Memo RE: Meeting Agenda

    MEMORANDUM 

TO: The Sheff Team 

FROM: Dennis Parker 

RE: Agenda for the March 8, 1999 Meeting 

DATE: March 5, 1999 

  

Here is a proposed agenda for our meeting on Monday. Because of the scope of the 
questions we have to address, we will probably have to carry some things over for another 
meeting (perhaps a phone call the following day). Remember, the meeting of the attorneys is 
at 9:45 a.m. at the CCLU. We will meet with the plaintiffs the same place at 6:00 pm. 

I. Discussion of Aurigemma decision 
a. Initial reactions 
b Appealable issues 
C. Alternative courses of action 
d Discussion 

IL. Next steps in consideration of remedy 
a. Consideration of economic basis for assignments 
b. Should we continue to develop a remedy and consider 

going public with it. 

III. Legislature and community outreach 
a. Today’s testimony before education committee (draft attached). 
b. Future interaction with Black and Latino Caucus and legislature as a whole. 
C. Contact with Courant editorial Board 
d. Recruitment for community organizer 
e, Meeting with new Hartford superintendent 

IV. Miscellaneous 
a. Case staffing 
b. Status of Rebell and Associates grant 
C. Hartford proposal regarding retention and social promotion. 

 



  

Draft of March 1999 Testimony 

The Plaintiffs in Sheff v. O’Neill respectfully submit this 
  

statement to express their concern and frustration with the State of 

Connecticut’s continuing failure to adequately address the 

unconstitutional racial and ethnic isolation in the Hartford 

metropolitan area. 

As you know, this week we received the most recent decision in Sheff 

v. O'Neill from the Superior Court. We are now studying the decision and 

considering our options. From the outset, however, we think it is 

important to clarify what we believe is a significant misstatement of 

the plaintiffs’ position. We did not then, nor do we now, urge that the 

Court choose between a '"mandatory’ and ‘'voluntary" plan. Instead, we 

sought to demonstrate that the benchmark of any plan is its 

effectiveness and that, using this standard, the state’s efforts to date 

have been sorely lacking. We believe that compliance with the Supreme 

Court’s Order requires that goals be defined and measures be identified 

that have a realistic chance of achieving those goals. 

Although there are many parts of the opinion with which we disagree 

strongly, there are some things that are beyond dispute. Clearly, the 

Superior Court decision did nothing to alter the state’s responsibility 

for remedying the racial and ethnic isolation which exists in the 

Hartford Metropolitan area. Whether or not the plaintiffs ultimately 

decide to appeal the decision, we remain committed to enforcing the 

 



  

letter and spirit of the Supreme Court Order. 

We believe that the action brought by the plaintiffs was both 

timely and necessary to enforce the constitutional rights of children 

in the Hartford region. As detailed in the record in this case, the 

children of Hartford have waited long enough. As you know, as early as 

1966 a team from Harvard made a series of recommendations to overcome the 

racial isolation of the Hartford schools. Since that time, there have 

been a plethora of statewide commissions, committees, forums, processes 

and panels devoted to the question. And there has been no shortage of 

ideas, some of which have been piloted now for years, even decades. 

These programs were put into place before the Supreme Court decision in 

July, 1990. That decision, therefore, required more. As the Court 

stated nearly three years ago, "the system of public education in 

Hartford and the Hartford region deprives plaintiffs’ schoolchildren of 

the right to a substantially equal educational opportunity based on 

racial and ethnic isolation and segregation and exists in the Hartford 

Public Schools and among school districts in the Hartford region." 

Noting both the severity of the constitutional violation and the 

decades-long history of repeated studies and ineffective programs, the 

Supreme Court issued a clear and unequivocal directive to the State 

n defendants to "put the search for appropriate remedial measures at the 

top of the respective agendas’ and insisted that this be done "in time to 

make a difference before another generation of children suffers the 

 



  

consequences of a segregated Public School education." Hopeful that 

the Supreme Court's straightforward and unambiguous mandate would spur 

the State to take steps to deal effectively with the unconstitutional 

condition of the educational system, the plaintiffs waited patiently for 

legislation which would, finally, reverse the pattern of increasing 

racial and ethnic isolation in the Hartford Metropolitan area. 

