Bostons Children First v. Boston School Committee

• Decision Date: 23 April 2003
• Docket Number: No. CIV.A. 99-11330-RGS.,CIV.A. 99-11330-RGS.
• Citation: 260 F.Supp.2d 318
• Parties: BOSTON'S CHILDREN FIRST, et al., v. BOSTON SCHOOL COMMITTEE, et al.
• Court: U.S. District Court — District of Massachusetts

260 F.Supp.2d 318

BOSTON'S CHILDREN FIRST, et al., v. BOSTON SCHOOL COMMITTEE, et al.

No. CIV.A. 99-11330-RGS.

United States District Court, D. Massachusetts.

April 23, 2003.

Chester Darling, Robert Roughsedge, Boston, MA, Michael Williams, for plaintiffs.

Frances S. Cohen, Dechert LLP, Diane diIanni, Hill & Barlow, PC, Merita A. Hopkins, Boston Police Department, Boston, MA, Erica Hovani, for defendants.

FINDINGS OF FACT, RULINGS OF LAW, AND ORDER OF JUDGMENT AFTER A NONJURY TRIAL

STEARNS, District Judge.

INTRODUCTION

This case may possibly be the concluding chapter in thirty years of litigation over the effort to desegregate the Boston public schools. It began in 1999, when the parents of ten white school children challenged the preferences given to black and other minority students under a "controlled choice" school assignment plan implemented by the defendant Boston School Committee in the 1980's. Plaintiffs won a victory, when, in response to their lawsuit, the School Committee voted to eliminate racial preferments in school admissions for the 2000-2001 school year. Despite the School Committee's vote, the litigation continued, plaintiffs claiming that vestiges of the discriminatory policy persisted in the new admissions plan. Plaintiffs focused on the School Committee's decision to reduce the number of seats allocated to students living within walking distance of neighborhood schools, a decision that plaintiffs contend discriminates against white students. Plaintiffs maintain that the School Committee's justifications for the decision, preserving parental choice and promoting diversity, are nothing more than euphemistic camouflage for an unconstitutional policy of racial balancing.

BACKGROUND

The Controlled Choice Student Assignment Plan (Old Choice Plan) was a near if distant relation of the original Boston school desegregation order entered by Judge W. Arthur Garrity in 1972. See Morgan v. Hennigan, 379 F.Supp. 410, 484 (D.Mass.1974), aff'd, 509 F.2d 580 (1st Cir. 1974). Underlying Judge Garrity's order was a finding that Boston school officials, acting under the direction of the City's elected School Committee, had deliberately gerrymandered school assignments to maintain a dual public school system. In a series of remedial orders, Judge Garrity divided the City of Boston into eight school districts,¹ each with a student enrollment that reflected the percentage of black, white, and "other" minority students found in the then existing school-age population.² Morgan v. Kerrigan, 401 F.Supp. 216, 252-255 (D.Mass.1975). Judge Garrity's order also set aside a minimum of 35 percent of the seats in matriculating classes at Boston's premier examination schools— Boston Latin School, Boston Latin Academy, and Boston Technical High School— for black and other minority students. Id. at 258.

After seven years of intensive supervision, the district court in 1982 began a "transitional course of disengagement" from the school system, while at the same time ordering that racial balances in the eight school districts be maintained indefinitely. The court delegated primary responsibility for monitoring compliance with its orders to the State Board of Education, which was required to submit semiannual reports on the progress of school integration to the court.

In 1987, the Court of Appeals ruled that the School Committee had achieved "maximum practicable desegregation," and had, as a matter of law, "attained unitary status in school assignments." See Morgan v. Nucci 831 F.2d at 326. Consequently, the Court found that there was no need for a continued "injunction requiring adherence to a particular formula for student assignments." Id. It did, however, warn the School Committee against taking any action that might "necessitate a return trip to federal court by school plaintiffs."³ Id at 326 n. 19.

