Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, June 13, 1995 TAG: 9506130082
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
By the identical 5-4 lineup that restricted racial preference programs Monday, the high court overturned a federal judge's order that Missouri pay for two costly aspects of Kansas City's massive desegregation program.
The judge, Russell Clark, had ordered the state to pay for across-the-board salary increases and a program to help minority children reach national norms in educational achievement.
School desegregation programs may not spend unlimited amounts of money, go on indefinitely, uniformly insist on academic achievement or seek to lure white students from blameless suburban districts, the court declared.
``It's bad news, no question about that,'' said William L. Taylor, a civil rights lawyer.
Of particular importance to other desegregation plans, he said, was the court's opposition to a requirement that minority children show substantial academic progress before court-supervised desegregation can end.
``Insistence upon academic goals unrelated to the effects of [past] legal segregation unwarrantably postpones the day when the [Kansas City district] will be able to operate on its own,'' Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist said for the majority.
``That view would apply to a lot of places,'' Taylor said.
In Philadelphia, Yonkers, N.Y., and elsewhere, federal judges have retained supervision after noting that African-American and Hispanic youngsters continued to lag behind in reading and mathematics.
A key goal of the Kansas City desegregation program, at $1.3 billion the most expensive in the nation, was to lure white students from the suburbs to top-quality magnet schools in the city.
But a goal that reaches into the suburbs is unjustified when suburban school districts played no role in racially segregating students, Rehnquist declared. He was joined by Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony M. Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
by CNB