Hearing set for Gardendale school separation case

Published 3:15 pm Wednesday, October 14, 2015

The ongoing separation process between the new Gardendale City Schools and the Jefferson County Schools has an event scheduled soon.

U.S. District Judge Madeline Haikala has set a status conference for Nov. 10 in her Birmingham courtroom, in which all parties involved — Gardendale, JefCoEd, the U.S. Department of Justice and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund — will tell her where they currently stand in the case.

Haikala is presiding over the Stout vs. Jefferson County Board of Education desegregation case that was filed in the 1960s. That case is still active, as JefCoEd has not been deemed by the courts to have achieved “unitary status” — a finding that its schools are legally desegregated and no longer require federal supervision.

All city school systems that have broken off from JefCoEd are also subject to the supervision as well. The Gardendale situation is getting extra scrutiny, because its breakaway might cause further racial imbalances in the county system’s student population. The new Gardendale system would include proportionally more white students than blacks or other minorities, which could leave JefCoEd with more minority students, making it more racially imbalanced and impairing the effort to get out from federal supervision.

The NAACP Legal Defense fund represents the original plaintiffs in the Stout case, while the Department of Justice represents the federal government.

The separation case was moved to the federal courts earlier this year. In the case, JefCoEd is claiming that the new Gardendale system should have to pay it more than $30 million so that JefCoEd can build a new facility for students outside the Gardendale city limits who won’t be a part of the new system. The payment would be so that the new facility would provide functionally-equivalent opportunities to what the new Gardendale High School offers.

Gardendale claims that they owe nothing because the new school was built by Jefferson County government, not the county school system, and therefore there is no existing debt that the county schools hold on the school. If there had been such debt, state law would require the breakaway system to assume it.

The new city system was scheduled to assume control of the four local schools at the beginning of the current school year, but was forced to delay for a year because the legal proceedings took too long.

Speakers’ series continues: The Gardendale Board of Education was host last week to George Thompson, president of the Schlechty Center in Louisville, Ky. The center helps local districts improve the caliber of instruction and students’ school work, thereby improving the students’ learning.

Thompson presented the second of four programs in the board’s Pathways to Educational Excellence series, held in conjunction with the board’s regular monthly meetings.

The board had previously contracted with the Schlechty Center to assist in the system’s startup.

The next program will be held on Tuesday, Nov. 3 at 6 p.m. at the Gardendale Civic Center, and will feature Jason Harpe, an accountant and partner with the Birmingham office of Carr Riggs and Ingram. Harpe’s presentation is titled “Transparency and Accountability, How the Numbers Work.”