Jimmie E. Gates

The (Jackson, Miss.) Clarion-Ledger

JACKSON, Miss. — Officials in a Mississippi Delta school district that never met the federal government's desegregation goals said Friday that they likely will appeal a judge's order to effectively shutter one of the district's two high schools and one of its two middle schools.

The Cleveland School District contends that its 3,800-student district is not segregated in spite of numerous federal court orders since 1965 designed to integrate two schools on the east side of the city that through the years have had nearly 100% black students and staff.

"The judge’s decision and comments by others have inaccurately portrayed our district as segregated, which is misleading and incorrect," the district said in a statement released through the Cleveland School Board's lawyer, Jamie Jacks. "The undeniable truth is that the Cleveland School District’s student population is integrated and has been for decades."

Cleveland, Miss., schools: 50 years in court

Open enrollment allows students to attend whichever school they choose, he said.

At Cleveland High School, 52.5% of the students are races other than white, according to National Center for Education Statistics data for the 2013-14 school year, the latest available. But at East Side High, 100% of the student body is a minority, predominantly black. Margaret Green Junior High on the west side of the city is similarly integrated with a 55.4% minority population, but D.M. Smith Middle School is 100% black.

A Government Accountability Office report, released Monday on the 62nd anniversary of the Supreme Court's ruling that struck down "separate but equal" schools, showed that about 16% of public schools across the USA had 75% or more of their student bodies composed of minority students. That would include East Side High and D.M. Middle schools. It also showed that poverty, as measured by the percentage of students eligible for free and reduced-price lunches, was very high in those schools.

The five-member Cleveland School Board, which has three white members and two black members, voted this week to investigate an appeal of the court ruling and is expected to vote next week on whether to actually file, Jacks said.

"The Cleveland School District’s board believes the court’s decision to consolidate schools will limit the choices of both parents and students," Jacks said in the school system's statement.

On May 13, U.S. District Judge Debra Brown ordered the Cleveland School District to merge its overwhelmingly black middle and high schools with its historically white schools to end a legal battle that began in July 1965 — more than 10 years after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision — when 131 students became plaintiffs in a lawsuit to desegregate the city's schools. She gave school officials 21 days to submit a timeline to comply with her order.

The U.S. Department of Justice's plan that Brown approved would create one middle school using the existing East Side High building, and one high school campus using the existing Cleveland High and Margaret Green Junior High schools, which are across the street from one another, according to an affidavit filed in the case from Claire Smrekar, a Vanderbilt University assistant professor hired by the federal agency.

Miss. school district ordered to desegregate, ending 50-year battle

This past week, students had their final days of classes before summer break, and Brown's expectation is that the two high schools and two middle schools will be combined beginning in early August with the 2016-17 school year.

The demographics in the area, in the Mississippi Delta about 125 miles northwest of Jackson, are majority black:

Almost 2 of 3 residents of Bolivar County, where Cleveland is located, are black.

residents of Bolivar County, where Cleveland is located, are black. More than half of the 12,000 residents in the city of Cleveland, 50.2%, are black.

of the 12,000 residents in the city of Cleveland, 50.2%, are black. About 66% of the students in the school district are black, 30% are white and 4% are Asian or Hispanic.

Ellis Turnage, a Cleveland lawyer who worked with the Justice Department on the case, said neighborhoods are still divided in Cleveland. Though trains aren't routed through the city any more, the site of the old tracks is the line between black and white housing, blacks to the east and whites to the west.

Many white students whose families can afford the tuition attend Bayou Academy, a private pre-kindergarten through 12th grade school founded in 1964 that has three blacks, two Hispanics and one Asian among its almost 300 students in 2013-14, a 2% minority student body in kindergarten through 12th grade.

However more white students attend public schools in Cleveland than in Bolivar County's five other school districts, Turnage said. He wonders whether white parents will pull their children from the district if the secondary schools are consolidated.

Follow Jimmie E. Gates on Twitter: @jgatesnews