Long-suffering families in Concordia Parish and its school district finally might get some relief from once necessary but now burdensome and needless regulation over details about how parish public education operates.

For years, district administrators have tried to exit the school system from court supervision over a desegregation consent decree now six decades old. In these instances when plaintiffs–almost always joined at some point by the U.S. Department of Justice–sue to stop a state and/or local district from engaging in an illegal practice, often the defendants enter into an agreement to take remedial action that corrects the discrimination. This all playing out could take many years, even decades, so the presiding judge and then any successors monitor progress.

Concordia officials implemented a series of reforms long ago agreed upon by the plaintiffs and the court and, with the exception of the opening of a charter school last decade that had to be fit into the decree, for about 45 years little has changed in terms of carrying out agreed-upon actions. As with many of the ten Louisiana districts at present under decrees, this has devolved into an annual exercise of status reports with only incremental statistical changes without the need of any practice alterations, wasting enormous taxpayer resources to continue compiling and reporting with no actual need present.

In 2024, the district wanted to end the decree, to which Western Judicial District Judge Dee Drell, who had taken over the case the previous decade after decades of dormancy, seemed amenable. However, DOJ, under the Democrat Pres. Joe Biden Administration and beholden to special interests wishing to see the case drag on, stubbornly refused to allow this without qualification and said it would do so only under conditions that would inject the court into reassigning attendance zones with the practical impact of having families in Vidalia and Ferriday swap their children between each city’s schools. Wisely, after hundreds of parents spoke or signed petitions against that, the Concordia Parish School Board rejected the idea in the waning days of the Biden Administration.

In came the Republican Pres. Donald Trump Administration, which took a more facilitating attitude towards parents and administrators. It dropped DOJ objections and GOP new Louisiana Atty. Gen. Liz Murrill helped the School Board bring the case for closure. But late last year Drell rejected a summary dismissal, saying precedent argued that a trial would have to be held for demonstrating maximal compliance.

However, that went against the grain of the dismissal of a decree in Plaquemines Parish, which had occurred this past summer. That became reinforced when last week something similar happened with DeSoto Parish schools, which is in the Western District of Louisiana.

Murrill and the Board have appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that the era of rampant, government-sponsored discrimination ended decades ago and that, in the absence of the presence of or recent admission of a discriminatory practice, districts should not have to go through a trial for release when they have years of voluminous reports serving as adequate demonstrations of compliance. It is pursuing the same with a case in St. Mary Parish.

This approach does not give local, state, or federal government entities a blank check to dispense with court decrees. In St. Martin Parish, the Fifth Circuit made clear that no shortcuts were permitted and that the decree had to remain in effect because, only a few years earlier, the school district had acknowledged ongoing discriminatory practices that required new remedies and had then undertaken changes in response.

Yet in basically open-and-shut cases like Concordia’s, the courts shouldn’t require lengthy and resource-intensive trials to end a decree. A supervising judge should have the option to end it by request on his own, and hopefully the Fifth Circuit will affirm that in this case.