Ky. school plan case heads to High Court

Brett Barrouquere

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Camera in hand, Rodney Pitts was ready to shoot a high school football game on a recent rainy Friday night.

To Pitts, the match-up between the predominantly black Central High on Louisville’s west side and predominantly white Pleasure Ridge Park High on the city’s south end could have been a view of the past and future of Jefferson County schools.

The U.S. Supreme Court, which convened Oct. 2, has scheduled a Dec. 4 hearing to decide if the nation’s 26th-largest school system can continue to use race in determining where students are assigned to school. A rejection of Louisville’s plan, some say, could result in a return to segregated, neighborhood schools. A decision is expected by June.

“If you go back to neighborhood schools, there’s nothing else in this neighborhood,” Pitts, who is black, said of Central High. “There’s no other school here.”

Attorneys have said the case could produce a landmark decision about whether schools can voluntarily consider students’ race when making assignments in order to maintain diversity.

A variety of groups have filed briefs with the court, including the Bush administration, which is asking the justices to throw out Jefferson County’s student assignment plan, along with a similar plan in Seattle, saying it relies too heavily on race as a factor.

The Louisville school district adopted its current plan in 2000, after a federal judge said the district had eliminated the vestiges of past discrimination after two decades of court-ordered busing.

The current plan allows some student choice while seeking to keep black enrollment at between 15 percent and 50 percent of the population at most schools.

Louisville parent Crystal Meredith challenged the system, which was upheld by a federal judge in Louisville and the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati. Ted Gordon, the Louisville attorney who will argue her case before the high court, said the current system is essentially “a quota” and hasn’t produced better results for students.

“When there’s no improvement in educational outcome and we in Louisville have thrown an estimated $70 million a year at it ... to me, that’s the focal point of the entire argument,” Gordon said.

Attorneys for the 97,000-student district argue that such sorting by race and gender, along with where a student lives and school capacity, is necessary to maintain integrated schools.

Pat Todd, director of student assignment, said the guidelines were meant to keep schools from straying too far from the district’s overall 35 percent black student population.

“Yes, we have problems in education but desegregation did not cause those problems,” said Raoul Cunningham, president of the local NAACP.

To Cassandra and Audreyanna Cosby, the idea of mixing students from around the county in different schools sounds like a good idea.

The sisters, who are black, said school integration provides a social education along with an academic one.

“You get to check out different environments,” said Cassandra, 16, a sophomore at Central High. “It might be more educational to go somewhere else.”

“If you stay in one school, in one neighborhood, you don’t know what the other schools got,” said Audreyanna, 14, a freshman at Central High. “You get to see how other people do it.”

Many of the current parents of high school students went through court-ordered busing. In interviews and at a recent NAACP forum on school desegregation, parents talked of how they don’t want to go back to busing, but there were mixed feelings about the current system.

Shirley Moore, who has one child in school, said there is currently an economic split in schools resulting in primarily black and low-income students going to schools with fewer academic options and ensuring that they get a lesser education.

“Some of these students, just because they get free lunch, doesn’t mean they can’t learn,” said Moore, who is black. “You don’t give them a chance.”

The idea of neighborhood schools sounds appealing to some like Moore, if all the schools are funded and supplied equally. Connie McDonald of Louisville, who has a young son in school, said parents should be able to choose the closest school that’s right for them, regardless of demographics.

“I think if it’s your home school, you should be able to go to it,” said McDonald, who is white. “It doesn’t matter if there’s a quota or what.”

McDonald’s view was echoed by Sonny Wells, whose grandson plays wide receiver for Pleasure Ridge Park. Wells, who is black, said parents and students should be able to decide what school is best for them, not a judge.

“I think it’s unfair the Supreme Court got involved with it,” Wells said.

Dexter Jones of Louisville, who was going to watch a neighbor play for Pleasure Ridge Park, said the current system disrupts the social fabric of neighborhoods the same way busing students across town did.

“They’ve rigged the whole school system,” said Jones, who is white. “How are you going to get a kid to go 20 miles to watch a football game? They got no way to get there.”

Pitts, who went through busing 25 years ago, said the social fabric of neighborhoods will hold up under the current system. Going back to strictly neighborhood schools would be a disaster, Pitts said.

“If you change it, what do you change it to?” Pitts said. “With neighborhood schools, you’d get overcrowding, with 40 or 50 students in a class.”

(Associated Press)