High Court to Hear School Diversity Case

Sisters Audreyanna, 14, left, and Cassandra Cosby, 16, discuss desegregation at a high school football game Friday, Sept, 22, 2006, at Central High School Stadium in Louisville, Ky. The sisters say the idea of mixing students from around the county in different schools sounds like a good idea. They said school integration provides a social education along with an academic one. Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled is to hear oral arguments on lawsuits brought by parents in Louisville and Seattle who challenged voluntary school district policies that use race to help determine where children go to school. (AP Photo/Brian Bohannon) (Brian Bohannon - AP)

If the court issues a sweeping ruling against using race, "we will be witnessing a reversal of historic proportions," said Ted Shaw, president of the NAACP's Legal Defense and Educational Foundation.

"Race-neutral" alternatives such as lotteries or socioeconomic sorting often end up segregating school populations again and hurting black students, according to Shaw's organization.

About 400 of the nation's 15,000 school districts are under court orders to desegregate. It is believed that hundreds more voluntarily take race into account; there are no firm figures.

The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights says banning the voluntary consideration of race in school assignments could result in an "absurd" situation in which districts are not allowed to promote the diversity they once were under order to achieve.

But to some parents, all of that is broad theory that does not compensate for denying kids the school of their choice or the one in their neighborhood.

Louisville parent Crystal Meredith, who is white, challenged a district policy that seeks to keep black enrollment between 15 percent and 50 percent of the population at most schools, while allowing some measure of school choice.

Meredith says the plan kept her son, Joshua McDonald, from attending a nearby elementary school. Instead, she says, he was bused 90 minutes away for two years, until she moved and her son got into his school of choice.

The result, says her legal brief, "denigrates a 5-year-old's self-worth and self-esteem" by color-coding him throughout his school years.

Not only white parents objected.

Deborah Stallworth, who is black, says she was unhappy when her young son initially was denied admittance to his neighborhood school. He was assigned to one across Louisville that would have required "busing my baby halfway to Timbuktu," as she recalls it. Stallworth got the decision reversed.

Now 15, her son, Austin Johnson, is thriving at predominantly black Central High School, a magnet school barred by court order from taking race into account.

Stallworth says arguments that a diverse student body is necessary to teach children how to get along are nothing but "foolishness," recalling her own years in segregated Louisville schools before court-ordered busing began.