Seattle - The United States Supreme Court ruled today that the Seattle School Board's school assignment policy violates the civil rights of its own students.
Under the policy, school district officials were directed to use skin color to designate children as "integration negative" or "integration positive," depending on whether they felt a student helped meet pre-determined racial quotas set for certain schools. According to District records, school officials were directed to deny educational opportunities to 300 students in the 2000-01 school year based on the students' perceived racial identity.
Voters ended government-sponsored racial policies with passage of Initiative 200, the Washington Civil Rights Initiative, on November 3, 1998. The measure garnered of 58% of the 1.9 million votes cast. The main provision of the Initiative says public officials,
"... shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting."
The Seattle School Board spent $462,096.88 hiring a prestigious law firm to argue the case, in addition to its own in-house legal expenses. The Board spent an additional $1,974.26 on airfare, hotel rooms, parking and food related to the case, for a total of at least $464,071.14.
If the Justices require the School Board to pay the legal expenses of the parents who sued to recover their childrens' civil rights, total costs to Seattle taxpayers would approach $1 million.
"School officials are constantly telling the public they don't have enough money to educate children adequately. None of the money spent on this pointless lawsuit has contributed to the education of any child in Seattle," said Paul Guppy, Vice President for Research.
"Nine years and nearly half-a-million dollars later, the School District is right back where it was in 1998. The whole exercise was a complete waste of time and money," Guppy added.
Research by the Washington Policy Center found that within a year of Initiative 200's enactment, public leaders at the state's 1,724 state and local governing bodies had adjusted their policies to comply with the new law, including all but one of the state's 296 school districts.
If allocated otherwise, $464,000 dollars would fund, for example, 11 new school teachers for a year, buy 545 new computers, cover "pay to play" sports fees for 6,186 students, or help buy for new math textbooks in 2007. Currently, only 59% of education funding in the state goes to classroom instruction, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Details on how Seattle's race-based assignment policy works is provided in the Washington Policy Center publication "Business as Usual - Continued Racial Preferences in Seattle Public School Admissions," June 1999.
More on how the Initiative 200 law works is in our study, "A Citizens' Guide to Initiative 200," September 1998. Both are listed by date at www.washingtonpolicy.org under "Publications."
The case is Parents Involved in Community School (PICS) v. Seattle School District No. 1, 05-908.