Federal judge sets timeline for Gardendale schools breakaway case

Published 3:15 pm Thursday, December 3, 2015

The federal judge in the Gardendale City Schools’ breakaway case has set a schedule for how the case is to proceed over the next few months — and if Gardendale prevails, the system will have a very short time for taking over local schools.

U.S. District Judge Madeline Haikala issued an order last week that sets a timeline for the case, in which Gardendale seeks to separate from the Jefferson County Schools to form its own system. It’s the latest move in the breakaway effort, which has already been delayed by a year.

Haikala’s schedule directs Gardendale to file a motion with a plan for separation by Dec. 12, a week from this Saturday. That plan would be much like the one already filed in various state court proceedings.

From there, the timeline follows this schedule:

March 18, 2016: All factual discovery must be concluded. This involves informing all other parties in the case — Gardendale, JefCoEd, the U.S. Department of Justice and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund — of all facts and figures pertinent to the case. (The Legal Defense Fund represents the original plaintiffs in Stout vs. Jefferson County Board of Education, the 50-year-old lawsuit that resulted in the racial desegregation of county schools. That case is still ongoing, and JefCoEd officials claim Gardendale’s breakaway will greatly affect their system’s ability to officially declare their schools desegregated and close the Stout case for good.)

April 8: Gardendale shall disclose who their expert witnesses are in the case.

April 29: The other parties shall disclose their expert witnesses.

May 20: All depositions of expert witnesses must be finished by this date.

May 27: All parties must have met by this date to determine if there is enough agreement to jointly submit a plan for separation, and file a report with Haikala.

June 10: If the parties cannot agree, then JefCoEd, the Department of Justice and the Legal Defense Fund must file motions of objection by this date.

June 15: Gardendale files responses to any objections, and Haikala will then set a date for hearing all motions.

If that timeline stays intact, and the parties do not agree on a separation plan — a strong possibility, given JefCoEd’s previous refusal to budge from its position that Gardendale should pay more than $30 million so that the county system can build a replacement school for students displaced by Gardendale’s breakaway that is functionally equivalent to the new Gardendale High School — then Gardendale could find itself taking over its schools with six weeks or fewer before the start of the 2016-17 school year.

Gardendale has maintained from the beginning that, because Gardendale High was funded by the Jefferson County Government directly and not by JefCoEd, that there is no outstanding debt owed by the county schools on the facility. Therefore, Gardendale contends that state law provides for no payment to JefCoEd.