Judge rules state must pay DeKalb County $105 million

ATLANTA - A Superior Court judge has ruled that the state must pay DeKalb County schools about $105 million to help pay for 24 years of busing students to schools outside their neighborhoods in a desegregation plan. <br> <br> Judge Bensonetta Tipton Lane of Atlanta said the state ``wrongfully withheld&#39;&#39; the transportation costs, and that it should be paying a share no matter what school a child attends. <br> <br> Currently, the state only provides funding for students who go to the schools in their home districts. <br> <br> Lane&#39;s ruling Tuesday, which was announced Thursday by DeKalb school officials, ordered the state to pay $68 million from the 1977-78 through 2000-01 fiscal years, plus $36.5 million in interest. She also awarded DeKalb $13,055 per day for the last 14 months, about another $1 million. <br> <br> A payment of $105 million would amount to almost 60 percent of the $175 million a year the state spends on school transportation. <br> <br> ``I am as sure as I can be that an order of this magnitude will be appealed,&#39;&#39; said Daryl Robinson, a deputy state attorney general. <br> <br> DeKalb County leads the state in providing students with optional programs, many of which grew out of efforts to desegregate. Several other Georgia school districts have ``majority-to-minority&#39;&#39; busing plans, which allow black students to transfer from majority-black schools to those where they are in the minority. <br> <br> ``I think that other school districts that have similar transportation arrangements would probably have a claim, too, and there are several in the state,&#39;&#39; said Al Lindseth, a lawyer from the firm that represented DeKalb schools. <br> <br> The suburban Atlanta county spends about $5.40 per day per student to bus about 6,000 students to campuses outside their attendance zones. The other 72,000 students riding buses to schools closer to home cost about 97 cents per day, partly funded by the state, said Dannie Reed, who oversees the system&#39;s transportation department. <br> <br> DeKalb won the case in federal court in 1994, but that decision was overturned by an appeals court, which said it was a state issue. <br> <br> The county was released from court supervision of its desegregation plan in 1996. The school board voted in 1999 to phase out the ``majority-to-minority&#39;&#39; program. More than 2,000 grandfathered students in upper high school and elementary grades are still bused across the county under that program.