Bogie, Bradley and Busing
The Story of Pinellas County School Integration A nine-part series exclusive to the Gabber By James A. Schnur
Court decisions from the 1950s through 1970s required Pinellas County to desegregate its public schools. Fifty years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court considered buses appropriate vehicles for meeting this mandate. During the last three decades, the legal requirements have relaxed as student bodies in many Florida districts have started to resegregate.
CATHY SALUSTRI
Part 9: A New Reality in a New Millennium
Unitary Status and New Trends in Diversity The original goal of school desegregation was to achieve “unitary status.” This meant a district had successfully removed earlier vestiges of unequal practices and separate facilities that discriminated against minorities. When the federal court approved the Bradley decree in 1971, the expectation was that once Pinellas attained unitary status, it would continue to maintain that standard. A January 1991 U.S. Supreme Court decision changed the landscape. In Board of Education of Oklahoma City Public Schools v.
Dowell, Justices permitted courts to end oversight once systems met the unitary test. This happened at a time when a growing number of lower courts granted such status. Instead of staying atop the mountain, Dowell permitted districts to lower themselves by reverting to earlier segregation practices. Since the 1990s, many Florida school districts have backslid. This happened at the same time politicians started to add high-stakes
testing while also diverting more public funds to private charter schools that did not have to comply with the same accountability standards. The U.S. District Court in Tampa granted Pinellas County “unitary status” on August 16, 2000. By this action, federal supervision under the Bradley decision came to an end as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund agreed that the district had Bogie continued on page 8
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