Forty Years Later, Cleveland School District Still Facing Integration Issues

East Side High School in the Cleveland School District has an overwhelming majority of black students. The Department of Justice says this needs to change.

Forty years later, the Cleveland School District is still not integrated enough – at least, according to the Department of Justice. MPB’s Cari Gervin has more.

The Cleveland School District was integrated by court order in 1969. The consent order was revised in 1989, and last year, the Department of Justice visited the district again.

The Justice report was sent to school board in April. The board only just made part of the content known at a meeting Monday night.

The school district’s attorney, Jamie Jacks, outlined the main complaints at the meeting.

“The Department of Justice states that the district has – and I quote – ‘pursued an incremental, voluntary and ultimately inadequate approach to integrating its all-black schools, in lieu of implementing more definitive, involuntary policies, such as altering attendance zone boundaries, school pairing and/or school consolidation.’”

But Jacks says the school board feels it has complied with the court order.

“The district’s majority-to-minority transfer policy and magnet school programs have impacted in a very positive manner the racial identifiability of the district schools as a whole.”

While some schools in the Cleveland school district have close to a 60-40 split between white and black students, others are much more imbalanced.

But Judson Thigpen says the problem isn’t race – it’s money. Thigpen is the head of the Cleveland-Bolivar Chamber of Commerce, and he says all the schools are suffering.

“We realize that we need new school buildings. But, you know, the cost of those buildings is astronomical. So this is the same problem we’ve had for 20, 30, 40 years.”

The board announced more than a million dollar budget deficit at its Monday meeting, so new facilities won’t be in the works any time soon.

For MPB News, I’m Cari Gervin.