The Roberts Court: The Struggle for the Constitution by Marcia Coyle Read Free Book Online

residents get into the city by crossing one of three bridges. Queen Anne, to the southeast of Magnolia, borders the north end of the center and covers the city’s highest hill. The community has a population of about 32,000, including a large number of young single adults. The median income is $49,000 and the racial composition is similar to Magnolia’s.
    Unlike Jefferson County School District in Kentucky—the target of the second school challenge in the Supreme Court that December morning—Seattle had never been under a federal court order to desegregate its schools, but that did not mean there was no problem in the schools.
    Although Brown v. Board of Education outlawed segregated schools in 1954, the hard work of desegregation did not begin until almost a decade later and then often under orders by federal courts. In 1962, Garfield High School, located in Seattle’s central district, became the first predominantly black high school in the state, with more than 51 percent black students. More than half of the city’s other high schools had no more than five black students. That grim picture triggered a lawsuit against the school district by the Seattle chapter of the NAACP. The district, settling the suit out of court, appointed a committee to address“gross racial imbalance” in certain city schools. That imbalance mirrored Seattle’s long history of housing segregation. 4
    A voluntary student transfer program was launched, and at its peak nearly ten years later 2,604 students participated, of whom 2,200 were black. There were additional attempts to promote voluntary integration—magnet programs at certain schools, for example. But by 1977, the district claimed that twenty-six schools remained racially imbalanced.
    In that year, the NAACP filed a complaint with the U.S. Office of Civil Rights, and the American Civil Liberties Union and the Church Council of Greater Seattle threatened to file a lawsuit. By the end of that year, the school board had approved a mandatory busing plan, and the city became the first in the nation to adopt a comprehensive school desegregation plan without the sledgehammer of a federal court order.
    Two months after the plan took effect, 61 percent of Seattle voters and 66 percent of voters statewide approved an anti-busing initiative sponsored by the Citizens for Voluntary Integration Committee. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1982 found the state initiative unconstitutional.
    The city’s efforts to address the racial problems in its schools without intervention by a federal court ironically would work against it when the Roberts Court, two decades later, on that December morning, heard arguments in the case against the city’s school district.
    With busing came white and middle-class flight from the public schools. By the 1980s, the baby boom had peaked, which contributed to declining public school enrollments. Seattle closed ten elementary schools, two middle schools, and two high schools. One of the two high schools was Queen Anne High School, and therein was the root of the problem for parents like Kathleen Brose and Jill Kurfirst. Queen Anne High School was considered the neighborhood school for Magnolia and Queen Anne residents—and it no longer existed.
    Throughout the 1980s and the 1990s, the school district tinkered with its busing plan, introducing and expanding a “controlled choice” plan inwhich parents could choose from a cluster of schools and applicants who could contribute to a school’s racial diversity were given priority.
    In 1995, the man whose vision drew David Engle across the lake to Ballard High School became superintendent. As superintendent, John Stanford, an African American, decided to end mandatory busing. He had two goals: achieve diversity in the public schools and bring back middle-class families.
    Stanford ended mandatory busing and moved the district to the “open choice” plan. He and Joseph Olchefske, who was the district’s chief financial