Federal appeals court ends desegregation oversight in Louisiana schools — What does it mean?
Louisiana’s Concordia Parish School District has been under court order to desegregate its schools since 1965.
In the district’s Ferriday High School, 92% of students are Black. Just twelve minutes’ drive away is Vidalia High School, where 62% of students are white. In the predominantly Black schools, court documents revealed considerably more deficiencies in the facilities.
“There was black mold in the air conditioning, unsafe playground equipment, lead in the water,” Allison Scharfstein, assistant counsel with the NAACP, told Straight Arrow of Ferriday’s schools. “There were really egregious and serious issues. There was a pathway forward so that the school district could actually satisfy its constitutional obligations, but the district withdrew.”
The NAACP has been active in many lawsuits regarding school desegregation.
In 2024, Concordia Parish considered merging schools to achieve desegregation. However, this controversial move was voted down by the board.
Now, Concordia Parish will no longer have to prove that it’s making moves to desegregate. Desegregation doesn’t simply mean integrating Black and white children into the same schools; it can also mean offering schools access to quality resources, college prep, qualified teachers and other critical support.
On Tuesday, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ended over 60 years of desegregation oversight by the federal government in Concordia Parish’s schools. Since the original Black families who filed the case in 1965 were dismissed in 2025 due to lack of involvement, the remaining parties were the school district, a local charter school and the U.S. government. And since all of the remaining parties agreed to end the litigation in August 2025, that was enough to end the desegregation order, the appellate court ruled Tuesday.
The ruling doesn’t simply end desegregation oversight in this particular school district. This decision could impact other school districts facing similar desegregation orders. More than 130 school districts remain under active federal desegregation orders. It could allow for procedure to dictate other schools’ futures, not necessarily that the schools have proved they’ve desegregated.
It also marks a triumph for the Trump administration’s efforts to end desegregation cases dating back to the Civil Rights era, something it has championed in President Donald Trump’s second term.
The impact of the case
When the Supreme Court ended school segregation in 1954 with its landmark decision Brown v. Board of Education, a slew of schools resisted integration. Many lawsuits followed against school districts that continued to separate Black and white students or maintain uneven access to materials and resources. Some of these cases still remain today.
The Concordia Parish School District case is the most recent in the Trump administration’s efforts to close long-standing school desegregation lawsuits across the nation. In 2025, the Justice Department announced that it would start unwinding these kinds of desegregation plans, and did so in Louisiana’s DeSota Parish in January and Plaquemines Parish last year.
“These decades-old consent decrees have long outlived their usefulness, and in this case, all parties agreed it should end,” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, who worked on dropping oversight in Concordia Parish, said in a statement. “The good people of Concordia Parish elected their School Board to govern their schools—not unelected federal judges. I’m grateful the Fifth Circuit agreed, and my team and I will continue working to end outdated federal oversight and return power to Louisiana’s local communities.”
Republicans argue that federal courts do not need to monitor local schools to ensure they are desegregated. Last year, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry and Murrill called for all remaining orders in Louisiana to be lifted. Those orders are relics of the past, an unnecessary burden to school districts, they argued.
But critics believe that this court decision could weaken safeguards against inequality in schools. Certain civil rights groups and parents say it helps protect areas where racial disparities linger.
“We’re talking about dismantling one of the most perverse and unacceptable forms of racial discrimination in our country’s history: the denial of Black students of an equal education on the basis of their skin color and the persistent segregation of Black students into inferior facilities,” said Scharfstein, who has worked on multiple lawsuits involving desegregation. “The school district should be held to this long-established standard that the Supreme Court has repeatedly reaffirmed that requires a showing that they have eliminated the vestiges of the segregated system.”
The DOJ, the Attorney General and the Concordia Parish School District did not respond with comment.
While Concordia Parish will no longer have to prove it desegregated its schools, which is called unitary status, many schools in the past have.
“Many school districts have achieved unitary status over the last many decades — and even recently — by taking the practicable steps. It’s a problem that the Constitution requires be remedied,” Scharfstein said. There were steps that the school board understood it could take here and simply refused to do.”
Proving ‘unitary status’
In school desegregation cases, the burden of proof falls on the school district to show it is no longer segregated.
These orders are meant to be temporary, though many persist for decades. The monitoring can be dropped if the school can show the court it’s gotten rid of segregation. If it is formally declared “unitary,” then the oversight order would be dropped. But that goal can remain elusive, as many towns still have racial imbalances.
The Supreme Court identified six areas that must be free from segregation: student assignment. faculty, staffing, transportation, extracurricular activities, trainings and outreach.
“Courts may also consider other indicia, such as ‘quality of education’ and discipline, as important factors for determining whether a district has fulfilled its desegregation obligations,” a draft consent order for the Concordia Parish case in 2024 stated.
When Concordia Parish, the DOJ, and a charter school system, Delta Charter Group, moved to dismiss the case last year, the district judge didn’t immediately grant it. In November 2025, the court said it needed more research and evidence to be presented.
“Normally, courts require, as the district court did here, school districts to make a three-part showing,” Scharfstein said. “First, that they’ve complied with all of the court’s orders in the case. Second, that the district has eliminated the vestiges of the segregated school system to the extent practicable. And third, that they demonstrated to the public and to Black families and students a good faith commitment to ensuring that Black students’ constitutional rights to an equal education are realized.”
Instead, the district appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. They argued that federal oversight had outlived its purpose. They also said that all parties wanted to dismiss the case, making federal oversight unnecessary. This time, the court sided with them.
“Few federal cases reach their seventh decade. This one did,” the ruling stated. It also examined whether a lower district court could continue to adjudicate a case after all of the remaining parties had motioned to dismiss.
“It may not,” the appeals court ruled. “Once the stipulation was filed, the case was over—and nothing the district court did afterward could change that.”
“The district court must now vacate its previous order, and the Louisiana school district is no longer subject to federal court supervision of its desegregation efforts,” Ben Golin wrote for Jurist News. “Tuesday’s ruling gives the US Justice Department a template for closing out other long-running desegregation cases and follows similar recent court holdings.”
“The district court was requiring the school district to make that required showing,” Scharfstein said. “On procedural grounds, the Fifth Circuit essentially waived that requirement for Concordia Parish. It’s really an injustice. The reality is that in Concordia Parish, the vestiges of segregation are very present.”
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
