadvantaged children greater legal tools in seeking to remedy Halifax-like educational disparity in other low-wealth counties.

Seeking to join the suit as co-counsel are the attorneys from the Lawyers’ Committee and from Latham & Watkins, based in San Francisco and D.C. Their motion to join the suit was taken under advisement by Superior Court Judge W. Russell Duke Jr. of Pitt County, who is hearing the case.

The outside lawyers told me they saw the case as a window into race-based denial of equitable education by local and state government, especially in the South. The outcome in North Carolina, said Katie Larkin-Wong of Latham & Watkins, could be used in legal challenges in other states.

A long haul

The legal process has a long way to go. It will be heard first in state Superior Court, but a decision there likely would be appealed by the losing party ultimately to the state Supreme Court. One might be pessimistic about the chances there, given the Republican majority on the court, but there are signs elsewhere that issues of educational disparity aren’t necessarily partisan.

Bill Cobey, Republican chair of the State Board of Education, recently said he thought the time had come for merger of the Halifax systems. And the Republican-controlled state legislature, in the budget just passed, included language allowing the state board to require merger of local school systems.

The entry into this battle by the Civil Rights Center itself occurs in a political context. The center was among those targeted for possible elimination last year during a UNC Board of Governors review of academic centers, which ended up scrapping the law school’s Center on Poverty headed by Gene Nichol. The Civil Rights Center escaped termination, this time.

I wondered whether Dorosin and his colleagues worried about that specter as they brought the resources of the law school into the Halifax fray, which could be seen as the university sticking its nose into a local governmental issue.

Dorosin pointed out that the Civil Rights Center receives no taxpayer support – its lawyers and operations are supported entirely from private fundraising. But he also said the initiative in Halifax falls within the center’s mission: “Our sense was that this is what the center was designed to do – to provide legal resources to communities challenging segregation and discrimination.”

This story was originally published October 11, 2015 at 2:00 PM with the headline "The case for forced school merger in Halifax County."