Court review of Calcasieu desegregation order takes school board by surprise
16th March 2026 · 0 Comments
By Natalie McLendon
Contributing Writer
(Special from The Current) – Retired Judge Ron Ware still remembers driving by Lake Charles High School’s campus with his sister Frances and his dad, admiring the stately oak trees framing its grounds.
“I’d like to go to that high school,” he remembers Frances saying, the picturesque campus a perfect fit for his older sister’s artistic sensibilities.
There was just one problem: It was the 1960s in Louisiana, and Lake Charles High, at the time, was an all-white school. When Ware’s father, an educator who would later on become a city council member, took Frances’ plight to the school board, he was told in no uncertain terms that a Black girl was not going to attend a white school, at least not as long as Superintendent G.W. Ford was in charge.
“Mr. Ford snapped at him and said, ‘Dennis, I’ll tell you what. Calcasieu Parish public schools will never be integrated as long as I’m superintendent,’” Ware recounts the interaction between his father and Ford. But Dennis Ware wasn’t deterred. “He was a track coach and very, very serious about our education,” his son remembers.
In 1964, Ware and his siblings were among the student plaintiffs in a federal case against the Lake Charles and Calcasieu Parish school boards, which led to a desegregation order by the federal government. For the decades to follow, school districts under such desegregation orders were required to submit progress reports to the courts to show their adherence to plans for integrating schools.
Now, more than 60 years later, a federal judge in Lake Charles is reviewing the local order and potentially considering its dismissal, in a development that has taken the Calcasieu Parish School Board by surprise. Many schools remain racially identifiable, despite the supposed integration achieved through that suit and years of federal oversight.
At a recent school board meeting, community members implored the board to resist any attempt to roll back federal desegregation oversight. Lake Charles resident Jacob Rafferty told the board that Conley vs. Lake Charles, the original suit, was about creating accountability for outcomes.
Rafferty said he had attended both majority white and majority Black schools growing up in Lake Charles.
“I want you to know you were wrong if you were thinking that this is a neutral policy decision,” Rafferty told the board. “This will create unequal outcomes, and the cost of that will be borne by our Black and brown students.”
Under the second administration of President Donald Trump, U.S. Department of Justice officials have set out to review and dismiss desegregation orders across the country, with orders in at least two Louisiana parishes, Plaquemines and De Soto, already lifted by the department. Lake Charles is only the latest on that list.
“Louisiana got its act together decades ago, and it is past time to acknowledge how far we have come,” Leo Terrell, senior counsel to the Civil Rights Division, said in a press release last year. “America is back, and this Department of Justice is making sure the Civil Rights Division is correcting wrongs from the past and working for all Americans.”
And while school officials in Plaquemines said they were relieved that the burden of compiling documents for review had been lifted, in Lake Charles, school board members say they were caught off guard by the review.
‘I wasn’t even aware that this was a thing’
There were areas [within the desegregation order] that were not followed, that have not been consistent,” says the Rev. Desmond Wallace, a school board member who represents Fairview and Kennedy elementary schools, whose student populations are majority Black and Hispanic. “For example, a biracial committee should have been in function, but it has not been for years.”
After desegregation orders were established throughout the 20th and into the 21st centuries – St. Martin Parish was placed under a new desegregation order in 2023 — schools became more diverse, with primarily Black and primarily white schools merging, and Black students being admitted to schools that were previously inaccessible to them.
Students like Ron Ware’s sister Frances, who, after being denied access the first time, was eventually allowed to attend Lake Charles High School as one of the school’s first Black students.
Roughly two decades later, in 1983, the school merged with the majority Black W.O. Boston High School. The high school closed in 2007, with the campus now serving as the headquarters of a district-wide virtual learning program.
Across Calcasieu Parish, schools remain largely segregated by race, in line with a nationwide trend of re-segregation after the height of the civil rights era.
That’s despite decades of federal oversight installed in pursuit of unitary status, the legal designation that a district is functionally integrated. Some Calcasieu school board members say it’s not totally clear whether the system has indeed met that standard.
“In some districts… maybe they have reached unitary status because they followed the guidelines, but it’s just not enough documentation for constituents and citizens to understand,” says Calcasieu Parish School Board member Glenda Gay, who was a student herself when the desegregation order was put in place.
For a school system to achieve unitary status, it must demonstrate that it has met the requirements set forth in a court desegregation order, at which point it is released from federal oversight.
“I really don’t know if the district has actually completed the requirements of the desegregation order,” says Gay, who represents two majority Black elementary schools. “There’s no paper trail that I’ve seen.”
Wallace puts it more pointedly. “No, I’m not in support of unitary status, as it is.”
Board member Phyllis Ayo, who represents a primarily white set of schools, says she’s open to whatever the outcome may be. “I personally am keeping a very open mind,” Ayo says. “I need to hear everyone’s opinion.”
While racial segregation largely persists on a school-by-school basis, many sub-districts within the Calcasieu Parish School Board are mixed. Board member Mary “Sister” Fontenot represents such a district, which covers Barbe Elementary, where 81 percent of students are Black, and T.S. Cooley, where the majority of students are white.
Fontenot says she didn’t know that there was a court case to begin with.
“I wasn’t even aware that this was a thing,” she said. “We were just kind of thrown into this. I had no idea what it was.”
For decades, school board administrators had been assigned to report to the Western District court on the school district’s progress, retired district administrator Ina Delahoussaye, who worked in the Calcasieu school system for 40 years, says.
