Furthermore: How might that have affected graduation requirements, and the university application/admission process? (More concisely: what were some of the knock-on effects for higher education?)
Thanks!
I believe the jurisdiction you're thinking of is Prince Edward County, Virginia, which closed its public school system from the fall of 1959 to the fall of 1964 in order to circumvent a court desegregation order.
Soon after the closing of the school system, a private white school foundation raised money to establish the Prince Edward Academy, which provided private classes at the elementary and secondary levels beginning in 1959. Virtually all the white children of the county attended these classes over the next several years; many poor whites were assisted by scholarships in order to afford private school tuition.
According to sociologist Wilbur Brookover, a few poor white families who could not afford tuition and would not accept welfare did not send their children to school, but we do not know the exact number, and "only a small proportion fell into this category."
By contrast, with the exception of home schooling and classes offered by churches, or students who were sent out of county, the great majority of black children in Prince Edward County were not able to attend school during this period. According to historian Christopher Bonastia, three-quarters of the black youth in the county were unable to attend classes for four years (the federal government intervened to establish Free Schools in 1963).
According to Brookover, the lost years of schooling did not have as severe an effect as one might think. Many of the older black students simply abandoned school and entered the workforce. Younger students, though, returned to school and made up for lost time - the level of educational attainment of black students in the county increased steadily in the ensuing decades, according to census data from 1970 and 1980.
That being said, as Bonastia points out, "Although the school-closing strategy thankfully did not gain momentum, the model that replaced it in Prince Edward County—poorly funded public schools for blacks, private schools for whites—was replicated widely, particularly in rural districts in the South."
See Wilbur B. Brookover, "Education in Prince Edward County, Virginia, 1953-1993," The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 62, No. 2 (Spring, 1993), pp. 149-161; Jill Ogline Titus, Brown's Battleground: Students, Segregationists, and the Struggle for Justice in Prince Edward County (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2014)
Follow-up: Is there any research showing whether this possible "skipped year" had significant impacts on the long-term educational and economic attainment of the South?
Follow-up question to this topic: were there any communities in the South that embraced integration before Brown v Board? We only ever hear about segregation when studying post Reconstruction, pre Civil Rights South in high school, but my guy tells me there's got to be exceptions, right? If any of you have sources, I would love to read any books that talk about some of the lesser told tales of tolerance in pre-Civil-Rights South.