Freed from court oversight in the matter of school assignments, the School Committee in December of 1988 adopted the Old Choice Plan, which took effect in the September 1989 school year. Its authors, Michael Alves and Charles Willie, termed the plan as "racially fair and providing] students with numerous school choices." They criticized the pre-1988 assignment plan, which had developed topsy-turvy from the court's serial orders in the Morgan case, as "too complex and lack[ing in] predictability." More fundamentally, because of demographic changes, the eight court-created school districts had lost their equivalence "in terms of racial and ethnic diversity, neighborhood cohesion and range of school facilities and programmatic options." The substitute plan devised by Alves and Willie organized Boston's (then) seventy-five elementary and twenty-one middle schools into three Master Zones: the East Zone, the North Zone, and the West Zone.⁴ The Zones were drawn along major arteries with the view of keeping traditional neighborhoods intact. Each Zone was administered by a superintendent whose staff included specialists in bilingual education, special education, curriculum development, in-service training, and student transportation. The plan called for a Parent Information and Student Assignment Center to be established in each Zone to guide parents through the school assignment process. Parent Councils and School Improvement and Planning Councils were also created to encourage parental involvement in school affairs.

Under the Old Choice Plan, students (or more realistically, their parents) could apply to any school in the Zone in which they resided, or to citywide magnet programs, such as Young Achievers or the Mission Hill School. Assignments were (and are) made in kindergarten, first, sixth and ninth grades by weighing the following factors: (1) how the applicant ranked the school in order of choice; (2) whether a sibling was already attending the school; (3) whether the applicant lived within the school's walk zone (that is, within a one mile radius of an elementary school or a 1.5 mile radius of a middle school);⁵ (4) whether the applicant had been previously enrolled in the school on a "temporary" basis; and, all else being equal, (5) by the tie-breaking strength of the applicant's computer-assigned random number.

The trump card, however, was race. No matter how an applicant scored, if a school's prospective student population would by his or her admission cause a deviation of 15 percent or more from the "ideal racial percentages" calculated for the student's Zone, the seat was given to a more "deserving" applicant who fit the desired racial criterion. ("Ideal racial percentages," as defined by the authors of the Old Choice Plan, mirrored the racial and ethnic composition of the then existing student population in each Zone). The Old Choice Plan also perpetuated the district court's order reserving 35 percent of the seats in the examination schools for black and other minority candidates.

From its inauguration in the 1989 school year, until the filing of this lawsuit in 1999, the Old Choice Plan remained largely intact, despite dramatic shifts in the demographics of the Boston school population. The percentage of enrolled white students dropped nearly in half from 24 percent to 14 percent,⁶ while the minority student population, which had been predominately black, absorbed a significant number of Hispanic and Asian students, as well as the children of new immigrants from South America, Central America, the Caribbean, the Cape Verde Islands, and Eastern Europe.

Change began in 1995, when Julia McLaughlin, a disappointed applicant to Boston Latin School, successfully challenged the constitutionality of the minority set-aside policy in the examination schools. See McLaughlin v. Boston School Committee, 938 F.Supp. 1001 (D.Mass.1996). Although the School Committee thereafter rescinded the regime of rigid quotas, it substituted a complex admissions formula, which while admitting half of the examination school candidates purely on merit, chose the remainder according to the proportional presence of five defined racial and ethnic groups in a "qualified applicants pool." In August of 1997, Sarah Wessmann, who had been denied admission to the Boston Latin School under the new formula, challenged the formula in federal court.⁷ In November of 1998, the Court of Appeals agreed with Sarah that any use of race as an admissions determinant offended the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. More specifically, the Court rejected the School Committee's argument that the new policy did not, in fact, result in group favoritism, as the exact racial and ethnic composition of the qualified applicants pool fluctuated from year to year, and therefore resulted in no set preference for any one group.

This assertion leads nowhere, for the manner in which the Policy functions is fundamentally at odds with the equal protection guarantee that citizens will be treated "as individuals, not as simply components of a racial, religious, sexual or national class." Miller v. Johnson, 515 U.S. 900, 911, 115 S.Ct. 2475, 132 L.Ed.2d 762 (1995) (citations and internal quotation marks omitted). Even though we may not know before the fact which individuals from which racial/ethnic groups will be affected, we do know that someone from some group will be benefitted and a different someone from a different group will be burdened.

Wessmann v. Gittens, 160 F.3d 790, 794 (1st Cir.1998).

On June 21, 1999, encouraged by the decision in the Wessmann case, plaintiffs brought this action challenging the School Committee's practice of structuring school admissions according to "ideal racial percentages." Plaintiffs, in addition to seeking damages and equitable relief, sought a declaration that the racial preferences awarded under the Old Choice Plan violated the federal constitutional guarantee of equal protection as well as the rights of white school children under art. Ill of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights.⁸ Plaintiffs sought a permanent...