26 Fair empl.prac.cas. 1649, 22 Empl. Prac. Dec. P 30,789 Leroy Zaslawsky v. Board of Education of the Los Angeles City Unified School District

The appellants, approximately 25,000 teachers employed by the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), brought this class action suit in the district court, alleging that the LAUSD violated their Fourteenth Amendment equal protection rights and other rights protected by federal law when it implemented, at the insistance of HEW and in the absence of a finding of de jure segregation, a faculty integration plan. The plan required that the makeup of racial and ethnic minority and non-minority teachers in the district as a whole be substantially reflected in the faculty composition at each school in the district. The plan provided for the involuntary reassignment of teachers as a means to achieve those goals. The district court held that the plan did not violate the appellants’ federal constitutional or statutory rights. We affirm.

FACTS

The LAUSD’s teaching force is made up of approximately thirty percent racial and ethnic minorities and seventy percent non-minorities. Prior to September of 1975, there was a substantial faculty racial imbalance in a vast majority of the LAUSD’s approximately 570 schools. At that time over seventy percent of the district’s schools had single-race…