Parents Challenge
Seattle District on Racial "Tiebreaker"
The Seattle Times Company Local News
Wednesday, July 19, 2000 by Keith Ervin Seattle Times staff reporter
Parents upset about their children's high-school assignments went to federal court yesterday to ask that the Seattle School District be forbidden to discriminate on the basis of race. The suit filed by Parents Involved in Community Schools contends the district's racial "tiebreaker" violates the U.S. Constitution, the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Washington's voter-approved Initiative 200.
It is believed to be the first legal complaint based largely on I-200, which bans racial discrimination and racial preferences in public education, employment and contracting. Facing the media on the steps of the U.S. District Courthouse in downtown Seattle, two members of the parent group said the Seattle School District's racial tiebreaker has divided community members and weakened parental support for public schools.
The parents said Seattle's school-choice plan should give students preference to the school closest to home rather than a school the student can help integrate. Race is used as one of several tiebreakers to assign students to schools that can't accommodate all students seeking admission. Kathleen Brose and Jill Kurfirst said they don't expect the court to act quickly enough to get their ninth-grade children into Ballard High School, the school closest to their homes in Queen Anne and Magnolia, in September. "I'm doing this for my younger child," said Brose, president of Parents Involved. "I have a daughter in fourth grade. I do not want to go through this again. I do not want anyone else to go through this again."
Using a series of tiebreakers for student assignments to the most popular schools, Brose's older daughter - who is white - was not assigned to any of her top three choices: Ballard, Roosevelt and Hale. She was assigned to her fourth choice, Franklin, but has transferred to Ingraham because of its music program. A nonwhite friend of Brose's daughter was admitted to Ballard. The two girls have agreed not to talk to each other about schools because the subject is too painful, Brose said. Kurfirst's ninth-grade son had qualified for admission to Ballard's biotechnology academy but won't be able to attend the academy because he wasn't assigned to the school.
After being denied his second and third school choices, he received an assignment to Ingraham. Superintendent Joseph Olchefske said the district believes the racial tiebreaker is consistent with both I-200 and federal law. "We clearly feel we've acted in the best interest of kids," Olchefske said. "The School Board clearly has said that to prepare kids for the world they're going to enter they need exposure to a diverse environment. That doesn't happen by accident." Ironically, the assignment plan under legal challenge buses fewer students for racial purposes and gives parents more choice over their children's school assignments than earlier assignment plans.
After a succession of voluntary integration plans, Seattle in 1978 became the largest city in the nation to adopt mandatory busing without a court order. By 1979, 12,000 students were being bused out of their neighborhoods for integration purposes. The Seattle Plan, as it was known, survived a statewide anti-busing initiative and a lawsuit that went to the U.S. Supreme Court. But the School Board in 1989 implemented a "controlled-choice" plan that allowed parents to choose within a prescribed cluster of schools - as long as their choices didn't throw the schools out of racial balance.
Controlled choice resulted in 7,400 children being bused for integration purposes before the school district offered more parent choice in 1997. Instead of requiring that every school's student body reflect the diversity of the entire school district, this plan takes race into consideration only at schools that are "oversubscribed" and are not racially balanced. A school is defined as racially balanced if the percentage of students in each racial or ethnic group is within 10 points of its districtwide percentage. James Kelly, president of the Seattle Urban League, this week reiterated his group's commitment to assist the school district in defending the racial tiebreaker.
He said the Urban League is waiting to hear from the district's attorneys to decide whether it should intervene in the case or file a friend-of-the- court brief. "What's important to us is to make sure that there are quality schools in every community, that under no circumstances should we go back in time to what's happening across the country, which is basically the resegregation of schools," Kelly said. School Board member Michael Preston, an African American who worked to end large-scale mandatory busing, but who supports the racial tiebreaker, said the lawsuit will tie up district funds that would be better used creating a new high school in the Queen Anne and Magnolia areas.
In an irony that points to the complicated issues involved in fostering diversity, both Parents Involved members on the courthouse steps said they voted against passage of I-200 two years ago. Kurfirst said she felt the anti-discrimination initiative went too far toward dismantling various forms of affirmative action and would vote against it again. But her sense of justice has led her to support a lawsuit based in part on I-200. "In light of the fact that these kids do have diverse friendships - which is wonderful because our community is diverse - to take some and send them one place because they're minorities and to take others and send them to four different schools feels really wrong. I can't support that." The parents are represented on a pro-bono basis by the law firm of Davis Wright Tremaine. The school district is represented by Bennett Bigelow & Leedom, which is also defending the University of Washington Law School in a lawsuit alleging reverse discrimination.