Delta Charter v. Sch Bd Concordia Prsh, No. 23-30063 (5th Cir. 2023)
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This case involves Delta Charter Group, Inc. (Delta), a public charter school operating within Concordia Parish in Louisiana. The case has its roots in a 1965 lawsuit against the Concordia Parish School Board for operating segregated schools in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. The district court approved a desegregation plan, but the Board has yet to achieve unitary status, and Delta, which had intervened in the ongoing desegregation case, was required by a 2013 consent order to comply with the Board's desegregation decree. A second consent order in 2018 outlined a race-based enrollment process for Delta, giving the highest enrollment preference to black students.
Four years later, Delta moved to discontinue the race-based enrollment process, arguing that it was unconstitutional. The district court declined to modify the order under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(b)(5), which allows courts to modify or dissolve a consent decree if applying it prospectively is no longer equitable. Delta failed to show a significant change in factual conditions or in law that would justify modification. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed the judgment of the district court, stating that Delta had forfeited any argument that the district court had abused its discretion by failing to adequately brief the argument on appeal. The court did not offer any opinion on the underlying constitutional merits, as Delta had forfeited any available argument that the district court should have applied Rule 54(b) and that it had abused its discretion in denying relief under Rule 60(b)(5).
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