ST. LOUIS (AP) - The federal trial is over in a lawsuit alleging racial bias in how school board members are elected in a district that includes Ferguson, but a ruling is still months away.
The American Civil Liberties Union's lawsuit alleges that the Ferguson-Florissant School District's practice of selecting board members at-large makes it more difficult for black candidates to win and violates the Voting Rights Act.
District attorney Cindy Ormsby disagreed, telling the court that the district favors at-large elections as the best way to achieve proportional representation for blacks.
The trial concluded Tuesday. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch (http://bit.ly/1T4oyEg) reports that U.S. District Judge Rodney Sippel gave both sides until April 8 to file briefs and proposals on how he should rule. They have until April 22 to respond to those filings.
The suit was filed in December 2014, just months after 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was black and unarmed, was fatally shot during a street confrontation with white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. A St. Louis County grand jury declined to charge Wilson, who resigned in November 2014.
Brown's death led to several protests, was a catalyst in the national Black Lives Matter movement and prompted a federal investigation into the city's police department and municipal court. A U.S. Department of Justice's report on Ferguson, released in March, led to the resignations of Ferguson's city manager, police chief and municipal judge, and resulted in several police and court reforms.
The Ferguson-Florissant School District serves about 12,000 students in parts of 11 municipalities. While the residents of the district are nearly evenly split between black and white, 77 percent of students are black, in part because many white parents send their kids to private and parochial schools.
Five of the district's seven board members are white.