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After 30 years, the Tucson Unified School District is all but free from a federal desegregation court order. This change is momentous for TUSD and its students, families, employees and taxpayers.

This is a time of great opportunity for the entire district, but that must not obscure the significant work that remains to improve education for all students and, in specific ways, for minority students. A large gap between the test scores of minority students and white students remains and this gap must be closed.

U.S. District Judge David Bury issued a 59-page ruling Thursday that states that TUSD Governing Boardmust meet with plaintiffs and develops a "post-unitary plan" to improve the district's transparency and accountability.

Once that is completed, then the district will finally be out from under the court's supervision.

TUSD asked in 2005 to be declared "unitary," which means it met goals outlined in the court order to remove barriers to equal education for minority students.

For the past 30 years, TUSD has operated under the federal court order, which affected decisions on school attendance, busing, magnet programs and departments dedicated to assisting specific students, like African American Studies.

TUSD spent nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars on its desegregation efforts. Taxpayers got the bill.

Bury noted that the original settlement agreement included benchmarks that were to be met within five years — 1983.

But, as Bury points out, state and federal funds are tied to court-ordered desegregation efforts and that revenue was too precious to give up. So the district kept on going, until 2005 when, in response to the court asking why the case shouldn't be closed, TUSD asked to be declared as having reached "unitary status."

Demographic changes over time have turned TUSD into a majority-minority district and some schools are now 90 percent minority — a phenomenon Bury wrote the district is not obligated to address because it's not TUSD segregating schools.

Bury's ruling is illuminating for what is missing: evidence from TUSD that its efforts have worked. TUSD created programs and policies, taxpayers paid for them and no one ever determined if they actually helped students.

The ruling points out willful disregard of requests made year after year by the Independent Citizens Committee, the district's desegregation oversight group, for facts and figures from TUSD about student achievement, discipline, enrollment of minority kids in special education and gifted programs.

Year after year reasonable questions were asked, and year after year they went wanting for an answer.

Many of the statistics had never been gathered or compared until TUSD asked to be released from court supervision. Such negligence is appalling and must not continue to be tolerated by the Governing Board or the public.

TUSD must create a plan that honestly assesses efforts to improve education for all students. And if the efforts aren't working, they must be changed.

TUSD has the chance to start a new chapter.

A new superintendent begins in July. School board elections are in November. The desegregation order is being lifted.

TUSD must move ahead.