Milestone agreement in Sheff vs. O'Neill school desegregation case adds 1,000 magnet school seats...

Source: Hartford Courant

Milestone agreement in Sheff vs. O’Neill school desegregation case adds 1,000 magnet school seats to ease racial isolation of Hartford students

By JOSH KOVNER HARTFORD COURANT | JAN 10, 2020 | 4:57 PM

Civil rights lawyers and the state have reached a milestone agreement in the 30-year-old Sheff vs. O’Neill school desegregation case that adds more than 1,000 new magnet school seats and improves the school choice lottery in a system long plagued by a racial imbalance.

Martha Stone, the original Sheff lawyer, and Attorney General William Tong told Superior Court Judge Marshall Berger Friday that the agreement, while not coming close to meeting the actual demand for magnet school seats, provides a blueprint for more permanent solutions to racial isolation in and around Hartford.

The agreement follows by three years a Courant investigation that found some seats were artificially kept open to avoid racial imbalances, which penalized minority children in Hartford.

Berger signed the agreement, saying it was worth celebrating, but cautioning that even harder work lies ahead.

Read more: https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-news-sheff-desegregation-expansion-hartford-magnet-20200110-7hpmkplwxjfxjedqu2r5bic44y-story.html

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This was a landmark desegregation ruling in Connecticut 30 years ago (1989), and the parties have been in and out of court ever since.

This ruling and the agreement today will probably be the basis of other cases around the country in the future.

More background on the case can be found on the ACLU website here: https://www.aclu.org/cases/sheff-v-oneill

As a side note, the O'Neill in the case was Governor William O'Neill, who was the last Democratic Governor in Connecticut before Dannel Malloy was elected in 2010. He also happened to be close friends with my father in law!