A tiny Marin County school district “intentionally” segregated its students, corralling black and Latino children in an under-performing public school for years, and must now develop a plan to quickly reintegrate its classrooms, according to settlement terms in a racial discrimination case announced Friday by the state attorney general’s office.

Former leaders of the Sausalito Marin City School District failed their students and their community by creating a deliberately segregated school system, Attorney General Xavier Becerra said, using pointed language, at a news conference at the public Bayside Martin Luther King Jr. Academy.

“Depriving a child of a fair chance to learn is wicked, it’s warped, it’s morally bankrupt, and it’s corrupt,” he said. “Every child deserves equal access to a quality education. That’s what we say, what we believe and what’s required under the law.”

The settlement calls for a speedy solution — developed by a coalition of administrators, teachers, parents and students — to desegregate the two schools located in the southern Marin County district that had 528 students in the 2018-19 school year. About a third of them were white and the rest black, Latino, Asian American or multiracial, according to district records.

The district’s only regular public school is Bayside, a K-8 campus with 119 students, eight of them white. The second school, also K-8, is Willow Creek Academy, a publicly funded charter school where about 40% of students are white, 25% are Latino and 10% are black.

Bayside is located in unincorporated Marin City, a diverse, lower-income community where residents have long felt overlooked. Willow Creek is about a mile away in Sausalito, a wealthy enclave of bayside homes, charming houseboats and downtown shopping that draws hordes of tourists every weekend.

“The stigma associated with the Marin City community has been one of failure, whether it’s been relative to housing, education or economic disparity — or acceptance in neighboring communities,” said Ida Green, president of the Sausalito Marin City School District Board of Trustees. “This is not the platform to discuss how we change the course of all the injustices. But we can begin to move forward with an edict on equal education.”

The attorney general’s office opened an investigation into charges of racial discrimination in the school district three years ago, in response to a scathing report released by the state’s Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team.

Investigators with the attorney general’s office found that the district had intentionally created Bayside MLK Jr. Academy in 2013 as a racially and ethnically segregated school. Then, the district “cut critical classroom programming” at Bayside while providing stable funding for Willow Creek, according to the state attorney general’s office.

Over the past six years, Bayside has consistently been understaffed, especially compared with its wealthier counterpart. The one guidance counselor at Bayside was part-time, and the counselor at Willow Creek was full-time. Bayside didn’t have a credentialed math teacher for three years.

Particularly alarming were disciplinary reports from the school district: Black students were suspended for 66 times as many days as white students — the largest such disparity in the state, Becerra said.

The district was shaken in February 2016 when Superintendent Steve Van Zandt resigned after being charged with a criminal conflict of interest in his previous position as superintendent of a district in San Diego County. He later pleaded guilty. Later that year, the principal and assistant principal at Bayside retired suddenly.

Green said she and her colleagues were eager to start working with the community to begin desegregating the schools, an effort that could involve combining the public and charter schools into one campus or finding ways to draw a more diverse student body to Bayside.

“It should not take the highest policing agency in California to ensure that we are taking care of the children,” Green said. “But today’s settlement now enables the district to move forward with full transparency.”

Under the settlement terms, community members and outside experts will join in developing a plan to “attract a diverse pool of students to Bayside.” The agreement also includes a scholarship program for two years of college or trade school for students affected by the district’s disparities, and a counseling program offering college and career guidance to students who attended Bayside between 2013 and 2019.

An advisory group will be established to provide input to the district on desegregation, and an outside monitor will oversee compliance.

The administrators responsible for the segregation are no longer with the school district, current district leaders said. And there are no plans to hold them accountable for the decisions they made, both in creating the two schools and diverting money from one to the other.

Bayside parents and educators said Friday that they’re eager to move forward in fixing their school.

“The framing now should be around the kids, not veering off to figure out what the consequences should be for those who made those decisions,” said William Cole-Woods, a program director with Bridge the Gap, which helps Marin City students improve their academic skills and prepare for college.

Cole-Woods said many of the high school students he works with who came from Bayside struggle academically compared with their peers from other elementary and middle schools. They’re especially behind in math, he said, because there was no credentialed teacher at Bayside for so long.

He was pleased to see that the settlement terms included counseling and academic support for students who aren’t at Bayside anymore.

“I can take a breath of relief that people are acknowledging this, that there were kids who were really affected,” Cole-Woods said.

Parent Kahaya Adams, 38, has a daughter entering eighth grade and a son who will start kindergarten at Bayside later this month. She said she was hesitant about sending them to Bayside, given the historic problems there — and she may still transfer them to a different school if she feels they’re being underserved.

But she added that as a member of the Marin City community, she has a responsibility to help improve its schools, which means giving the new leadership a chance.

“You can be angry about what happened, but our kids are already hurting and suffering. Hopefully, they will flourish and grow now,” Adams said. “We want the best for all the kids in our district.”

Erin Allday and Bob Egelko are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: eallday@sfchronicle.com begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter:@BobEgelko @ErinAllday