Instead, the plaintiff watched with mounting frustration as racial 

and ethnic isolation increased - in Hartford alone, the minority 

population, which accounted for 90% of student enrollment at the time 

the Sheff lawsuit was filed, increased to 94% minority by the 1997-98 

school year. In the face of these rising levels of racial and ethnic 

isolation, plaintiffs watched as the State re-presented slightly 

modified versions of existing programs which had already proven 

unsuccessful at reducing racial and ethnic isolation. 

Convinced that there was nothing in the State’s legislative 

response which promised to remedy unconstitutional racial and ethnic 

isolation, the plaintiff availed themselves of their right under the 

Supreme Court opinion to return to the Superior Court for vindication of 

their constitutional rights. 

Indeed, the Sheff plaintiffs believe strongly that none of the 

state’s efforts to date, up to and including the Commissions January, 

1999 Report Advancing Student Achievement and Curriculum, and Reducing 
  

Student Isolation, has reduced racial and ethnic isolation or promises   

 



      

to do so in the foreseeable future. The effects of this failure are 

enormous. Although, racial and ethnic isolation adversely effects all 

students, the results will be felt most sharply by African-American and 

Latino students who have historically suffered educationally. 

Plaintiffs submit that the record tells a compelling and sobering 

story of the State’s failure and urge that the legislature carefully 

review thes trial transcript as a part of ‘its evaluation of the 

Commissioner’s report. 

At the September hearing, the plaintiffs presented evidence that 

the welter of educational programs which the state presented as a 

comprehensive response was neither comprehensive nor responsive to the 

Supreme Court’s mandate. Testimony showed that the programs embodied 

in the Commissioner's February, 1998 section of the five year plan 

entitled Achieving Resource Equity were, for the most part, new 
  

incarnations of programs which were in existence at the time of the 

Supreme Court’s opinions which the Court itself had found to be 

inadequate. And the one wholly new program, charter schools, was one 

which, in its first year of operation, had resulted in the creation of 

only two new schools in the Hartford metropolitan area -- and these were 

racially identifiable. 

The. plaintiffs faulted: the state’s . response both for its 

ineffectiveness to date and for the unlikelihood that the programs would 

lead to significant reduction of racial isolation in the future. Based 

 



  

upon years of experience in educational administration and school 

desegregation cases, plaintiffs experts testified that the combined 

effects of the interdistrict cooperative grant programs, magnet 

schools, lighthouse schools and Project Choice, the highly touted 

version of Project Concern which actually falls far short of that 

program’s success and the aforementioned charter schools would be 

negligible in its effect on reducing racial isolation. 

Most significantly, each of the three, nationally recognized 

expert witnesses testified that the programs which the state described 

could not be described as a plan to reduce racial and ethnic isolation 

regardless of the educational desirability of some of the programs. 

These same experts agreed that a plan was vital to the successful 

reduction of racial and ethnic isolation. 

As our “Guidelines to an Effective Plan for Quality, Integrated 

Education” make clear, the plaintiffs did not advocate mandatory 

reassignment as the only alternative to the state's approach. Let us 

emphasize: at no time have the Sheff plaintiffs argued that the Board of 

Education must adopt a mandatory reassignment plan. Instead, 

plaintiffs’ evidence showed that there were a number of indispensable 

elements which any successful plan must contain and that each of these 

essential elements were absent in the state’s legislative response. 

Included among these were the existence of quantitative goals for the 

reduction of racial and ethnic isolation, timelines for achieving those 

 



goals and clear legislative procedures for dealing with the failure to 

achieve the goals set. Ironically, the evidence showed that the 1997 

legislation (P.A. 97-290) seemed to depart from the example offered by 

the state’s racial imbalance act which, whatever its shortcomings as a 

measure that applies only to infradistrict imbalance, does provide clear 

and enforceable guidelines to the school districts in the state as to 

what is expected of them. 

