Opinion ID: 792253
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Seattle Public Schools: A Historical Perspective

Text: 5 Seattle's historical struggle with the problem of racial isolation in its public school system provides the context for the District's implementation of the current challenged assignment plan. Seattle is a diverse community. Approximately 70 percent of its residents are white, and 30 percent are nonwhite. Seattle public school enrollment breaks down nearly inversely, with approximately 40 percent white and 60 percent nonwhite students. A majority of the District's white students live in neighborhoods north of downtown, the historically more affluent part of the city. A majority of the city's nonwhite students, including approximately 84 percent of all African-American students, 74 percent of all Asian-American students, 65 percent of all Latino students and 51 percent of all Native-American students, live south of downtown. 6 The District operates 10 four-year public high schools. Four are located north of downtown — Ballard, Ingraham, Nathan Hale and Roosevelt; five are located south of downtown — Chief Sealth, Cleveland, Franklin, Garfield and Rainier Beach; one is located west of downtown — West Seattle. For over 40 years, the District has made efforts to attain and maintain desegregated schools and avoid the racial isolation or concentration that would ensue if school assignments replicated Seattle's segregated housing patterns. Since the 1960s, while courts around the country ordered intransigent school districts to desegregate, Seattle's School Board voluntarily explored measures designed to end de facto segregation in the schools and provide all of the District's students with access to diverse and equal educational opportunities. 7 In the late 1950s and early 1960s, school assignments were made strictly on the basis of neighborhood. 3 In 1962, Garfield High School reported 64 percent minority enrollment and it accommodated 75 percent of all African-American students. Meanwhile, the eight high schools serving other major areas of the city remained more than 95 percent white. 8 The District responded to this imbalance, and racial tensions in the de facto segregated schools, in various ways. In the early 1960s, the District first experimented with small-scale exchange programs in which handfulls of students switched high schools for five-week periods. In 1963, expanding on this concept, the District implemented a Voluntary Racial Transfer program through which a student could transfer to any school with available space if the transfer would improve the racial balance at the receiving school. In the 1970s, the District increased its efforts again, this time adopting a desegregation plan in the middle schools that requested volunteers to transfer between minority- and majority-dominated neighborhood schools and called for mandatory transfers when the number of volunteers was insufficient, though this portion of the plan was never implemented. The District also took steps to desegregate Garfield High School by changing its educational program, improving its facilities and eliminating special transfers that had previously allowed white students to leave Garfield. Finally, for the 1977-78 school year, the District instituted a magnet-school program. According to the District's history: 9 While it appeared evident that the addition of magnet programs would not in itself desegregate the Seattle schools, there was supportive evidence that voluntary strategies, magnet and non-magnet, could be significant components of a more comprehensive desegregation plan. 10 History of Desegregation at 32. 11 By the 1977-78 school year, segregation had increased: Franklin was 78 percent minority, Rainier Beach 58 percent, Cleveland 76 percent and Garfield 65 percent. Other high schools ranged from 9 percent to 23 percent minority enrollment. 12 In the spring of 1977, the Seattle branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) filed a complaint with the United States Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, alleging that Seattle's School Board had acted to further racial segregation in the city's schools. Several other organizations, principally the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), formally threatened to file additional actions if the District failed to adopt a mandatory desegregation plan. When the District agreed to develop such a plan, the Office of Civil Rights concomitantly agreed to delay its investigation, and the ACLU agreed to delay filing a lawsuit. 13 During the summer of 1977, the District and community representatives reviewed five model plans. Ultimately, the District incorporated elements of each model into its final desegregation plan, adopted in December 1977 and known as the Seattle Plan. The Seattle Plan divided the district into zones, within which majority-dominated elementary schools were paired with minority-dominated elementary schools to achieve desegregation. Mandatory high school assignments were linked to elementary school assignments, although various voluntary transfer options were available. With the Seattle Plan, 14 Seattle became the first major city to adopt a comprehensive desegregation program voluntarily without a court order. By doing so the District maintained local control over its desegregation plan and was able to adopt and implement a plan which in the eyes of the District best met the needs of Seattle students and the Seattle School District. 15 History of Desegregation at 36-37. Opponents of the Seattle Plan immediately passed a state initiative to block its implementation, but the Supreme Court ultimately declared the initiative unconstitutional. Washington v. Seattle Sch. Dist. No. 1, 458 U.S. 457, 470, 102 S.Ct. 3187, 73 L.Ed.2d 896 (1982). 16 The Seattle Plan furthered the District's school desegregation goals, but its operation was unsatisfactory in other ways. 4 In 1988, a decade after its implementation, the District abandoned the Seattle Plan and adopted a new plan that it referred to as controlled choice. Under the controlled choice plan, schools were grouped into clusters that met state and district desegregation guidelines, and families were permitted to rank schools within the relevant cluster, increasing the predictability of assignments. Because of Seattle's housing patterns, the District's planners explained that it was impossible to fashion clusters in a geographically contiguous manner; some cluster schools were near students' homes, but others were in racially and culturally different neighborhoods. Findings and Conclusions at 30-31. Although roughly 70 percent of students received their first choices, the controlled choice plan still resulted in mandatory busing for 16 percent of the District's students. 17 In 1994, the Board directed District staff to devise a new plan for all grade levels to simplify assignments, reduce costs and increase community satisfaction, among other things. The guiding factors were to be choice, diversity and predictability. Staff developed four basic options, including the then-existing controlled choice plan, a regional choice plan, a neighborhood assignment plan with a provision for voluntary, integration-positive transfers and an open choice plan. 18 Board members testified that they considered all the options as they related to the District's educational goals — with special emphasis, at the secondary school level, on the goals of choice and racial diversity. Neighborhood and regional plans were viewed as unduly limiting student choice, on which the District placed high value because student choice was seen to increase parental involvement in the schools and promote improvements in quality through a marketplace model. The District sought to maintain its commitment to racially integrated education by establishing diversity goals while moving away from the rigid desegregation guidelines and mandatory assignments prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s. 19 The Board adopted the current open choice plan (the Plan) for the 1998-99 school year. Under the Plan, students entering the ninth grade may select any high school in the District. They are assigned, where possible, to the school they list as their first choice. If too many students choose the same school as their first choice, resulting in oversubscription, the District assigns students to each oversubscribed school based on a series of tiebreakers. If a student is not admitted to his or her first choice school as a result of the tiebreakers, the District tries to assign the student to his or her second choice school, and so on. Students not assigned to one of their chosen schools are assigned to the closest school with space available; students who list more choices are less likely to receive one of these mandatory assignments. The most recent version of the Plan, which the School Board reviews annually, is for the 2001-02 school year and is the subject of this litigation.