Court hears arguments in Cancer Alley school desegregation case
28th October 2024 · 0 Comments
By Safura Syed
Contributing Writer
(Veritenews.org) – A federal district court in New Orleans heard arguments on Tuesday (Oct. 22) in an ongoing lawsuit against the St. John the Baptist Parish School Board that says the district discriminates against Black students and puts their health at risk by bussing them to school in a heavily polluted area.
The case centers on Fifth Ward Elementary School in Reserve, which sits 500 yards from a chemical plant with emissions that pose a likely cancer threat. Parents are asking the court to immediately close the school and relocate Fifth Ward’s 338 students to LaPlace Elementary School, about a 10-minute drive away.
Fifth Ward Elementary School is located just 500 yards from the Denka Performance Elastomer facility, which produces synthetic rubber and chloroprene, a likely human carcinogen. The area where the school is located is in the 99th percentile nationally in terms of environmental burden created by toxic chemicals being released in the air, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s EJ Screen. And researchers from Louisiana State University said in a 2022 report that students at Fifth Ward face “unacceptably high cancer risks” after measuring chloroprene levels that were between four to 2120 times higher than the EPA’s recommendations near school grounds.
Nearly half of the students attending Fifth Ward live closer to LaPlace Elementary, lead attorney for the plaintiffs Victor Jones said.
During the hearing, attorneys representing St. John the Baptist Parish School Board said present members of the district’s strategic planning committee unanimously voted to relocate Fifth Ward. School board members will vote on relocation plans during their meeting on Nov. 7.
Attorneys representing the school board said they couldn’t comment on pending litigation.
Judge Jay C. Zainey, who heard the case, said that environmental issues facing Fifth Ward Elementary are clear and swift action should be taken for the children’s sake. But he also said the question of whether the parents have the standing to ask the court to close the school and if the court had the authority to do so was up for argument. And before the court can rule on whether or not relocate students, it must first decide if the parents have valid standing.
“I don’t think anyone can blind themselves to the fact that there is a problem down there,” Zainey said.
Parents at Fifth Ward say that the inferior environmental facilities at the school are a remnant of segregation. They are represented by attorneys from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Jones, said the school district disproportionately assigns Black students to a school outside of their neighborhood and closer to the Denka plant, an area he called a “cancer pit.”
“The white students who are in St. John the Baptist Parish, they are zoned into schools that are in their neighborhoods and that are located away from the Denka plant,” Jones told Verite News before the hearing. “Those Black students, however, do not have that same luxury, right?”
Verite News reached out to members of the school board for comment, but they didn’t immediately respond prior to publication.
Jones said members of the community have been trying to close the school for almost a decade.
State Rep. Sylvia Taylor, D-La-Place, said she attended the hearing because she is concerned about the children attending Fifth Ward, and the board’s lack of movement to relocate them.
“Every opportunity they get to move them out of harm’s way, they’re not doing it,” Taylor said.
The school board has been debating whether or not to relocate and brought up four different relocation plans in an April 2024 meeting, according to documents obtained by the Legal Defense Fund and filed with the court.
St John the Baptist Parish is located in Cancer Alley, an industrial stretch between New Orleans and Baton Rouge with extremely high cancer risks compared to the rest of the state due to air pollution from nearby petrochemical facilities, impacts that disproportionately affect Black residents like those attending Fifth Ward Elementary, according to the EPA.
“There’s a sense of urgency by the Black community of St. John the Baptist Parish, understandably, to want to make sure that children are in healthy and safe spaces while attending school,” Jones said.
This article originally published in the October 28, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
