(The Center Square) –A federal appeals court ended decades of court oversight of Concordia Parish schools Tuesday, handing Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill another victory in her effort to close long-running school desegregation cases.
The Fifth Circuit ruled a federal district court could not continue supervising the school system after all remaining parties agreed to dismiss the case.
The decision did not find that Concordia Parish had fully eliminated the remaining effects of segregation; instead, it resolved a procedural question about whether the litigation could remain open once the parties sought dismissal.
The United States, the Concordia Parish School Board and Delta Charter Group were the remaining parties after the original 1965 plaintiffs were dismissed from the case in 2025. The three parties jointly filed a stipulation seeking to dismiss the case with prejudice.
That court refused to treat the filing as automatically ending the litigation and instead scheduled hearings to determine whether the school system had been truly desegregated. Now, this latest ruling from the higher court says the lower court never had the authority to proceed with those hearings.
“Once the stipulation was filed, the case was over — and nothing the district court did afterward could change that,” Judge Don Willett wrote for the Fifth Circuit majority.
“These decades-old consent decrees have long outlived their usefulness, and in this case, all parties agreed it should end,” Murrill said. “The good people of Concordia Parish elected their School Board to govern their schools — not unelected federal judges.”
Murrill said her office would continue working to end what she described as outdated federal oversight and return authority to local communities.
The decision marks the latest success for Murrill in dismantling longstanding federal court supervision of Louisiana school systems that were once legally segregated.
In April 2025, federal desegregation litigation involving the Plaquemines Parish School Board was dismissed. In January, a decades-old desegregation case involving the DeSoto Parish School Board was also dismissed.
Murrill’s office has additionally joined the U.S. Department of Justice and the Bossier Parish School Board in seeking to end federal oversight stemming from a desegregation case there.
