Tentative Deal Reached in School Desegregation Suit

Chinese American parents challenging racially based admissions in San Francisco’s school desegregation program reached a tentative settlement with the school district and the NAACP on Tuesday, the day their suit was to go to trial.

U.S. District Judge William Orrick ordered details kept confidential until a hearing today on preliminary approval of the settlement. But participants’ comments indicated that limits on racial and ethnic groups at each school in the 63,000-student district would be repealed. The limits were part of a 1983 court order.

The agreement is “a balanced resolution that achieves the objectives that plaintiffs in this case set,” said Daniel Girard, lawyer for three Chinese-American students and their parents, who filed the suit in 1994.

“This is definitely worth the fight,” said Charlene Loen, whose 14-year-old son, plaintiff Patrick Wong, was denied admission to elite Lowell High School in 1994 because the school then required higher test scores from Chinese Americans than other ethnic groups.

That policy has been changed, but the court order still has the effect of curbing Lowell’s Chinese American enrollment, the largest of any group. Wong, 18, now attends UC Irvine.

The 1983 order, which resolved a 1978 discrimination suit by the NAACP, contained a 45% ceiling on any racial or ethnic group at a school. The limit is 40% at alternative or magnet schools; those include Lowell, which has an entrance exam and counts Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and the late Gov. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown among its alumni.

A draft settlement that was brought to Orrick earlier in the day would prohibit assigning students based on race or ethnicity but would let the district consider their socioeconomic status, said Patrick Manshardt, lawyer for the State Board of Education, who saw the draft but was not part of the negotiations.

The settlement comes at a time of increasing judicial hostility to race-based admissions. In November, a federal appeals court struck down race as an admissions factor at the prestigious Boston Latin School, a ruling the school board decided not to appeal.