Student and faculty assignments were reviewed to ensure racial balance, she notes. “They really tried to look at the ratio of cultural diversity and to match that with the distribution of positions,” Delahoussaye says.
According to Delahoussaye, school integration required adjustments beyond student placement, affecting transportation patterns and staffing structures across campuses.
Whether this was truly successful will now be up to the court to decide.
‘Green’ light
To determine whether oversight can be lifted, districts must meet specific legal standards, explains Janice Hebert, a former assistant U.S. attorney who worked on desegregation litigation in the Western District of Louisiana.
Known as “Green factors,” an examination of those standards includes assessing the composition of student bodies, faculty, staff, transportation, extracurricular activities and facilities, to determine whether schools have achieved desegregation through racial equality in those areas.
“What that means is, functionally, the court would say: Are you doing what we all agree a decent, desegregated school would be doing?” Hebert explains. In Green vs. School Board of New Kent County, the Supreme Court described the list of factors as flexible rather than exhaustive, affording judges discretion in evaluating whether districts have successfully eliminated the vestiges of segregation.
Federal District Judge James D. Cain has appointed former McNeese President Daryl Burkel as an expert to examine the Calcasieu Parish School Board’s financial status and student achievement information as part of the court’s evaluation.
The appointment of Burckel signals the court’s focus on the realities on the ground, rather than simply going along with what appears to be an unofficial Justice Department directive to get rid of desegregation orders, Hebert says.
“Judge Cain, because he’s a decent human being and a good lawyer, is saying, I’m not going to do that. He’s saying: I’m going to actually look at the Green factors and see if you’re in substantial compliance before I say you have unitary status and dismiss the case,” Hebert says.
Ron Ware, who previously served as the chief public defender for Calcasieu Parish, and later as a judge, says he has confidence in Burckel’s ability.
In 2004, Burckel co-authored a report examining funding disparities at the Calcasieu Parish Public Defender’s Office. The report found that the office was overburdened at the time and that additional funding, along with systemic reform, could bring it into compliance.
Burckel did not respond to The Current’s request for comment.
No changes were immediately ordered, and Superintendent Jason VanMetre has said the district will take no action affecting students while the federal court gathers information.
Built-in inequality
While there are no longer direct restrictions on race around school designations, the continued segregation of neighborhoods and wealth along racial lines contributes to a de-facto segregated school district, some argue.
“In Lake Charles, for instance, the property values in North Lake Charles, a predominantly Black area, the property values are not nearly as high as, let’s say, the Graywood subdivision, which is majority white,” explains retired Judge Gene Thibodeaux, who attended Washington High School, a segregated school for Black students, and worked on the original litigation prompting the local desegregation order in his first year out of law school.
“So there’s inequality of funding that has to be dealt with,” Thibodeaux says.
“If you had schools that were predominantly Black or predominantly white, they all should have the same educational opportunities,” says Craig Marks, a Lake Charles councilmember and first VP of the Lake Charles NAACP. “What is so bad about doing right?”
To remedy funding inequalities, Thibodeaux says the judge could order parishwide bonding to equalize financing across the parish rather than relying on the tax strength of individual areas.
During a recent status conference with Judge Cain, there did not appear to be representation for the original plaintiffs, a development Thibodeaux characterizes as “unusual.”
“I think it raised some concerns in the community, and it raised some concerns within the leadership of the NAACP,” Thibodeaux says.
With many of the original plaintiffs in desegregation cases dead or at an advanced age, and desegregation orders under the purview of the federal government, it would be the Justice Department’s role to serve as a stand-in.
“It’s the government coming in enforcing civil rights,” Hebert says. “And if there was nobody there on behalf of the government, it’s because the Trump administration is abandoning civil rights litigation.”
Klan country
The civil rights era may seem like a distant past, but for those who lived through it, the memories are still fresh.
Ware’s father’s civil rights work brought tension. They were harassed with hang-up calls. One night, when Ware was in the third or fourth grade, someone attempted to burn a cross in their yard.
“They had hinges on it where they would try to fold out the arms, and they had trouble getting it lit, and the dog startled them, and the whole thing just went awry,” Ware says.
Despite the clumsiness of the intimidation attempt, it was far from an isolated incident.
A 1973 newspaper article reported on the arrest of several local men in connection to the burning of a predominantly Black school and several Black families’ residences. Those charged, with the exception of a Texas police officer, identified themselves as former Ku Klux Klan members.
Ware says crosses were burned in front of a few other homes in the community, including that of Rickey Conley, the main plaintiff in the school board lawsuit. “It occurred in different locations, so it was coordinated,” Ware says.
When Ware’s father took him fishing near the old Calcasieu River Bridge going toward Moss Bluff, Ware still remembers seeing a big wooden sign proclaiming: “This is Klan country,” a sign also referenced in the 1973 news report.
Ware says his father would most likely be disappointed by the current moment.
“I think he would feel that we could do better, that the system could do better,” Ware says, adding that it didn’t seem like there was a serious effort to improve the quality of education for all students.
He worries younger generations may not understand what segregation was like.
“I was asked a question some time ago,” Ware says. “About what I thought was the most important thing: the right to vote or quality education. That’s like asking about the chicken and the egg.”
The Current, a nonprofit news organization serving Lafayette and South Louisiana.
This article originally published in the March 16, 2026 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
