Judge approves Cleveland school merger plan to end segregation tracks

Federal Judge Debra M. Brown approved a settlement that put Cleveland School District on a single track for its secondary schools, sending ninth through 12th graders to one high school and seventh and eighth graders to a separate middle school. Under the plan, the consolidated high school was set for the Cleveland High School and Margaret Green Junior High School campus, while the middle school was assigned to the East Side High School site; sixth graders were left at elementary schools. The district’s new high school was named Cleveland Central High School.

The order mattered because it settled a civil-rights case that began in 1965, when African-American students and parents sued to end white-only and black-only schools in Bolivar County. The United States later joined the case in 1985, and Justice Department lawyers argued that Cleveland’s secondary schools still carried illegal vestiges of segregation in a city of about 12,000 residents split by railroad tracks that divide east from west as well as black from white.

Brown had already ordered the district in May 2016 to consolidate its middle and high schools after rejecting the district’s alternative proposals. By Jan. 30, 2017, the Cleveland school board said it would drop its appeals and proceed under the judge’s desegregation plan. The joint settlement was filed Feb. 8 by the Justice Department, private plaintiffs in Cowan v. Cleveland School District and the district itself, and Brown approved it as the remedy for the district’s high schools and middle schools.

The agreement told district leaders to work with students, parents, educators and community stakeholders as the merger moved ahead. For families in a district of about 3,500 students, that meant new attendance lines, new transportation patterns and new staffing arrangements tied to the school reshuffle, along with the end of the old campus separation that had shaped Cleveland’s school identity for decades.

Justice Department case summaries said Cleveland Central High School and Cleveland Central Middle School opened on Aug. 7, 2017, marking a major step in a case that had been in federal court for generations.