The South Bend schools integrated in 1981 under the terms of the consent decree, a legal agreement that was reached in federal court and remains in effect today. The agreement requires that each school enroll a percentage of black students that is within 15 percentage points of the total percentage of black students in the school corporation.
The latest data, released in November 2017, show that Washington High School and five primary schools are out of compliance.
“It’s not the consent decree that’s the problem. It’s the interpretation,” said Oletha Jones, one of the CAFE organizers and education chair for the South Bend branch of the NAACP.
Neither she nor Albert advocates seeking to end the consent decree.