A sweeping New Jersey school segregation lawsuit reached a state appeals court on Thursday, when a coalition of civil rights groups, students, and parents urged judges to hold the state responsible for racial divisions in its public schools and order a plan to address them.
For more than eight years, the coalition has argued that New Jersey has allowed racial segregation to persist in its districts, leaving hundreds of thousands of Black and Latino students in predominantly nonwhite schools, depriving kids of equal educational opportunities.
But the state has failed to fix the longstanding disparities, according to the coalition, which includes the Latino Action Network and the NAACP New Jersey State Conference.
The arguments Thursday at the Appellate Division of the state Superior Court in Trenton marked a new milestone in the case. They followed a 2023 ruling in which a trial judge declined to decide whether the state had violated the constitution, and more than a year of mediation that ended without a settlement.
Even so, after a lengthy hearing, it was not clear which way the judges were leaning. They repeatedly questioned whether the coalition could prove its case with the enrollment data it presented, and pressed both the coalition and the state on whether the case could be decided without a trial.
The judges did not rule Thursday, but said they hoped to decide soon. When they do, they could side with the plaintiffs, moving the case closer to a court-ordered fix; side with the state, which could end the case; or send it back to a lower court, possibly for a trial.
How the case got here
The case began on May 17, 2018 — the 64th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, which outlawed racial segregation in public schools — when the coalition filed their lawsuit in the state Superior Court in Mercer County.
The plaintiffs argued that a state law requiring most children to attend school in the community where they live has helped entrench racial divisions between school districts. The state, represented by the attorney general’s office, countered that the imbalances in enrollment did not by themselves prove unconstitutional segregation.
The lawsuit was the idea of Gary Stein, a retired state Supreme Court justice whose group, the New Jersey Coalition for Diverse and Inclusive Schools, organized the plaintiffs.
Five years later, in 2023, a judge declined to rule for either side on the main question in the case. He found “marked and persistent racial imbalance in numerous school districts across the State” that state officials had failed to address. But, he wrote, the plaintiffs had not proved “that the State’s entire educational system is unconstitutionally segregated.”
On Thursday, the appeal centered largely on that same question: what the state’s enrollment data can prove and how segregation should be measured.
By the plaintiffs’ count, nearly half of the state’s Black and Latino students attended schools that were more than 90% nonwhite in the five school years ending in 2020. The state’s experts, counting only schools where a single racial or ethnic group made up at least 90% of students, found that about 6% of all students attended such public schools in 2019-20.
Judge Hany A. Mawla asked whether the panel could fault the trial judge for not siding with the plaintiffs when experts in the case “have different definitions of what segregation is?”
Lawrence S. Lustberg, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, told the judges that the plaintiffs had never claimed that every district in the state is segregated. “Nor could we,” he said, “because that just isn’t true.”
But the problem, he said, is widespread: One in four Black students in New Jersey attended a school that was at least 99% nonwhite in recent years.
Francesco Ferrantelli Jr., a deputy attorney general representing the state, acknowledged that racial imbalances exist in some districts. But he said enrollment numbers alone can’t tell the whole story.
New Brunswick’s schools, for example, are predominantly Hispanic, he said, but the evidence in the case does not establish whether that reflects unlawful segregation or broader demographic changes in the area.
A fight over local control
Under New Jersey’s long tradition of local control, most towns in the state run their own school districts, and children are assigned schools based on where they live.
The plaintiffs want the state to stop assigning students to schools based only on home address, and to draw up a statewide desegregation plan. But on Thursday, Ferrantelli contended that the state’s residency requirement is fundamental to its public school system.
The law predates the state’s constitutional ban on school segregation, he said, and reflects a system in which schools are funded in part by local property taxes.
Dismantling the law, the state has also argued in written filings, would be enormously difficult and require a new way of assigning students to schools, a new school funding formula, a system for busing students across county lines, and new rules for electing school board members.
Ferrantelli also rejected the idea that the state has done nothing to correct racial imbalances. He pointed to a decades-old program that lets students enroll in other districts, state reviews that block district changes that would worsen divisions, and efforts to expand affordable housing.
The judges also questioned whether the court could settle any of this without a trial, including in the state’s favor.