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A bill that would phase out desegregation funds to more than a dozen school districts could put Tucson Unified School District into noncompliance with a federal court order, the district superintendent said Wednesday.
H.T. Sanchez, TUSD superintendent.The bill passed committee following a two-hour hearing.
Of the Arizona districts receiving desegregation funding, Tucson Unified is the only one still under a federal court order to address desegregation issues, Sanchez said.
Republican state Sen. Debbie Lesko said she wants to stop school districts from receiving millions from the Office of Civil Rights and Desegregation Funds if they are not under court orders. Lesko said it is unfair for the schools that didn’t have problems with segregation decades ago to not be getting some of the extra state funding now allocated to the desegregation budgets.
"For all but one school district, there’s no court orders," Lesko said. "There’s nothing left. This is from long, long, long ago when there were problems with desegregation. Those problems are gone.”
Sanchez said that for TUSD, the federal court mandates how it spends the money.
"And if there’s any deviation, the court could find us in contempt of its order to comply with the Unitary Status Plan," Sanchez said. That is the court's nomenclature for the plan that leads to desegregation.
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