GALVESTON — Representatives of Galveston’s public school district and the U.S. Department of Justice will meet with a federal judge in March as part of the district’s ongoing bid for a legal declaration of racial desegregation known as unitary status, but Alamo Elementary School will remain closed.

In an order filed Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Sim Lake wrote that he would not reconsider his ruling allowing the district to close Alamo Elementary School. The district closed the predominately Hispanic school last year.

Lake will conduct a status conference with district and justice department officials March 6 in the U.S. courthouse in Houston where Lake is expected to make further rulings, according to the order.

Also in the order released Monday, Lake denied the district’s request to toss out a letter from the justice department accusing school district officials of misleading the federal court in August when they said a consultant was too ill to provide a promised report. The letter will remain as evidence as the judge considers whether to declare the district desegregated.

Justice department attorney Allison Brown said in the letter dated Aug. 17 that civil rights consultant John Bell was not too sick to complete his report.

Brown said she contacted Bell, who said he wasn’t too sick to do the analysis, she wrote. Rather, the district hadn’t supplied him with data he needed, Brown wrote.

What’s more, Brown wrote, Bell said his report wouldn’t support closing San Jacinto and Alamo.

In his request to Lake to toss out the letter, the district’s attorney, Erik Nichols, said the district had not lied to the court, that Bell was sick and the justice department’s assertions were a “big fabrication.”

He said Bell never said any of the things Brown alleged in her letter to the judge.

“This is the biggest bunch of horse crap I’ve ever heard in my life,” Nichols said in an interview.

Bell told the justice department he could not write a report supporting the school closures because he opposed the plan, Brown claims in her letter. Bell, the letter asserts, has repeatedly told the district it built more elementary schools in the “white section of the city (on the west side of Galveston) than were necessary.”

Bell said Galveston’s population growth is in the center of the city, where most minority schools are, but the district has chosen instead to bus minorities to the west side of town, Brown claimed in the letter.

The Justice Department has asked Lake to order the district to turn over correspondence with Bell, including letters, e-mails, completed and draft reports. The district has told the department it would hand over the information, according to previous court filings.

In Brown’s August letter, she also asked Lake to keep Alamo Elementary School open until the department completed an investigation into the district’s desegregation efforts. She asked Lake to reconsider his ruling giving the district permission to proceed with the planned closure of the elementary school and questioned the district’s motives for not providing a report it requested. Lake denied Brown’s request.

Brown also asked to question Bell and Superintendent Lynne Cleveland, but two weeks ago, she dropped that request. Lake on Monday denied the department’s ongoing request to question the district’s testing coordinator, Richard Tullis.

“The parties’ recent joint status report ... reflects that GISD is continuing to voluntarily provide information to the United States...,” Lake wrote in his order. “Although the United States now wished to depose Dr. Richard Tullis, the court is not persuaded that the United States has shown a legitimate basis for doing so.”

Bell is still on contract with the district, but the last time the district spoke to him regarding unitary status was in November, Cleveland said. The district is proceeding with trying to achieve unitary status without Bell’s help because that is the direction trustees want to head, Cleveland said.

In the past two years, the district has paid Bell $24,618, she said.