Note: much of the language below is taken from the official court rulings and opinions of the several cases involved in the Brookins v. South Bend Community School Corporation (SBCSC) lawsuit. Copies of these opinions can be found in the collection in Box 01, Folder 3; Box 01, Folder 17; and Box 02, Folder 10.

In 1980, a group of mostly Black parents of children in the South Bend Community School Corporation (SBCSC) public school system in South Bend, Indiana, initiated a class action lawsuit against the SBCSC. Mary Louise Brookins stood as the representative for the group of parents, known as the Brookins class. The Brookins class was represented by lawyer David W. Albert, who did much of his work on the case on a pro bono basis. In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs, the Brookins class, alleged that the defendants–the SBCSC, its superintendent, and its Board of School Trustees–had engaged in various acts of discrimination with the intent and effect of segregating students and faculty on the basis of race in the South Bend, Indiana public school system. Because they argued that these actions by the SBCSC and its representatives violated the United States Constitution, the lawsuit against the SBCSC was officially filed by the United States Department of Justice. The complaint against the SBCSC was filed by the United States in February 1980.

In the complaint, an injunction was sought to prohibit the defendants from discriminating on the basis of race or color in the operation of schools within the South Bend Community School Corporation system, and requiring the defendants to develop and implement a desegregation plan to remove "all vestiges of prior discrimination."

The district court entered a consent decree settlement calling for the defendants to develop and implement a desegregation plan for student assignments by the beginning of the 1981-1982 school year. The crux of the plan was to provide that Black students in each school would be within 15% of the total percentage of Black students in the school system. The plan was also to ensure that student transportation or school closings would fall equitably on all racial groups.

In addition, faculty assignments were to be adjusted by the beginning of the 1980-1981 school year so that the faculty of each school would reflect the racial composition, teaching experience, and teaching disciplines of the faculty as a whole.

Under the consent decree, the school board developed a new faculty assignment plan, which went into effect at the beginning of the 1980-1981 school year. In addition, the school board enlisted community support to develop a desegregation plan for student assignments.

To develop the new student assignment plan, a Community Advisory Committee (CAC) was formed (see committee files in the SBCSC: Community Advisory Committee series of this collection). Over 300 citizens, many of them residents of Clay Township, volunteered to serve on subcommittees. Subcommittees met over 150 times between February and December 1980, and nearly 200 people actively participated in the meetings. All CAC meetings were open to the public and were given extensive newspaper publicity. The subcommittees' recommendations were subsequently reported to the school board by the Community Advisory Committee.

A recommended desegregation plan was decided upon in late November. On December 17, 1980, the precise details of the proposed plan were made available to the public and the media in printed form and were aired on the local public television station. During the months of December 1980 to February 1981, the school board held a dozen special meetings devoted solely to the plan (see meeting minutes in the SBCSC: Board of Trustees series of this collection). The meetings were heavily publicized in school newsletters as well as in the local news media, and all citizens were invited to speak at the meetings and were also encouraged to submit written comments. Throughout this process, the school board made it known to the public that it was operating on a timetable which required implementation of a desegregation plan by the beginning of the 1981-1982 school year.

At the conclusion of these proceedings, during a meeting on February 26-27, 1981, the Board of School Trustees passed a resolution adopting a desegregation plan for student assignments.

On February 26, 1981, the day before the parties first submitted the proposed consent decree incorporating the desegregation plan to the district court, Clay Quality Education II, Inc. sought to intervene in the case as a defendant. Clay Quality Education II was an Indiana not-for-profit corporation whose members were parents of students in Clay High School and its feeder schools. If the Clay parent group's intervention were granted, it planned to request the district court to vacate the first consent decree because there was no finding by the court or admission by the defendants of a constitutional violation. The Clay parent group also stated that it would also answer the Government's complaint by denying any intentional racial discrimination and would file a cross-claim contending that defendants' "dismantling of the neighborhood school system deprived students and their parents of liberty and property without due process of law." The Clay parent group also contended that the district court had no subject matter jurisdiction.

Subsequently, four days after the desegregation plan was submitted to the district court, the South Bend Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) also sought to intervene in the case, but as a plaintiff. It sought to challenge the desegregation plan on behalf of Black children in the school district and their parents. It also sought to challenge the transfer of students in North Liberty Township, an all-white area, from the South Bend school system to an adjoining all-white school system. This transfer had been approved by the school board after the entry of the initial consent decree in 1980.

In a hearing on the motions to intervene on March 5, 1981, the United States Government and defendants opposed intervention by Clay Quality Education II and the NAACP.

