San Diego Parents Challenge
Busing of Their Children,
in Carlin v. Board of Education,
as Real Parties In Interest,
Entitled to Intervene

Author, as a Parent, Publishes Concerns About Busing

In the meantime the author, whose children had gone to San Diego schools, had been watching the hearings in Carlin v. Board of Education, San Diego Unified School District, in which a class of students and their parents (Carlin Plaintiffs) asserted the racial balancing of San Diego schools, “if necessary through court order.” The Carlin Plaintiffs, in hearings in early 1977, relied upon 1976 Crawford I, which went beyond federal rulings requiring a finding of de jure segregation, to hold that school boards had a duty to alleviate racial imbalance “regardless of cause.”

The Carlin attorneys disturbingly demanded that this expansion of judicial power (that is, ordering students bused on a racial basis to correct “de facto” segregation) be applied in San Diego. Their tone is reflected by the following excerpts from their argument reported in The San Diego Union on January 25, 1977:

(T)he “time for voluntary plans is over… they only postpone the inevitable ....” (counsel for Carlin Class)

(T)he court asked, “Do you think it is the duty of the district (to desegregate the schools) no matter what the price to individual children ... the law must march on?

“A difficult question, but yes, the law marches on ....” (counsel for Carlin Class)

To the author, that approach mirrored other desegregation decrees which, to echo Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, placed a burden upon innocent children and their parents who were not charged with any offending action. That was the burden — compelling children to leave their neighborhood and spend significant time each day being transported to a distant school — resisted fiercely elsewhere. Also, litigation history taught that those decrees had derived from stare decisis application of rulings in cases in which their individual interests had not been separately represented.

The author concluded there was a necessity for a fuller articulation of constitutional objections to forced busing on behalf of innocent persons subject to it. Weren't these innocent parents and their children subject to such busing the real parties in interest? Weren't they being shut out of individual representation in these desegregation actions directed toward
 

Carlin v. Board of Education, San Diego Unified School District,
San Diego Superior Court No. 303800 (1967-1998)
San Diego, California
 

Crawford I 

Crawford v. Board of Education, 17 Cal.3d 280 (1976)
[related to Bustop — Board of Ed., etc.]
Los Angeles, California
 

— Handbook: Challenge One, pages 23 - 31 —