FLORENCE, SC (WBTW) – The Florence School District One Board met on Thursday, and discussed dismissing a desegregation consent order.

The consent order was issued by the United States Department of Justice in 1970.

The school district’s attorney presented a motion to dismiss the 48-year-old order during the meeting.

School Board Chair, Barry Townsend, said the board will need to vote on the motion to dismiss the order. 

“If that [motion] is approved, he’ll [the attorney] submit that motion to the U.S. Justice Department, they’ll take it into advisement, and determine how, next, to move,” Townsend explained. “They can just accept it, and dismiss the order. They could decide that we need to have some sort of trial, at that point, the ball’s in their court.”
 

News13 was at the public forum last fall when the Department of Justice spoke with the community, and district staff about dismissing the consent order.

 
“Last year the Justice Department came, and did an investigation in the fall to determine the status of the district,” said Townsend. “And they have suggested that they would entertain a motion to dismiss the order.”
 
Community activist, Charles Foxe, spoke to the Florence One board during the public participation portion of the meeting about the consent order.
 
“We just wanted to remind them in case they are able to prevail, and get unitary status, that they should not just say ‘okay, we no longer have any obligation to continue to pursue desegregation’,” said Foxe.
 
Foxe said the school he is most concerned about desegregating is North Vista Elementary School.
 
“We’re concerned still that North Vista is almost 100 percent black,” Foxe told News13. “We just wanted to encourage them to try and desegregate that school because it would be a shame to leave, in this day and age, a school that’s segregated.”
 

Townsend said the last item of the consent order, which was added in 1995, is for the district to report any changes, re-districting, or construction within the school district to the Justice Department.

“If we were building a new school, we had to submit that for approval to Justice Department,” he said. “And they had 90 days to review that. In all of these years we’ve submitted, I don’t know how many documents, and how many requests. The Justice Department has never once come back with an issue with anything we’ve done.”

The school board chairman said some schools in the district have been difficult to desegregate.

“We’ve got some schools, because of their location in areas that are historically African-American, there’s no way to actually desegregate those schools without doing artificial measures [like] busing kids in from well outside of the area,” he explained after the meeting. “One of the things the Justice Department did was they looked at some of those schools. North Vista is the one that’s brought up most often. They [the Justice Department] looked at it, and said there was no real remedy to desegregate the school.”

Townsend said the board will vote on the motion to dismiss the consent order at its August meeting.