high school students in January and desegregation of senior high schools in September of the
following year.196 After remand from the court of appeals, the district court ultimately ordered
the implementation of a desegregation plan for all but the twelfth grade in January. The new plan
increased the percentage of children eligible for busing from 48% to 56%. Its major impact was
on elementary school children where the percentage of children eligible for bus transportation
increased 11%. Under the plan, only two schools would be more than 50% black. The longest
bus trip was 35 minutes and the mean average for bus transportation was 14 minutes.197

Nearly a decade after the decision in Prince George's County, the plaintiffs returned to
federal district court. The suit attacked the conduct of the school system in relation to faculty
hiring, faculty assignments, special education for the handicapped and for talented and gifted
students, student discipline, student classroom assignments and student assignment to schools.
The Court denied plaintiffs' claims with respect to all challenges except student assignment to
schools. Plaintiffs demonstrated that programs of special education for the handicapped for
mental rather than physical handicaps contained a disproportionately large percentage of black
students, that programs for talented and gifted contained a disproportionately large percentage of
white students, and that student discipline affected a disproportionately large percentage of black
students. The court considered the statistics, but found that the plaintiffs failed to prove any
improper motivation and pointed to efforts within the school system to expand the opportunities
for black students to avail themselves of programs for the talented and gifted. Defendants
claimed that racial imbalances in student assignments were a product of residential movement
and not of deliberate segregation, and that the school system had ceased being dual after the
court's initial order in 1973. The district court concluded, however, that a unitary system had
never been achieved. Portions of Judge Kaufman's opinion follow:

The racial composition of Prince George's County has changed dramatically since
this court's 1973 desegregation decree. There was a sharp acceleration in black
population growth in the decade of the 1970's, involving the addition of 155,000
black citizens and changing the black population percentage from 14% in 1970 to
37.3% in 1980. . . . During the 1970's, the white population declined. Prince
George's County lost 170,000 white residents between 1970 and 1980, accounting
for an overall slowing of population growth. In 1980, the percentage of black
students in the county's schools was 49.9%, 12.6% above the countywide black
population percentage of 37.3%. Mr. Grier [the defendant's expert witness on
demography] testified that the disproportionately high number of minority
children in the schools is due to the younger age of the new black parents of the
county who have more school age children on the average than the white
residents; to the incentive for white homeowners to sell their older existing houses
to the incoming black families and to move to more expensive homes, within and
without Prince George's County; and to a loss of whites from the schools because
of the pendency of Vaughns in 1972 and this court's 1973 decree (sometimes
called "white flight").

The growth in black population as well as the decline in white population

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