A court decision from May 11, 2009 in the Augustin v. Enlarged City School District of Newburgh case is available via Google Scholar at this link. Judge Connor granted the Newburgh School District's motion for summary judgement on all issues except for one, a federal claim of employment descrimination. The case was subsequently settled.

The first half of the decision contains much information about the procedures followed (or not followed) by the Newburgh School District when dealing with this difficult situation. Some interesting background information is presented. For example around page 428 there is a succinct explanation of the tenure recommendation process:

Pursuant to the recommendation process in the District, Human Resources makes a recommendation about whether a teacher should be granted tenure or terminated to the Superintendent of Schools ("Superintendent"), who usually relies upon that recommendation in making her own recommendation to the District's Board of Education ("Board") without performing any independent investigation. If a teacher requests the reasons for an adverse recommendation by the Superintendent, Human Resources provides the Superintendent with those reasons and drafts the Superintendent's response to the teacher, which response the Superintendent is required to provide, pursuant to the Education Law. This correspondence and any response by the teacher are provided to the Board for its consideration in voting on whether or not to adopt the Superintendent's recommendation.

One (contended by the complainant) fact recorded by the judge is incredible--that a substitute teacher about whom HR received many complaints and who teachers requested not be assigned to their classes was hired as a full time teacher. If Augustine was hired full time in January of 2003, Nick Johns would have been Superintendent at the time. He resigned as Superintendent in February 2004.

In any event, there was a special meeting of the Board of Education on May 27, 2009 at which, according to the official meeting minutes, this resolution was unanimously approved:

BE IT RESOLVED, that the Board hereby consents to the settlement of the litigation, Docket No. 07 CIV 5790 (WCC), venued in the U.S. District Court for the Southern Disctrict of New York, upon such terms presented at this meeting and recommended by the insurance counsel.

The Times Herald-Record published an article a week or so ago which speculated that a recent Supreme Court decision prohibiting the use of race as a criteria for public school assignment could have an impact on the Newburgh school district. There was some interesting commentary about the article in the Record's online discussion forum.

In the Record article Paul Brooks writes "In the recent decision, the majority Supreme Court justices frowned on racial balancing," which dilutes the venom of the language used by the judges. Scalia and Alito joined Roberts' opinion, which called racial balancing "patently unconstitutional" (by quoting the 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger). Kennedy wrote a separate concurring opinion but cautioned "The plurality opinion is too dismissive of the legitimate interest government has in ensuring all people have equal opportunity regardless of their race."

It's easy to see how school districts would have gotten the idea that racial balancing would be OK. In his dissent, Breyer points out that in a previous decision the court had said:

"School authorities are traditionally charged with broad power to formulate and implement educational policy and might well conclude, for example, that in order to prepare students to live in a pluralistic society each school should have a prescribed ratio of Negro to white students reflecting the proportion for the district as a whole. To do this as an educational policy is within the broad discretionary powers of school authorities." Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Bd. of Ed., 402 U. S. 1, 16 (1971)

In the majority opinion Roberts explains that this prior statement is not something the current court needs to pay attention to.

This would make terrific material for a Social Studies class -- assuming that actual, real-life events which affect the lives of students are permitted in the curriculum.