The Clay parent group's motion to intervene was opposed because it was argued that the group failed to demonstrate that the school board was inadequately representing its interests. In response to the Clay parent group's argument that it should be permitted to intervene because defendants too eagerly adopted the desegregation plan, the court pointed out that the Indiana legislature had required the defendant Board of Trustees to adopt a plan of desegregation surpassing minimal constitutional standards by requiring integration to the fullest extent "reasonable, feasible and practical." The Clay parent group's contention that it wanted to prevent the defendants from "dismantling the neighborhood school system" was rejected because there was no constitutional or statutory right to attend a neighborhood school. Therefore, Clay Quality Education II's motion to intervene was denied.

The defendants opposed the NAACP's intervention on the grounds that it was adequately represented by the Attorney General of the United States. The defendants argued that the Black students and parents in the school district that the NAACP sought to represent were already represented by the Government under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974. The district judge found that the NAACP failed to show inadequacy of representation by the Justice Department and that there was no showing of collusion between the parties. He noted that the NAACP admitted that it and the Government had a similar goal, namely "the system-wide desegregation of students and staff as called for in the consent decree," and that the NAACP had not shown that the Attorney General failed to fulfill his duty. It was found that the disagreement was not about the goal, but about the road map used to achieve that goal. The NAACP had not argued that the proposed desegregation plan was unconstitutional, but instead suggested improvements to the plan. Because the district court held that the NAACP could not prove that there as an inadequacy of representation, its motion to intervene was denied.

Although Clay Quality Education II and the NAACP were not allowed to intervene, their objections to the proposed consent decree led the parties to the suit—the Department of Justice and the South Bend school board—to renegotiate the terms of the consent decree. The renegotiated consent decree was submitted on April 3, 1981, and approved by the district court on April 17, 1981.

Subsequently, on September 8, 1981, a class action lawsuit was filed by the Brookins class against the SBCSC alleging that the desegregation plan approved by the Court on April 17, 1981 violated the Constitution of the United States and the laws of the State of Indiana. The Brookins class consented to have this independent lawsuit against the school district treated as a motion to intervene in the previous United States v. SBCSC lawsuit.

The Brookins class, represented by David Albert, argued that the "Multi-Aged-Continuous-Progress-Option" model that the SBCSC had undertaken involved closing racially integrated, racially balanced, and easy-to-integrate schools in the system. Schools that were proposed for closure included Maple Lane Elementary School, Edison Middle School, Perley Elementary School, Brown Middle School, Madison Elementary School, Oliver School, Lincoln Elementary School, Navarre Middle School, Lafayette Elementary School, and Coquillard Elementary School.

The Brookins class argued that this fundamentally segregationist approach attacked racially integrated education, destabilized racially integrated housing patterns, and geographically isolated racially identifiable clusters of schools, establishing a de facto dual school system between white and Black students. They argued that there was an attempt to cover up the symptoms of this plan through additional, laborious and cosmetic busing routes.

On September 22, 1981, the Brookins' application for intervention was denied by the district court. The reasons given for the denial were twofold.

First, the court referred to their decision in the NAACP's motion to intervene in the previous case, in which they pointed to Rule 24(a)(2) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which creates a right to intervene if the interest of the would-be intervenor is not adequately represented by an existing party. Since it was found that both the NAACP and the Department of Justice wanted the same thing—desegregation of the South Bend public schools—the Department of Justice had been presumed to be an adequate representative of the NAACP's interest. In this case, it was found that the Brookins class had the same interest as the NAACP and the Department of Justice—desegregating the South Bend public schools—and that no more than in the previous round was there any evidence that the Department of Justice was incompetent, acting in bad faith, or colluding with the school board.

Second, the denial to intervene was also denied for not being "timely." Rule 24(a)(2) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure requires that the motion to intervene be "timely," although it does not attempt to define the term or specify rigid time limits. The purpose of the requirement is to prevent a tardy intervenor from derailing a lawsuit shortly before its conclusion. This was interpreted to mean that as soon as a prospective intervenor knows or has reason to know that their interests might be adversely affected by the outcome of the litigation, they must move promptly to intervene.

The revised consent decree had been entered on April 17, 1981, and the Brookins class filed a motion to intervene on September 8 of that year. It was argued that the motion to intervene should have been filed within days of the April 17 order, and since the Brookins class had waited four and a half months to file their motion, it was argued that their request to intervene did not meet the requirement of being "timely."

For these reasons, the Brookins' motion to intervene was denied by the district court on September 22, 1981.

After this ruling, Brookins et al. filed another appeal to allow intervention in the case on April 4, 1983. On June 23, 1981, this appeal was also denied.

As a result of this case, the South Bend Community School Corporation was to be held accountable by the U.S. Department of Justice for racial balance in its schools, according to the terms of the revised consent decree entered in April 1981. For the next two decades, several schools remained out of compliance. In 2000, the SBCSC adopted a new school reorganization known as Plan Z. As of 2022, the consent decree is still in place; however, compliance with the terms of the decree continues to vary across schools.