State Attorney General Xavier Becerra on Friday announced a historic settlement with the Sausalito Marin City School District that will lead to desegregation within five years.

The announcement comes almost nine months after the AG’s office accused the district of deliberately creating a segregated school at Bayside Martin Luther King Jr. Academy in Marin City and violating state anti-discrimination laws. Becerra said the district’s former board of trustees from about 2013 to 2019 deliberately diverted staff and resources to Willow Creek Academy, a charter school under district auspices in majority white Sausalito, while systematically depriving those resources from Bayside MLK, which mostly serves non-white minority student populations.

“Every child — no matter their stripe or stature — deserves equal access to a quality education,” Becerra said at a news conference Friday at Bayside MLK. “That’s what we say and what we believe and what’s required under the law.” It is the first comprehensive effort to desegregate a California school in five decades, Becerra said.

He said the desegregation plan must begin in the 2020-21 school year and be completed within five years or the district could face further consequences. There would be no civil or criminal sanctions for the former district board members involved — most of whom are no longer serving — but he did offer strong words against them.

“Depriving a child of a fair chance to learn is wicked, it’s warped, it’s morally bankrupt and it’s corrupt,” he said. “Your skin color or zip code should not determine winners and losers.”

The settlement also calls for reparations in the form of scholarships, counseling and other support to students at Bayside MLK who may have been deprived of educational opportunities.

“We are committed to taking substantive action to manifest equitable educational, economic and social opportunities and outcomes for all of our children and families,” said district Superintendent Itoco Garcia. “It is now the time to set aside any past conflicts and work together toward a brighter future.“

Ida Green of Marin City, president of the district’s board of trustees, said the history for the segregation goes back decades.

“For more than 70 years, the stigma associated with the Marin City community has been one of failure,” Green said. ‘Whether it’s been failure relative to housing, education, economic disparity, or acceptance in neighboring communities, it’s been an ongoing battle.

“This is not the platform to discuss how we as a people simultaneously change the course of all the injustices,” she added. “But we can plan to move forward with a foundational edict of a public school system to provide excellent education to all students.”

Later, Green said it was “invigorating for me” that the entire state Attorney General’s enforcement and settlement, which was kept under strict wraps since December, was finally being discussed publicly.

“Now that it’s out in the open, everyone who felt left out (during the negotiations) can go to the (settlement) document,” she said. “I hope that those same ones now decide to get involved going forward.”

Garcia said the settlement agreement implementation would work in a parallel fashion with ongoing plans to unify Bayside MLK with Willow Creek. In recent weeks, both the district and the charter school have passed resolutions to work together collaboratively on a potential “one school” approach.

On Thursday night, the board of trustees’ soon-to-be named “reunification subcommittee” announced a six-month timeline to come up with a proposal for “one school,” meaning uniting Bayside MLK with Willow Creek. The timeline includes a meeting next month with the Willow Creek board’s newly formed “consolidation committee,”  followed by a series of community town halls in October and November. Sometime in December or January, those working on the issue are expected to come up with a recommendation to restructure the district.

“It’s unfortunate that it took this (state action) to get to where we are today,” said Terrie Green, board chair of the Marin City Community Services District, and a parent of two children, one attending Bayside MLK and the other at Willow Creek.  “(The state’s involvement) really makes people come to the table. It elevates everybody’s thinking in terms of what happens with our children — especially children of color.”

Mary Jane Burke, Marin County superintendent of schools, said the idea of reparations in this case was key to healing the Sausalito Marin City community, which has been torn apart for more than a decade.

“There have been many good people over the years who have talked about and wanted the best for all our kids. But this (settlement) is different — it’s serious,” she said. “Now we have an absolute mandate that all kids’ needs must be met. There’s a requirement for reparations for all children. It provides clarity that this an unwavering commitment and an unequivocal mandate.”

Three years ago, Burke contacted then state superintendent Tom Torlakson to ask that the state Attorney General’s office issue a formal opinion of the practices of the then-trustees on the Sausalito Marin City school board following an August 2016 report by the state Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team. In response, the Attorney General’s office launched a two-year probe of district operations and finances, culminating in a letter last December alleging that the district was in violation of state anti-discrimination laws for operating a segregated school at Bayside MLK.

