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

officer under Stanford and who succeeded Stanford after Stanford’s death from cancer, knew that minority and low-income parents wanted the same thing as white parents—schools near home—and that kids who had been bused to the north were likely to choose schools in the city’s south, concentrating the highest needs populations in schools with no offset for the change in quality and resources for their education. They devised a new form of budgeting—backpack budgeting—where the district’s money is attached to the student.
    “Sure enough, exactly according to plan, there was this big migration of kids, of enrollment, from north to south,” recalled Olchefske. “They took their money with them. And schools in the south started swelling in enrollments and schools in the north started shrinking in enrollments.” 5
    Under the new policy, ninth graders could choose any high school in the district and as many as possible were given their first choice. If more students chose a particular school than the school had capacity, the tiebreakers were applied.
    While Seattle’s school district was working through its new policy, opponents of affirmative action were making headway in the courts and at the polls. Ward Connerly, leader of the successful anti–affirmative action movement in California, was supporting a similar effort in Washington State. On the day the Seattle School District implemented its open choice policy, Washington voters approved Initiative 200, prohibiting racial preferences in public employment, education, and contracts.That initiative would become one of the bases of the lawsuit by Parents Involved in Community Schools.
    Once Seattle students could choose their schools, an open market existed and schools, particularly those in the northern part of the city with excess capacity, began competing for enrollment in order to survive. The northern schools became home to some of the district’s most creative programs, such as biotechnology and theater programs. Non-public school parents began taking notice. Over a period of five to six years, the district increased the percentage of parents choosing public schools by about 10 percent.
    “As soon as you go to open choice, you have to confront the fact that some schools are more popular than others and you don’t know year to year which ones,” said Olchefske, referring to variations in programs offered. “In a choice system, you must have criteria for deciding what to do when you have an oversubscribed school. It all would come down to these tiebreakers.”
    The tiebreakers—do you have a sibling in the school; do you live in the neighborhood; do you help diversify the school; and what is your distance from the school—worked well for elementary and middle schools. With sixty-five elementary schools, each had a neighborhood. The ten middle schools were put into five regions, with two schools in each, so a student was guaranteed to go to one of the two. But the high schools had to draw from such large areas that there were no “neighborhoods,” and so diversity became the second tiebreaker.
    Kathleen Brose had the “elementary and middle school view of the world,” which did not exist for high schools, said Olchefske. The year in which Brose’s daughter was to start high school, parts of Magnolia fell outside of the circle for Ballard High School’s draw area. Pick a street in Magnolia and on one side, parents were happy because they fell within the circle’s boundaries, and people on the other side of the street were unhappy. Any other year, it may not have been a problem.
    “Every year there was a different set of angry white moms who would come to my office, and whatever supply-demand imbalance occurred,they advocated very strongly in lots of different ways to change the outcomes of the assignment process,” he recalled. “They’d say, ‘Draw the boundaries differently,’ or, ‘You said only three hundred kids could go to X school, make