District Poised to Adjust Its Ethnic Policy

Revisions to a controversial policy designed to preserve ethnic balance at its campuses could win tentative approval at tonight’s meeting of the Huntington Beach Union High School District.

Last year, the policy blocked a number of white students seeking to transfer from Ocean View High School to another campus because there weren’t any white students to replace them.

The revised policy would give students more leeway to transfer among district schools, but would still keep an ethnic balance quota.

Opponents, including one school board member, are offended by the revision. They question the constitutionality of the policy and maintain that only complete elimination of race as an issue will do.

Administrators “will not give up the quota altogether, so they’re ratcheting it down,” complained school trustee Matthew Harper.

“The proposed policy still provides a racial barrier to school choice,” he said. “What we have now is: Some students are allowed to choose schools and some students are not, based on where they live and what color they are.”

If approved, the proposed revision would allow the 52 students on a waiting list to transfer from Ocean View when school starts in the fall. The families had previously been told that their transfers were denied.

Sandra Studer’s 14-year-old son, Ryan, is one of the students hoping to transfer from Ocean View, so he can play baseball with his friends at Edison High. While the new policy would benefit her son, Studer still wants ethnicity eliminated as a consideration.

“We’re trying to raise our son to know that everyone’s equal,” she fumed. “But we’re having a hard time explaining why, because he’s Caucasian, he can’t transfer out.

“I understand the value of ethnic balance, but Orange County is not ethnically balanced,” she pointed out. “The Ocean View area is not ethnically balanced. I don’t know how they expect to balance the schools.”

The current policy bars student transfers when a school’s white population--excluding Latinos--falls below 50%. The revision would kick in when a school’s white population falls 15 percentage points below the district average of 51%. Individual schools range from 72% white at Pacific Coast High School to a low of 18% white at Westminster High.

Under the revised rules, schools where white populations fall below 36% would limit transfers. Only Westminster High would meet that threshold.

“The law says we need to keep our district from being segregated, and we’re making an attempt to do that,” said Jerry White, the district’s curriculum director. “We’re doing our best to get a plan together, and we will come together in November to look at it again.”

The district policy was instituted in 1993 at Westminster High after administrators concluded that state law required them to watch and preserve ethnic diversity in schools to avoid racially segregated campuses. Westminster is home to Little Saigon, and some local schools are predominantly Asian American.

But other precedents have been set since then, including U.S. Supreme Court decisions and the state’s Proposition 209, which outlawed affirmative action in government.

Harper said he will propose eliminating the ethnic balance quota altogether.

“Both the existing and proposed racial quota schemes are not constitutional under the state or federal constitutions,” he said.

School officials are still hoping for more clarification, possibly from a lawsuit pending against Pasadena schools, which consider race as an admissions factor for certain programs.

“There is federal case law saying you can’t have open enrollment policies that advance segregated schools,” White said. “But they don’t tell you how to put that into practice.”