Becerra said the final judgment in the case was filed in Superior Court in San Francisco on Thursday as well as the complaint.

“I’m so hopeful because it feels momentous in terms of going forward, and letting go of so much divisiveness,” said Bayside MLK art teacher Ellen Franz after the news conference Friday. “And finding a way to go forward together, instead of one side, the other side. We have to figure this out.”

Sausalito Mayor Joe Burns said the roots of the “bifurcation” of the two communities — Sausalito and Marin City — go back even further than 2013, when Bayside Elementary School was relocated from the Sausalito campus to Marin City, or before the FICMAT report in 2016.  He said the announcement Friday was “a great opportunity to move forward. That’s what everybody has been discussing and wanting over the years of this process — that we move forward for all the kids — we just needed a point to start. This apparently is the starting point for a wonderful collaborative future.”

Melanie Meharchand, a Willow Creek parent, said she felt it was unfair that Willow Creek was taking some hard blows, even though the charter school now is well integrated and serves about 80% of the total student population in the district.

“I do think it’s good that we have attention on our school district,” she said after the press conference. “But I don’t think we’ve had attention on both of our schools. An investigation would have shown that 80% of our Marin City kids, and high needs learners and English language speakers are actually served by the charter school today. So we have an integrated school in Sausalito Marin City, and that is the charter school that’s currently under fire. We really hope there can be a one-school solution, but we have to speak to all sides of it, so we can keep a certain level of academic support for all children.”

State attorneys general typically defend school systems against desegregation claims, not pursue them. In the decades after the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, the vast majority of desegregation agreements resulted from federal, not state, action — but in recent years, federal courts have done little to integrate schools.

In the Sausalito Marin City case, the state said the district had violated the equal protection clause of the California Constitution. The action is part of a wave of new educational equity court actions from the left that relies on state law.

The charter school, Willow Creek Academy, was founded about two decades ago by parents in Sausalito who said they were frustrated by poor test scores in the district. Many parents were sending their children to private school or seeking transfers to other public school districts.

In 2013, against the wishes of many people in both Sausalito and Marin City, according to court papers, the district decided to move its elementary school from Sausalito to the campus of its middle school in Marin City. The resulting campus became Bayside-Martin Luther King Jr. Academy. Like Willow Creek, it served kindergarten through eighth grade.

At a district meeting in 2012, a district trustee, who is not named in court papers, “admitted that the plan to create separate programs for Sausalito and Marin City was motivated by a desire to create separate programs for separate communities,” according to the complaint. “This trustee also expressed it would improve community relations if students in Marin City were not ‘shipped over’ to Sausalito.”

Willow Creek, with about 400 students, prided itself on its diversity. In the 2018-19 school year, it was 41 percent white, 11 percent African-American, 25 percent Latino and 10 percent Asian, according to its website. In contrast, Bayside-Martin Luther King Jr. Academy, with about 119 students, was 7 percent white, 3 percent Asian, 49 percent African-American and 30 percent Latino, according to state statistics.

In court papers, the attorney general said that the district had systematically starved the school it ran of resources. It reneged on a promise to create a gifted program and cut music, art, physical education and counseling services, according to court papers. By 2015, the Bayside-MLK principal, assistant principal and about half of the teaching staff had left, the court papers say.

The district-run school did not have a qualified math teacher, while the charter school did. The district school had only a part-time counselor, while the charter school had a full-time one. And the district was harsher in disciplining black and Hispanic students compared with white students than any other public school district in the state, the attorney general said.

Kurt Weinsheimer, the president of the charter school board, said on Friday that families in the district were hungering for integrated schools, and that the charter school was proof. A slight majority of its students come from the less affluent part of the district, he said, adding that district mismanagement, not racial antagonism, had led to the segregation problem.

“If you look at the history of the school district they’ve had revolving district board members, revolving superintendents, revolving heads of school, and that creates an unstable environment,” Weinsheimer said.

Garcia, a 44-year-old mixed-race Oakland man who was just hired a month ago as the sixth district superintendent in eight years, said Friday marks the start of a new era.

“We are at a critical juncture, locally and nationally,” he said. “We are excited to move forward in both spirit and action with the highest dedication to the shared ideals of equity, diversity, inclusion, justice and truth.”

The New York Times contributed to this story.