KVIG Informative

Las Vegas spent parts of two decades fighting in federal court over a basic question: whether children could be assigned to schools strictly by neighborhood when the neighborhoods themselves were segregated by design. The ruling that resulted upended Clark County’s elementary schools for twenty years — and the neighborhood-based system that returned after it expired is close to how the district still assigns most students today.

In May 1968, Herbert E. Kelly Sr. and other Black parents filed a class-action lawsuit against the Clark County School District, alleging the district had forced their children into segregated schools on the city’s West Side, according to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ 1972 opinion in the case, Kelly v. Guinn, 456 F.2d 100. By 1968, Black student enrollment exceeded 97 percent in each of six West Las Vegas elementary schools, and the district had assigned 83 of its 102 Black teachers to those same six schools, the opinion states.

The district’s own construction record undercut its defense. Clark County School District built new elementary schools inside the Black residential area between 1956 and 1966 even as it used busing to prevent segregation at the secondary level, according to the same opinion. Over that period the district closed two majority-white schools on the edges of the growing Black neighborhood and built their replacements farther away in white areas, the court found.

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A plan that ran the busing backward

The case took its final name from a change in Nevada’s schools leadership. Originally filed as Kelly v. Mason against then-Superintendent James Mason, the suit was refiled as Kelly v. Guinn once Kenny Guinn succeeded him as superintendent, according to a digital exhibit on the case published by UNLV Libraries Special Collections. An earlier, voluntary integration effort had already failed by the numbers: roughly 1,254 Black students volunteered to transfer into other district schools, but only 321 white students enrolled in West Las Vegas schools in return, the exhibit states.

The Sixth Grade Center Plan that followed inverted the usual geography of desegregation busing. Every sixth-grader in the district, regardless of neighborhood, was required to attend one year of school inside the historically Black West Las Vegas elementary schools, which were converted into sixth-grade centers; Black students in every other grade were bused to schools elsewhere in the valley. A federal district court ordered the plan, and the Ninth Circuit affirmed it on Feb. 22, 1972, clearing Clark County School District to begin the plan with the 1972-73 school year, according to the court’s opinion and the UNLV Libraries exhibit.

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The plan drew organized resistance from the moment it began. A “Bus-Out” boycott kept 15,517 Clark County students home from school in protest of the new busing requirement, according to the UNLV Libraries exhibit — a large enough share of district enrollment to make the protest impossible to ignore.

Twenty years later, the opposition ran in the opposite direction. When the Sixth Grade Center Plan ended with the 1992-93 school year and Clark County School District returned to neighborhood-based attendance, more than 300 Black families kept their children home through the district’s official enrollment count date in protest of losing the integration model, according to the same UNLV Libraries exhibit. Clark County School District has assigned most students by neighborhood attendance zone ever since — the same basic framework Black parents sued to change in 1968, and that white parents once boycotted a court order to preserve.