Opinion ID: 792253
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Necessity of the Plan

Text: 89 The District argues that the compelling interests that it seeks are directly served by the race-based tiebreaker. The tiebreaker allows the District to balance students' and parents' choices among high schools with its broader compelling interests — achieving the educational and social benefits of diversity and the benefits specific to the secondary school context, and discouraging a return to enrollment patterns based on Seattle's racially segregated housing pattern. 90
91 When the District moved from its controlled choice plan to the current Plan, see supra Part I.A, it predicted that families would tend to choose schools close to their homes. Indeed, this feature was seen as a positive way to increase parental involvement. However, unfettered choice — especially with tiebreakers based on neighborhood or distance from a school — created the risk that Seattle's high school enrollment would again do no more than reflect its segregated housing patterns. See supra Part II.C.2. 92 It is this de facto residential segregation across a white/nonwhite axis that the District has battled historically and that it seeks to ameliorate by making the integration tiebreaker a part of its open choice Plan. 32 The District, mindful of both Seattle's history and future, appropriately places its focus here. In the 2001-02 school year, the integration tiebreaker operated in three high schools (that is, three high schools were oversubscribed and deviated by more than 15 percent from the ratio of white to nonwhite students district-wide). The integration tiebreaker served to alter the imbalance in the schools in which it operated in a minimally intrusive manner. The tiebreaker, therefore, successfully achieved the District's compelling interests. 93
94 Parents argue that the District paints with too broad a brush by distinguishing only between white and nonwhite students, without taking into account the diversity within the nonwhite group. However, the District's choice to increase diversity along the white/nonwhite axis is rooted in Seattle's history and current reality of de facto segregation resulting from Seattle's segregated housing patterns. The white/nonwhite distinction is narrowly tailored to prioritize movement of students from the north of the city to the south of city and vice versa. This white/nonwhite focus is also consistent with the history of public school desegregation measures throughout the country, as reflected in a current federal regulation defining [m]inority group isolation as a condition in which minority group children constitute more than 50 percent of the enrollment of the school, without distinguishing among the various categories included within the definition of minority group. 34 C.F.R. § 280.4(b); see Grutter, 539 U.S. at 316, 123 S.Ct. 2325 (noting that the law school sought to enroll a critical mass of minority students, a category that included African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans); Comfort, 418 F.3d at 22 (By increasing diversity along the white/nonwhite axis, the Plan reduced racial tensions and produced positive educational benefits. Narrow tailoring does not require that Lynn ensure diversity among every racial and ethnic subgroup as well. ) (emphasis added). 95