NJ school segregation plaintiffs seek choice
By: Mary Ann Koruth
NorthJersey.com
USA Today Network - New Jersey
..... Throwing out the home rule laws that allow children to attend public schools in their ZIP code is not the intent of a closely watched New Jersey school segregation lawsuit, a lead attorney for the plaintiffs has said.
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The 2018 lawsuit Latino Action Network v. State, field by a coalition of advocates, alleged that New Jersey's public schools are segregated, resulting in disproportionate impacts on Black and Latino students in low-income areas that have low Asian and White subpopulations.
..... At the core of the lawsuit is its challenge to the state's residency statute, which assigns students to schools based on the municipality they reside in.
..... The Plaintiffs want to make it easier for children to attend schools outside htier district and expand their educational options by "relaxing" the residency statute, said attorney Lawrence Lustberg at Newark-based law firm Gibbons P.C.
..... Attorneys for the plaintiffs asked an appellate court to issue a ruling in their favor in April, [2025] instead of having a long trial. The plaintiffs include families, two school districts, the Latino Action Network, the NAACP and the Urban League of Essex County.
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The Murphy administration moved to block the motion last week. [06/03/2025]
..... "We have proposed, in our complaint, a series of reforms that could reduce segregation without necessitating the wholesale repeal of the residency statue," Lustberg told NorthJersey.com .
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"What is an expansion of inter-district choice, magnet schools, which will attract students from across municipal liners more open admission to vocational schools, an increase in regional school districts and other ideas that will require relaxing but not necessarily entirely repealing the residency statue," he said.
..... "Our hope is that once there is a judgment, the Legislature will consider these and perhaps other ideas, in an effort to desegregate our schools, increase parental choice and enhance school quality - all things that everyone wants," Lustberg said.
..... The now seven-year-old case is set to be litigated after efforts to come to a count-mediated agreement between the two parties failed.
..... Mediation discussions went on for more than a year with several deadline extensions. when the state and plaintiffs could not come to an agreement after confidential court-supervised mediation, the case moved to trial.
..... Superior Court Judge Robert Lougy ruled in October 2023 that the state's school are indeed segregated by race, and that the state has failed to remedy this, but he did not issue an order or rule that the stat4e had violated students' constitutional rights. The plaintiffs requested that the appeals court find the state liable for the unofficial or "de facto" segregation that exists in schools, especially in New Jersey
where wealthy districts border impoverished ones, resulting in stark disparities in the outcomes of children attending neighboring schools.
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The trial court's findings were ripe for a ruling - and the courts had stopped short of issuing one, the plaintiffs said.
..... "An appeal from the court's ruling on liability is appropriate," Lustberg said. "Our argument, to which the state was responding, is that the trial judge found all of the relevant facts in our favor, but somehow did not grant us judgment on liability."
..... In their request for an appellate ruling, the plaintiffs argued that the trial court had made erroneous decisions, said the plaintiffs, represented by Lustberg, and attorneys from Pashman Stein Walder Hayden, P.C. and school-funding watchdog the Education Law Center.
..... One error, they said, was the court not issuing a ruling because "no practical solution: existed to solve the problem of unofficial segregation in schools. this was a "premature, irrelevant" conclusion from the courts, and solution were feasible, the plaintiffs said.
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The state represented by attorney General Matthew Platkin's office, did not comment, other than providing a copy of its brief. No "grave harm" could come from the courts not providing a ruling immediately, said the state in its brief blocking the plaintiff's motion for a ruling form the appellate branch. Remedy and liability were interlinked in this situation, it wrote, such that finding the state liable would mean having to provide a solution.
..... Lustberg said the state was suing delay tactics.
..... "The stat4e has sought to delay nay disposition of this matter ... and now, an attempt to prevent a decision by New Jersey's appellate courts," Lustberg said.
..... The governor and attorney general are preserving a status quo, he said, resulting "in another generation of New Jersey students consigned to be educated in segregated public schools."