After a yearlong battle in court, Chambers County Schools will proceed with consolidation and building changes.

U.S. District Court Judge Keith Watkins ruled Friday that the district may consolidate its two high schools – majority-Black LaFayette High and majority-white Valley High – into one, though LaFayette must remain open while a new school is built. The plan is part of an ongoing effort to relinquish court oversight of the rural, east Alabama district.

Chambers County is one of nearly 40 Alabama school systems that are still under active decades-old desegregation orders. Last fall, a court ruled that officials could close and merge several elementary schools, in an effort to cut costs and spread resources more evenly.

“Change is difficult,” Superintendent Casey Chambley said last year, when he first announced the plan. “But you’ve got to take that first step. And I think a lot of times when you take that first step, that’s the hardest. There are going to be moments ahead of us that are going to be difficult and we’re going to have to get through, but we can get through those.”

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The proposal, however, sparked pushback from members of the LaFayette community, where the district’s majority-Black high school is located. Many worried that the district didn’t have their best interests at heart – concerns that heightened as district officials announced the location of the new school.

“I believe that the community, the students, even myself – there’s this overarching belief that LaFayette isn’t getting a fair shake in this consolidation,” Kelsey Barnes, a local pastor, told AL.com this winter.

After receiving offers for land from both communities, officials said last fall that they would build a new school in Valley, a majority-white but diversifying area in the eastern part of the county.

In public hearings on the matter, LaFayette residents said the new school wouldn’t be a good location for their families. In January, during a weeklong federal trial, NAACP lawyers accused officials of using faulty data to make a decision that would further burden Black students and families.

District officials acknowledged that their plan was imperfect, but argued that the site they chose was the most cost-effective option.

“[The district] is faced with complying with Court Orders and with being able to finance and pay for the new school while sustaining the Board’s financing for operations,” school board attorney Robert Meadows wrote to the judge in May. “It is in a ‘tug of war’ with two different communities, and it must endeavor to provide their students with everything that they need as best they can.”

Now, months later, a federal judge is giving district officials what they asked for – mostly.

Construction may start on a new school in Valley immediately, Watkins said. But the current high schools must stay open in the meantime. A previous plan required LaFayette High School students to move into Valley High, while their high school was being repurposed into another facility.

Plans to move LaFayette students into Valley High School, Watkins said, would “create an undue burden on the black students” at LaFayette High. He instead ruled against closing the high school until a new building was completed.

“The history of this case, which started in its present form in 1970, and the orders entered over the ensuing fifty-two years,” he said in the ruling, “have been considered, along with extensive briefing and motion practice over the last three years.”

District officials and attorneys for the plaintiffs did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.

A final opinion with detailed instructions for progress reports to the courts will be forthcoming.