Agreement Reached in Connecticut School Desegregation Case | NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund

Connecticut Attorney General William Tong and Governor Ned Lamont have announced the settlement agreement reached in the thirty year litigation with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to address the racial segregation of Connecticut public schools.

Connecticut summarizes key provisions:

Key terms of the agreement include:

1. Substantially increases the number of seats available to Hartford students in more diverse educational settings;

1. Provides a path towards ensuring all Hartford students will have the opportunity to attend school in more diverse educational settings if their parents desire;

1. Continues to support Hartford in providing the best quality education in its neighborhood schools;

1. Commits to developing a long-term plan with the input of experienced educators and other key stakeholders to ensure a sustainable and equitable Hartford-area voluntary choice school program for the future;

1. Provides additional support to help Sheff magnet schools attract more diverse applicant pools;

1. Makes the Regional School Choice application process more user-friendly and transparent so that families from all backgrounds can more easily understand the opportunities available to them, make informed choices about those opportunities, and more easily complete the student lottery application;

1. Changes the Regional School Choice student assignment protocols going forward so that student lottery selection is based solely on socioeconomic status, thereby providing diverse school populations while protecting present and planned successful voluntary school desegregation progress from legal challenges, without materially changing desegregation goals.

  For a copy of the signed settlement, click here

Agreement Reached in Connecticut School Desegregation Case | NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund

Read a PDF of the NAACP LDF statement here.

On behalf of Elizabeth Horton Sheff and other Black, Latinx, and white families, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), the Center for Children’s Advocacy, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, and Horton, Dowd, Bartschi & Levesque, PC have reached a new landmark agreement in Sheff v. O’Neill. Sheff is a longstanding school desegregation case against the State of Connecticut that seeks to address the extreme racial and economic segregation of students in the city of Hartford in relation to its surrounding suburbs.

The new agreement adds up to 1,052 new magnet school seats, including a new middle school at the Riverside Magnet School and new prekindergarten classes at a Hartford host magnet and the Academy of Aerospace and Engineering Elementary School. Nearly 600 of these new seats are reserved for students from Hartford. Additionally, among other funding, Connecticut is furnishing $1.1 million for magnet schools to develop new themes to recruit more diverse student bodies, $800,000 to provide academic and social support for Hartford students participating in the Open Choice program, and an additional $300,000 as incentives for suburbs that agree to accept more Hartford students.  

“This agreement reaffirms the parties’ commitment to racial integration and moves the needle forward by expanding opportunities for hundreds of Hartford students,” said Martha Stone, executive director of the Center for Children’s Advocacy. She has represented the plaintiffs since the case began in 1989.

In 1996, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that the extreme racial segregation between the predominately Black, Latinx, and low-income schools in Hartford and the overwhelmingly white and high- or middle-income schools in the surrounding suburbs violated the Connecticut State Constitution.

Since the early 2000s, a series of agreements between the plaintiffs and the State have established nearly 40 inter-district magnet schools and a robust Open Choice program, which allows Hartford students to transfer to suburban schools. Today, over 44% of Hartford students attend a magnet or Open Choice school.

The new agreement lasts until June 2022 and seeks to place 47.5% of Hartford students in integrated schools. Before this agreement expires, the plaintiffs and the State will develop a long-term plan to take effect in 2022 and ensure that every Hartford student has the option of attending a quality, integrated school. The State is required to set up an advisory committee made up of experienced educators to provide guidance in the implementation of the Sheff programs.

KEEP READING FOR MORE DETAILS OF THE REMEDY