School district declared desegregated

By Kelli Gauthier

Staff Writer

Hamilton County Schools soon will receive official word that the system is considered completely desegregated, but some say the district has a long way to go before all races are treated equally.

Superintendent Jim Scales said Tuesday that beginning in the 2008-2009 school year, Hamilton County no longer would be under court order to desegregate its schools.

"We have gotten to a point where the court says we've reached unitary status," he said.

Dr. Scales said officials with the Tennessee Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission told him in October that the district soon would receive official notification from the national commission, but he has not yet received that notice.

Dr. Bernie Miller, chairman of the Tennessee committee that advises the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, spent the last year conducting research on all 136 state school districts to see whether they had achieved unitary status as described by the U.S. Supreme Court.

"I wanted to know where school systems were in Tennessee, and no one could tell me," he said. "No county knew if they'd achieved unitary status."

Although the official results soon will be released by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, Dr. Miller said along with most of the state's school districts, Hamilton County no longer is segregated.

Dr. Scales said there still was progress to be made in racial equality and school desegregation.

"It's always a continuous process," he said.

In 1960, James Mapp filed a lawsuit against Chattanooga and its school system, saying the schools were segregated, six years after the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling. He said Tuesday that despite this recent declaration of desegregation, racial equality in Hamilton County Schools has gotten worse over the years.

Mr. Mapp, who was president of the Chattanooga branch of the NAACP for 26 years, said the district continues to spend more money on predominantly white schools than in those with mostly black students.

"We're really not in a desegregated system," he said. "As long as they're showing favoritism, we will never have a good system of education here in Hamilton County."

But Dr. Scales said desegregation progress has been made since some black students have moved out of the inner city and the district added a magnet school program in 2000.

Allowing students to attend magnet schools outside their designated zone increases diversity, said Danielle Clark, schools spokeswoman.

Beginning next school year, the district will not be required to offer transfers to students who wish to attend institutions with populations mostly of a different race. The majority-to-minority transfers began in 1997 when Chattanooga City Schools merged with Hamilton County Schools.

Dr. Scales said the Hamilton County Board of Education would have to decide whether the district would continue offering the transfers, which 184 students use this year.

Andria Calhoun's daughter, Precious Birdsong, is a sixth-grader at Red Bank Middle School. Precious is zoned to attend the predominantly black Dalewood Middle, but her mother decided Red Bank was a better fit, and sent her daughter there on a majority-to-minority transfer.

"I'm not saying Dalewood isn't a good school, but I guess I hope they would continue with this to give kids opportunities," said Ms. Calhoun, who is black.

School board member Debra Matthews said the unitary status was "shocking to a certain degree," since there still are schools in Hamilton County that serve students of predominantly one race. More than 90 percent of students at Howard School of Academics and Technology are black, and 97.1 percent of students at Nolan Elementary on Signal Mountain are white.

"Time seems to be going backward," she said.

But when a district has achieved unitary status, individual school populations are not considered, Dr. Miller said.

"You look at the whole of the school district, and you come up with whether they have a good percentage of African-American students and a good percentage of white students," he said. "According to our findings, (Hamilton County) does."

Ms. Matthews said she hoped Dr. Scales would hold a school board work session to discuss ways of encouraging greater diversity within the system, including the continuation of majority-to-minority transfers.

E-mail Kelli Gauthier at kgauthier@timesfreepress.com