The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund is appealing a district court’s decision allowing the predominantly white, middle-class city of Gardendale, located just outside Birmingham, Alabama, to secede from majority non-white Jefferson County School District.

“The District Court agreed that Gardendale’s bid to form its own school district was designed to exclude black schoolchildren,” Chris Kemmitt, senior counsel for the legal defense fund, said in a statement. “In filing this appeal, we are simply asking the Circuit Court to follow that finding to its logical conclusion and prohibit Gardendale from creating a separate, segregated school district at the expense of the broader community.”

The 67-page appeal, filed Monday to the 11th Circuit, argues that the decision should be overturned because the secession would impede desegregation efforts in the country, which is under a longstanding desegregation order, and because the secession was motivated by an intent to discriminate based on race.

The issue of secession garnered national attention in April, when Judge Madeline Haikala of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama in Birmingham, ruled in favor of Gardendale. The ruling, which acknowledged that "race was a motivating factor" behind the effort, would allow Gardendale to begin operating two elementary schools on its own as soon as the 2017-2018 school year.

If the secession goes forward, it would be the eighth such move by wealthier and whiter municipalities in the state and the 47th in the country since 2000, according to a report from EdBuild, a nonprofit that focuses on education funding and inequality.

“If we win, I think it probably makes it harder for subsequent towns to secede,” Kemmit tells U.S. News. “It would not affect towns that have already been allowed to do so.”