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)

"I don't have any problems getting along with anybody," she said. "I have a good life."

But Pat Todd, director of school assignment for the Jefferson County schools, said most parents value the diversity produced by the school assignment plan. Todd said 95 percent of families get their first or second choice of school and the average bus commute in the district is 45 minutes.

"The plan has prevented the resegregation that inevitably would result from the community's segregated housing patterns and that most likely would produce many schools that might be perceived as 'failing,'" the school district said in its brief to the high court.

To sisters Cassandra and Audreyanna Cosby, who are black, mixing students from around the county provides a valuable social education as well as an academic one.

"You get to check out different environments," said Cassandra, 16, a sophomore at Central High, the same school Austin Johnson attends. Audreyanna, 14, a freshman, said: "You get to see how other people do it. "If you stay in one school, in one neighborhood, you don't know what the other schools got."

The Seattle plan let students pick among high schools while trying to maintain a 40-60 ratio of whites to nonwhites at each school. A racial "tiebreaker" helped to determine which students were admitted to popular schools that were "oversubscribed."

In 2000-2001, about 300 of 3,000 ninth-grade students were denied the school of their choice because of their race; the racial tiebreaker was discontinued after a group of parents sued.

"We teach our children in the Seattle public schools that people shouldn't be discriminated against," said Kathleen Brose, the president of the group that sued. "Then when they get to ninth grade, we're judging them by the color of their skin."

But a U.S. district judge in Seattle and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Seattle's practice, finding a compelling interest in securing the benefits of diversity.

"We stand for all the school districts in this country that believe Brown v. Board of Education still applies," said school district lawyer Shannon McMinimee.

"Communities are still segregated, either by the history of racism in America or by current circumstances like the affordability of housing. This is about what a school board can do to remedy the effects of past segregation," McMinimee said.

Amy Stuart Wells, a sociology professor at Teachers College of Columbia University, said adults who attended racially diverse schools in their youth believe they are more open-minded and less fearful of other races than peers who went to segregated schools.

While racial tensions of the students' school years were challenging, Wells said, "when you talk to them 20 years later they understand what it did for them. They understand how it helped them in a multiracial society and in a global society."

The cases are Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, 05-908; and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education, 05-915.

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Associated Press writers Gene Johnson in Seattle, Brett Barrouquere in Louisville and Mark Sherman in Washington contributed to this report.