Instead of clear guidelines, the record shows that the state has 

substituted the vague and largely unenforceable obligations upon school 

districts to "provide educational opportunities for its students to 

interact with students and teachers from other racial, ethnic, and may 

provide such opportunities with students from other communities." 

(emphasis added). This obligation would be measured by the equally 

nebulous standard of "evidence of improvement over time." 

In addition to its vagueness, the chief fault of the state’s set of 

programs is that it turns a deaf ear to the Supreme Court decision 

(indeed, the chief expert witness for the state flatly asserted that she 

felt that the Connecticut Supreme Court’s decision was ‘"wrong"). 

Nowhere in the opinion’s frequent discussion of school enrollments does 

the Court suggest that ‘interracial contact" would be sufficient to 

satisfy constitutional mandates, particularly when, as is the case with 

the state’s interdistrict grant programs, some of which are of only 

several days duration. Moreover, the state’s legislative package, with  



  

its permissive language regarding exposure between different 

communities, fails to address the Supreme Court’s recognition that the 

existence of firmly established town attendance boundary lines is at the 

heart of the constitutional violation. 

At the time of the hearing, the state, most notably through 

testimony of Commissioner Sergi, pointed to the Commissioner's upcoming 

January 1999 report as one which would contain further new Initiatives 

designed to reduce racial and ethnic isolation. Indeed, the Court cited 

the fact that the five year plan was not completed as part of the reason 

that it felt that the plaintiffs’ efforts were premature. 

The Sheff plaintiffs are saddened to see that the hopes expressed 

by the Court that there would be further steps to reduce racial and 

ethnic isolation were not realized. The January 1999 report Advancing   

Student Achievement and Curriculum, and Reducing Student Isolation 
  

brings nothing new to the table and does nothing to dispel their 

skepticism about the possibility of future success. Notwithstanding the 

high expectations that were created for it, the new report fails to 

describe even a single new program choosing instead to provide increased 

funding for the existing programs. Missing in all of the legislation 1s 

a clear, quantitative definition of what would constitute "reduction of 

racial and ethnic isolation". That absence creates the possibility, and 

indeed the likelihood, that despite the state’s efforts, the Hartford 

School district will continue its steady movement toward become a 

 



  

substantially completely minority school district. Indeed, in his 

testimony, Commissioner Sergi allowed that were that to occur, he would 

not regard that as necessarily indicating that the state’s efforts 

failed. 

We submit that such an approach mocks the Supreme Court’s holding 

and denigrates the hard-fought constitutional rights of all students in 

the Hartford metropolitan area. When the Supreme Court instructed this 

body to create a remedy for racial and ethnic isolation, it entrusted it 

with the priceless constitutional rights of its youngest citizens. We 

feel strongly that the worst consequence of the recent decision would be 

if the state regarded it as license to relax the search for methods to 

address constitutional violations. To date, the State of Connecticut 

has not discharged its obligations and has left the rights and needs of 

many of its most vulnerable citizens unanswered. The Sheff plaintiffs 

urge that the problems be addressed and be addressed now, before another 

generation of children are damaged. 

 



FAX COVER SHEET 

John Brittain 860/570-5242 
Sandy DelValle 516/496-7934 
Juan Figueroa 212/431-4276 
Chris Hansen 212/549-2651 
Wes Horton 860/728-0401 

Marianne Engelman Lado 212/802-5968 
Willy Rodriguez 860/541-5050 
Martha Stone 860/570-5256 
Phil Teleger 860/728-0287 
Elizabeth Sheff 860/527-3305 

Dennis Parker 

Agenda for the March 8, 1999 Meeting 

March 5, 1999 

NUMBER OF PAGES (INCLUDING THE COVER SHEET) 10 

IF YOU DO NOT RECEIVE THE NUMBER OF PAGES INDICATED ABOVE, 

PLEASE NOTIFY US IMMEDIATELY AT 212\219-1900.