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June 18, 2005
Comfort v. Lynn School Committee
First brought in 1999, Comfort v. Lynn School Committee recently left the federal appeals court in Boston with a 3-2 ruling in favor of Lynn's school district's desegregation plan. The court reversed it's previous decision from October in light of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003 -- the court upheld a desegregation plan based on race used by U. Michigan Law.
“Many good things can be said about the Lynn plan,” the dissenting opinion says. “But the overriding fact is that it unnecessarily inflicts racially based wounds on a large and diverse group of its students and, consequently, fails to satisfy the narrow-tailoring requirements set out in the Supreme Court’s equal protection jurisprudence.”
Federal Appeals Court Upholds Use of Race by Lynn, Mass., Schools
The Massachusetts Attorney General's Office has also posted a briefing of the case.
In the past 15 years, the federal courts have moved away from desegregation remedies and have made it easier for communities to get out of existing court-ordered plans. Subsequently, communities have turned to voluntary plans to achieve the desegregation of their schools. The second wave of legal challenges is focusing on dismantling voluntary school desegregation plans. The federal courts are now starting to address whether it is constitutional for local educators to use race as a factor in student assignments after determining it is in the educational interests of their students to prevent racial isolation and segregation in their schools. Distilled to its essence, the big question raised by this case is whether state or local government any longer can try to achieve the clear command of Brown v. Board of Education (to desegregate public schools and strive toward truly integrated public schools) through voluntary non-court ordered action. Although consideration of race has been addressed in other contexts (the limits of affirmative action in employment and government contracting and procurement procedures), this is an issue that has not been directly addressed by the Supreme Court in the factually and legally unique context of elementary and secondary public schools.