S.F. Drops Bid to Use Race as Student Placement Factor

The Board of Education told a federal judge Friday that it will abandon the effort to use race as a factor in assigning students to city schools, even though district officials say a race-neutral plan will resegregate some schools.

“The plan omits racial and ethnic guidelines and racial and ethnic priorities for African American and Latino students,” said San Francisco Unified School District spokeswoman Elaine Koury. “The district is, however, still committed to diversity and we are going to continue to study the effects of this plan on the diversity of this district.”

The board’s decision came in response to an order by U.S. District Judge William Orrick that the district cannot use race in making school assignments.

Michael Harris, an attorney for the San Francisco chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, said he was “sorely disappointed,” by the district’s decision.

“It’s very clear that this means there will be a number of schools that will have incoming classes that will have extreme racial concentrations,” Harris said. Earlier this week, the NAACP submitted its own plan to Orrick and asked him to call all parties to the case--the NAACP, the district and Chinese American parents who sued the district--together to devise a new assignment plan.

Orrick rejected a district plan last month that would have included race as a factor in making school assignments, and ordered the district to draw up a race-blind formula.

The district tried to come up with a plan that would substitute socioeconomic status and other factors for race, but decided, in the end, to keep in place a race-neutral plan it experimented with this school year. The current plan makes assignments based on factors including whether an incoming student’s sibling attends a school, whether the student is applying to a special program, and whether the family lives in public housing, Koury said.

The current plan was put in place last spring, settling a lawsuit against the district brought by Chinese American parents who said racial balancing unconstitutionally discriminated against Chinese Americans. That settlement overturned one the district reached in the 1970s with the NAACP to end school desegregation.

Koury said the Board of Education has not yet decided whether to appeal Orrick’s ruling.