This SC school district is still under a desegregation order. That could change soon.

Georgetown County school board members want to lift a federal desegregation order that, according to Superintendent Randall Dozier, has prevented hiring some new teachers in areas where there are teacher shortages.

It’s also forced the district to spend extra time and money compiling information for the Department of Justice that they otherwise wouldn’t have done, the superintendent said.

The school board unanimously voted Tuesday to file a motion with the U.S. District Court in Charleston to lift parts of the desegregation order that has governed the district since 1997.

“I think it improves morale in the district and in the community,” said Lindsay Thompson, the district’s in-house legal counsel. “This is something that’s been an issue for many, many, years and now is something we’ve made vast improvements in and can show that in some tangible ways.”

The 1997 consent decree is the latest in a series of court orders stemming from a 1969 complaint. It forces the district to get permission from federal government before building any schools or changing attendance lines, regulates teacher hiring and restricts student transfers.

David Duff, the attorney representing the district in court, said the DOJ had agreed after it’s most recent visit that the schools had ended the effects of segregation in the areas of transportation, facilities and extracurricular activities and he was confident the court would lift those parts of the order.

“There’s been a steady improvement in the facilities,” said Duff. “They’re all top-notch, they’re all equal. You go to any of the schools and every building looks terrific whether it’s new or old. We reconfigured a couple of (bus) routes that were of concern to DOJ. They were all one race so we modified a few of those.”

Other aspects of the order dealing with student assignment to schools and faculty and staff assignments were not addressed in the motion, but Duff said he hopes to get the rest of the restrictions lifted within a year.

Dozier said the district would not start ignoring the recommendations in the consent decree if it’s lifted.

“What I’d like to see is that we put those things in policy, that we still continue to maintain those requirements that they had,” Dozier said. “I know people are concerned that you would just forget about it and not continue to maintain it, but we would with regard to students, staff assignments, teacher hiring and those kinds of things. I do think if we’re not doing things we should be doing, we’d like to correct those.”

What’s in the consent decree?The consent decree sets out a number of requirements for the district on attendance areas, racial imbalances at schools, access to facilities and educational opportunities, and racial balance among teachers and administrators.

For example, in most cases students cannot transfer between schools unless the transfer helps the racial balance of both schools.

Another requirement specifically singled out the Carvers Bay middle and high school attendance zone, which was created after merging the Choppee and Pleasant Hill zones.

The decree ordered that any future changes to the zone “shall ensure that, to the degree practicable, the racial composition of student enrollment of the zone approximates the racial composition of the School District’s student enrollment as a whole,” and “at least maintain the degree of desegregation” in the schools.

The zone hasn’t changed since the consent decree.

According the U.S. Department of Education, Carvers Bay High School was 74 percent black and Carvers Bay Middle School was 71 percent black as of 2013, the most recent year for which data was available.

That year, the district as a whole was 44 percent black and 50 percent white.

“There’s only so much you can do,” said Duff. “The demographics and the geographic conditions must be taken into consideration.”

This story was originally published September 21, 2017 at 7:54 AM with the headline "This SC school district is still under a desegregation order. That could change soon.."