Orlando Sentinel Editorial: April 29, 2009

Orange County School District officials still can't seem to fathom - or appreciate - their stunning neglect of a federally ordered biracial committee that went AWOL without anyone seeming to notice.

But at this point, the blame game is secondary to more pressing issues.

For starters, the school district needs a complete accounting of the committee's activities over the years. Did it meet when it was supposed to? Were zoning and attendance issues decided without the committee's input? How many meetings were held without a quorum? How many times were School Board members assured that a valid recommendation existed, when it did not?

How can the board demand anything less when a Sentinel review of meeting minutes over the past five years showed that the committee had only two valid meetings during that time?

Meetings of that citizens committee - which was supposed to have five black and five white members- are an essential piece to make sure Orange County is complying with a federal desegregation order issued in 1964. That was followed by a 1970 order mandating a special biracial citizens group to monitor the district's progress.

The committee was also designed to allow community input into sensitive decisions like changing school boundary lines and closing schools.

But, to the shame of Orange County school officials, the community was misled when it recently was told the biracial committee had signed off on plans to close six elementary schools and convert two middle schools to kindergarten-through-eighth-grade campuses.

Only one committee member was at that "meeting."

Still, armed with that bogus recommendation, the School Board was ready to sign off on a plan to relocate about 7,000 students and create new attendance lines for 14 county middle schools.

Despite all of this, School Board attorney Frank Kruppenbacher said he expects the district to be in compliance with the desegregation order by the end of the year.

That seems mighty confident. For all the promises of better oversight, how can school officials not be bothered by the fact that the committee has been pretty much a joke for all these years? Do they really expect that the original plaintiffs in the desegregation lawsuit are going to be OK with that lack of proper review?

Mr. Kruppenbacher says "there's been no violation of the law," reasoning that the committee is more of an independent group. He insists the district remains on track toward complying with the federal order, though numerous independent desegregation attorneys beg to differ.

At the same time, Mr. Kruppenbacher is promising that the committee is going to be reconstituted properly and monitored more closely.

School officials can't have it both ways. The committee is either important, as they say it is now, or inconsequential, as evidenced by years of neglect.

Anybody who has a child in the Orange County School system should be worried, not just about whether the right decisions were made in the past, but by what this suggests about the school district's ability to operate efficiently and competently.

Making this right involves much more than appointing some new members and calling it a day.

The board needs to demand that administrators scrutinize all key decisions involving this biracial group.

That's going to demand a lot of homework and a lot of backtracking, but ignoring past failures isn't going to work.