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: BoardBuzz: NSBA's Daily Weblog

Legal eagles soaring

BoardBuzz likes nothing more than to celebrate the achievements of our peers, and have we got a doozy today! Our friends over at Legal Clips have celebrated a major milestone in the subscriptions department. Clips is now at more than 10,000 subscribers. Congratulations go out to our Legal Clips team, NSBA staff: Tom Hutton, Tom Burns, Andrew Paulson, and Lisa Soronen. This week's edition has a couple of interesting tidbits of note. The first is an excerpt from this story in the New York Times, with, as usual, some additional background and sources provided by NSBA, Connecticut reaches tentative settlement in landmark deseg case. The Times notes,

Schools in Hartford and 22 of its suburbs would be encouraged to open more classroom seats to children from outside their neighborhoods in order to increase racial diversity, under a tentative settlement reached Friday in a decades-old desegregation case. The settlement, which still requires the approval of Connecticut legislators and the state court handling the dispute, outlines a five-year plan whose goal is to get at least 41% of Hartford's minority students into schools where enrollments are no more than three-quarters minority. In the first year, the goal would be at least 19%. Approximately 94% of the 22,000 students now enrolled in Hartford's 40 public schools are minority. Achieving the goals depends on students crossing district lines in a region where students, over all, are about 45% minority. The tentative deal opens the possibility of resolving a case that has outlasted three governors but has yet to bring sweeping changes to the composition of Hartford's public schools. The case is known as Sheff v. O'Neill. The tentative settlement, much like the ones that have preceded it without permanent success, relies entirely on voluntary incentives.

Clips adds info on why the case is so significant. The second story of note is related, in a way, to the first. In Parent group argues Dillon's Rule bars Virginia school boards from considering socioeconomic diversity or instructional effectiveness in drawing attendance zones, Hutton points out the potential significance of "a lawsuit by some parents in Virginia?s Fairfax County over the school board?s redrawing of high school attendance zones." Hint: Think the Supreme Court's ruling in the Seattle and Louisville diversity cases. Follow the links for the full story. Are YOU a Legal Clips subscriber? If not, click here to subscribe and see what all the buzz is about.

Full post as published by BoardBuzz: NSBA's Daily Weblog on April 10, 2008 (boomark / email).