MANNING, S.C. - A school funding lawsuit challenging the way South Carolina funds education is drawing attention from some outside the state who are struck by similarities to the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that desegregated the nation's schools.

A filmmaker whose credits include "Hoop Dreams" on Wednesday filmed parts of the trial to include in a new documentary about the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling and the progress the nation has made integrating schools.

In South Carolina, some say, the same disparities in education that black children faced 50 years ago are still in place. Three dozen rural, largely black school districts are suing the state, claiming that the state's funding formula for schools - a mix of the mix of local property taxes, federal aid and state dollars - shortchanges school districts in less developed areas while wealthier, urban districts have an easier time providing students an adequate education.

Lawyers for South Carolina argue that the state has constantly adjusted its educational policy to meet changing needs and to raise standards over the past 25 years.

At Allendale Elementary, students visit a library filled with 30-year-old books, school principal Judy Franchini testified Wednesday, as snapshots of schoolchildren in front of half-empty shelves flashed across a screen.

When Franchini became principal, the average copyright date of books in the school's media center was 1965. Since then, she's worked to raise the average copyright date to 1978, she said.

"Boy, am I proud of raising that copyright average," she said. "We had samples that were culturally biased, culturally insensitive or totally incorrect."

Examples like these harken back to the 1954 desegregation case when outdated books and inadequate facilities prevented schools from providing black children with an education equal to that of white students, said 75-year-old Arlonial DeLaine Bradford, whose uncle, the Rev. Joseph DeLaine, led efforts in South Carolina to desegregate schools.

"We used to have the old books," DeLaine Bradford said. "The white school's name used to be in the books by the time we got them."

The Rev. Joseph DeLaine helped file a lawsuit in South Carolina that became one of five leading to the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education that integrated public schools.

Fifty years later, the state still is neglecting rural districts where mostly black children are educated, said DeLaine Bradford, one of many descendants of plaintiffs who attended the trial Wednesday.

To filmmaker Peter Gilbert, the trial being heard in Manning is a sequel to Brown v. Board of Education, the subject of the documentary he is directing and producing that will be shown in theaters and on the Discovery Channel after its completion in May.

With the film on Brown v. Board of Education, Gilbert said, one must look at whether schools have really been integrated. Many schoolchildren in America still attend "relatively segregated" schools, he said.

"This case is fascinating because this isn't schoolchildren and their parents saying that people can't get an adequate education or equal opportunity," Gilbert said. "This is about superintendents of school systems (and) teachers - black and white - saying that their kids cannot be properly educated.

"To me, this is 50 years later, we're dealing with the same issues, same types of poverty and, in my mind, same type of racism."

The trial in Manning is in its seventh week. On Friday the trial will adjourn until next year.