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

it three hundred fifty,’ or, ‘Change the tiebreakers a little bit.’ As soon as you get into the business of making one exception, it’s a slippery slope. I was going to enforce the policy as written. It was up to the school board to make any changes.”
    And to the school board was exactly where Brose and similarly situated parents—mostly mothers—went.
    “We knew a year or so before the assignment implosion that this was going to happen,” recalled Brose. “The Ballard high school had just been remodeled. Everyone was excited about going to a brand-new school. Not only did you have a lot of public school kids who wanted access to the school, you had a lot of private school kids. The school district didn’t understand what the numbers were. We went to the school board and said, ‘Look, there’s too many kids trying to get into this school. And we know you are using the racial tiebreaker,’ and they also had the sibling tiebreaker and the distance tiebreaker. We went to a lot of school board meetings. Kids went and got up. A few of us cried. We were pretty vocal and newspapers covered it quite a bit. And they just basically said, ‘Oh don’t worry about it.’ They were very patronizing.”
    Brose had a “legitimate beef,” conceded Olchefske, but, he added, “We could rightfully say to her and others, ‘What do you mean, you don’t get a school?’ We were giving them schools. I do not believe Kathleen Brose was waiting around for a race issue. She just wanted her kid to get into the school she wanted, period.”
    Before it was rebuilt, Ballard, ironically, was not a school that anyone in Magnolia or Queen Anne would have sought out. It was considered a terrible school. Although located in a white neighborhood, it was predominantly minority. It also was viewed as unsafe because there had been a drive-by shooting that resulted in the death of a student.
    In fact, as one Ballard neighborhood resident and parent, critical of the lawsuit, blogged on a “save seattle schools” blog: “If the principleof attending one’s neighborhood school is so important, why weren’t people suing to get into Ballard High School when the ceiling tiles were falling on people’s heads?”
    With a new building, a biotech program, and a creative new principal, Ballard became the rising superstar.
    For the 2000–01 school year, about 82 percent of students selected an oversubscribed high school as their first choice, and only 18 percent picked one of the undersubscribed high schools as a first choice.
    The school district estimated that without using the race tiebreaker, the non-white composition of the ninth-grade class that year at Franklin, a south end high school, would have been 79.2 percent, and in north end Hale, 30.5 percent; Ballard, 33 percent, and Roosevelt, 41.1 percent. But with the tiebreaker, the actual non-white populations at the same schools, respectively, were 59.5 percent, 40.6 percent, 54.2 percent, and 55.3 percent. 6
    The tiebreaker actually was race-neutral, according to Olchefske and others. There were schools in Seattle that were minority-dominated that white students wanted to attend, such as Franklin, which had an advanced placement program, and there were white-dominated schools that minority students wanted to attend. “This wasn’t like people tried to paint it—affirmative action, get minority kids in the best schools,” insisted Olchefske.
    Before it was abandoned in 2002, the race tiebreaker had been used in only a few schools and it accounted for an estimated 300 students out of 3,000 assignments to the ninth grade in 2000–01, the year that Brose’s daughter entered high school. The small number of students affected also would weigh against the district in the Roberts Court.
    The school board knew that by going to open choice, there would be a decrease in diversity, given the residential patterns of the city. However, unlike some cities at the time, race was not simply black and