Supreme Court to hear Seattle schools race case

Her anger has eased, but Kathleen Brose's voice still shakes slightly when she describes the turmoil Seattle Public Schools caused six year ago by denying her daughter's enrollment to her neighborhood school, Ballard High, because she was white.

Brose was one of several parents who sued in 2000, contending that the district violated state and federal laws by considering race when assigning students to popular schools.

Over the years, courts have struck down and upheld the policy, intended to promote diversity. The district hasn't used it since 2002 as the legal battle waged on.

Now, however, the issue will be decided once and for all. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear the case, setting up perhaps the most significant decision it has made on affirmative action and schools in years.

Brose still feels strongly about the case, even though her daughter graduated from high school years ago.

"I started it; I'm going to finish it," said Brose, who serves as president of Parents Involved in Community Schools, the group that filed the original lawsuit against the district. "I don't want other parents to go through what we went through."

The court will consider appeals from the Seattle parents group and a Kentucky mother, who argue that race restrictions improperly penalize white students. The main issue is whether school leaders can promote racial diversity without violating the Constitution's guarantee against discrimination.

Since 1997, the Seattle district has allowed its roughly 46,000 students to apply to attend the school of their choice. Race was one of several tiebreakers at popular schools; the student's race was a factor if attendance would help bring the school closer to the districtwide average of about 40 percent white, 60 percent minority students. The tiebreaker helped some white students get into predominately minority schools and vice versa.

By 2000, the tiebreaker was used for students entering kindergarten, sixth grade and ninth grade. Race wasn't the only factor considered. How close a student lived to the school and whether a sibling attended, for example, also were taken into account.

The district argued that the tiebreaker was necessary to create more diverse schools in a city where many neighborhoods are segregated.

Several groups, including the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Urban League, said Monday that they'll file legal briefs in support of the district.

"Seattle Public Schools isn't denying anyone access to a public-school education," said Aaron Caplan, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Washington. "The question is, are we going to try to have diverse and desegregated schools?"

But some parents, particularly those whose children were denied enrollment in the newly remodeled Ballard High School because of their race, said the tiebreaker was unfair, unconstitutional and unnecessary.

"The district has not been using it for several years now, and the result is the schools are still diverse," said Harry Korrell, an attorney representing the Seattle parents' group.

Records show the racial makeup at some Seattle high schools has changed since the district suspended the use of the tiebreaker. At Ballard High School, minority students made up slightly less than 42 percent of the student population in 2000; that fell to just under 38 percent in 2005. At Franklin High School, white students made up about 23 percent of the population in 2000; that declined to just over 10 percent by 2005.

The parents' original lawsuit accused the district of violating the Constitution, the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and voter-approved Initiative 200, a state law prohibiting preferential treatment on the basis of race, ethnicity or gender.

The suit was rejected in U.S. District Court, but later overturned on appeal. The district discontinued the use of the tiebreaker, prompting the principal at Ballard High School to resign in protest. Then, just months after its decision to reject the policy, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals made the highly unusual move of withdrawing its ruling and asking the state Supreme Court to consider the issue.

Since then, rulings in the complex case have ping-ponged between both sides.

With the case now before the U.S. Supreme Court, legal experts say the outcome will have far-reaching implications and could be crucial in determining how much authority local school boards have.

Some even mention the court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision that struck down segregated schools.

"This is going to reach into the homes and thinking of 100 percent of students," said Doug Kmiec, a Pepperdine University law professor and former Reagan administration lawyer. "This is not quite at the level of Brown v. Board, but it will be argued in the style of that case."

Others point to a decision the court made in 2003 that narrowly approved using race as a factor in admissions at the University of Michigan's law school.

It's unclear how widespread the use of race-based school assignment programs is in public schools. The California-based Pacific Legal Foundation, which has supported the parents in the Seattle dispute, has estimated there are as many as 1,000 similar school-assignment programs in public schools.

"By using race as a factor ... they're teaching our kids that race matters," said Sharon Browne, a principal attorney for the foundation. "That is just plain wrong, and it's not the type of teaching that our school districts should be doing."

In Seattle, much of parents' anger over the school-assignment process came from the widespread assumption that some high schools -- mainly in the city's more affluent North End -- were academically superior to others.

That's still an underlying issue, said James Kelly, president of the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle, which supports the district's policy. But in the end, the debate over using tiebreakers "is really secondary to the importance of having all 10 high-performing schools," he said. "And we don't have that now."

Brose said she understands the argument that a student's home address shouldn't limit their educational opportunities and agrees "they deserve to have good schools to go to."

A decision in the parents' favor could be the best way to get the district to "focus their energies on other things, like maybe improving the schools that kids don't want to go to," she said.

Material from The Associated Press was included in this report. P-I reporter Jessica Blanchard can be reached at 206-448-8322 or jessicablanchard@seattlepi.com.

Soundoff (Read 10 comments)
Should Seattle Schools consider race when assigning students to popular schools?

Add P-I Local headlines to