White Parents Win Ruling on Pupil Transfers

A group of white parents won a preliminary Superior Court injunction Wednesday barring the Los Angeles Unified School District from denying student transfers to predominantly white schools that the parents said are closer to day-care facilities.

Last June, the school board angered parents when it decided to uphold a policy to deny or rescind transfers if the district found that they would contribute to racial segregation in a school. One reason for the decision was the suspicion that some white parents were requesting transfers because they wanted their children to attend schools with higher white enrollment.

About 300 students attending 10 schools located on the Westside, in the San Fernando Valley and in the harbor area had been in danger of losing their transfer permits. Parents of about 250 students sued the district July 8, charging that the transfer policy was unfair and violated a state child-care law.

To discourage racial segregation, current district policy prohibits transfers to schools that are 70% or more white.

Ronald Gold, attorney for the parents, said the preliminary ruling will help working parents who need the flexibility to choose schools on the basis of their proximity to quality child-care facilities.

“This is a big victory,” he said. “What we are trying to do is stop the latchkey situation and allow parents who have to work to go to work without fear that their children are not being properly taken care of.”

Superior Court Judge Bonnie Lee Martin wrote in the order granting the preliminary injunction that children who have permits to attend a school outside their neighborhood to be closer to their child-care providers faced “irreparable harm” if they had to change schools in September and lose touch with their school friends.

Furthermore, Martin said, although the court was not prohibiting the district from “properly” enacting rules setting integration standards for transfer permits, adopting such rules “will take time (and) . . . could not be completed before the school year” begins in September.

The school board may have acted improperly, the judge said, because it authorized district staff to use ethnicity as the sole criterion for denial of permits during a closed meeting last June--a possible violation of the state’s Brown Act, which requires elected bodies to make most of their decisions during public sessions.

Action Defended

School district attorney Richard K. Mason defended the school board’s action. He said, “We believe the judge’s order is in error” and the district was right to take steps to ensure that it was not creating “segregated white schools” through the issuance of transfers.

The 10 schools have white enrollments that range between 71% and 90.3%.

School board President Roberta Weintraub, who represents the East San Fernando Valley, applauded the court injunction.

“I’m really thrilled the parents won on this. . . . It put these people through a terrible situation.”

School board member Jackie Goldberg, however, said she found the court’s action “odd and distressing,” particularly in light of the fact that the district has granted transfer permits to the majority of parents who asked for exemptions on the basis of child-care needs.

According to Joseph Fandey, an administrative consultant in the district’s student attendance office, over the past few months, the district approved more than 90% of the approximately 200 appeals filed by parents since the policy was announced. Although the district initially suspected that many transfer requests stemmed from parents’ wanting to send their children to schools with higher white enrollments, Fandey said a case-by-case review found that was “not as big an issue as it had seemed.”

Nearly all the appeals were granted because parents demonstrated a “desperate” need for day care that was close to school or to the parents’ jobs, he said.

The lawsuit may go to trial by the end of the year, but Gold, the lawyer for the parents, said he hopes the dispute can be settled out of court. Mason said it will be up to the school board to decide how the matter should be handled.