Supreme Court takes on K-12 schools racial mix

Objections across the board
Not only white parents objected. Deborah Stallworth, who is black, says she was unhappy when her young son initially was denied admittance to his neighborhood school. He was assigned to one across Louisville that would have required “busing my baby halfway to Timbuktu,” as she recalls it. Stallworth got the decision reversed.

Now 15, her son, Austin Johnson, is thriving at predominantly black Central High School, a magnet school barred by court order from taking race into account.

Stallworth says arguments that a diverse student body is necessary to teach children how to get along are nothing but “foolishness,” recalling her own years in segregated Louisville schools before court-ordered busing began.

“I don’t have any problems getting along with anybody,” she said. “I have a good life.”

But Pat Todd, director of school assignment for the Jefferson County schools, said most parents value the diversity produced by the school assignment plan. Todd said 95 percent of families get their first or second choice of school and the average bus commute in the district is 45 minutes.

“The plan has prevented the resegregation that inevitably would result from the community’s segregated housing patterns and that most likely would produce many schools that might be perceived as ’failing,”’ the school district said in its brief to the high court.

For some, a social education at stake
To sisters Cassandra and Audreyanna Cosby, who are black, mixing students from around the county provides a valuable social education as well as an academic one.

“You get to check out different environments,” said Cassandra, 16, a sophomore at Central High, the same school Austin Johnson attends. Audreyanna, 14, a freshman, said: “You get to see how other people do it. If you stay in one school, in one neighborhood, you don’t know what the other schools got.”

The Seattle plan let students pick among high schools while trying to maintain a 40-60 ratio of whites to nonwhites at each school. A racial “tiebreaker” helped to determine which students were admitted to popular schools that were “oversubscribed.”

In 2000-2001, about 300 of 3,000 ninth-grade students were denied the school of their choice because of their race; the racial tiebreaker was discontinued after a group of parents sued.

“We teach our children in the Seattle public schools that people shouldn’t be discriminated against,” said Kathleen Brose, the president of the group that sued. “Then when they get to ninth grade, we’re judging them by the color of their skin.”

Brown v. Board's long shadow
But a U.S. district judge in Seattle and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Seattle’s practice, finding a compelling interest in securing the benefits of diversity.

“We stand for all the school districts in this country that believe Brown v. Board of Education still applies,” said school district lawyer Shannon McMinimee.

“Communities are still segregated, either by the history of racism in America or by current circumstances like the affordability of housing. This is about what a school board can do to remedy the effects of past segregation,” McMinimee said.

Amy Stuart Wells, a sociology professor at Teachers College of Columbia University, said adults who attended racially diverse schools in their youth believe they are more open-minded and less fearful of other races than peers who went to segregated schools.

While racial tensions of the students’ school years were challenging, Wells said, “when you talk to them 20 years later they understand what it did for them. They understand how it helped them in a multiracial society and in a global society.”

The cases are Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, 05-908; and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education, 05-915.

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