Jackson Free Press

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A lawyer says a Mississippi Delta school district has agreed to a settlement in a long-running desegregation lawsuit.

Lawyer Jamie Jacks says the agreement was announced Monday evening at a Cleveland school board meeting. The 3,500-student district had originally sought to maintain historically black and white high schools, but a federal judge agreed with the U.S. Justice Department that such a plan maintained illegal vestiges of segregation.

Under the agreement, the district will agree to one high school on the campus of historically white Cleveland High School and Margaret Green Junior High School and one school for seventh and eighth graders at the site of historically black East Side High School. Sixth graders, most of whom now attend Margaret Green or a separate middle school, will now remain at elementary schools.