Resignation Over Admissions Policy Splits Seattle

Like most big-city school districts across the country, Seattle years ago gave up on its mandatory cross-town busing program. But the city never gave up on diversity as an ideal.

Race remained an important--and often determining--factor in who gets to go to the city’s best schools.

This year, 50 of the 367 freshmen at Ballard High--so popular that it has 250 students on a waiting list--got there because they are black, Asian, Latino or Native American. Ballard High has a 43% minority enrollment in the middle of one of the whitest neighborhoods in the city.

Last month, a federal appeals court struck down the Seattle School District’s racial preference program. Ballard Principal David Engle called an assembly and announced that he was resigning rather than comply.

Engle’s decision has split this traditionally liberal city. Some have applauded his commitment to ideals while others have accused him of walking away from his responsibilities. Engle, 53, said he was drawing on the example of Rosa Parks, the black woman who helped inspire the civil rights movement by refusing to sit at the back of a bus in segregated Alabama in 1955.

“I want to demonstrate to you how to peacefully and lawfully act on the courage of your convictions for the greater good,” Engle told his students, who first sat in stunned silence, then cheered. “It’s meant to change the moral, political and symbolic landscape of the city. I can’t do it alone.”

The court order, Engle predicted, would transform Ballard’s student body from “a rich, representative mosaic of Seattle’s young people to ... very monocultural.”

The problem in Seattle is one of geography and politics. Geography because there are no high schools in the middle of the city, and students who don’t go to a school near home usually are in for a long drive. Politics because Washington in 1998 passed a voter initiative similar to California’s Proposition 209, which bans racial preferences in public employment, contracting and education.

School administrators had figured they were immune from Initiative 200, which took aim at preferences that denied white students admission to competitive programs, such as the University of Washington Law School.

Seattle schools, the district argued, shuffled students but excluded no one from an education.

Attorney Harry Korrell, who represented the parents’ group that sued, said it isn’t enough to say that all students get to go to school.

“I guess you’d have to ask Rosa Parks,” Korrell said. “I mean, everybody on that bus got to ride the bus, some people had to sit in the back. We thought that constituted discrimination on the basis of race.”

Opponents say many students were shut out of good schools close to their homes and diverted to inferior schools an hour or more away because of their skin color.

In the days since Engle’s resignation, the discussion of race in the city’s schools has taken on an intensity that has long been absent from the debate.

Lauded, Vilified

Over Decision

Students have alternately hugged Engle in the halls and criticized him for abandoning the school system when it needed him most. Parents have written letters, some saying the schools were better off without administrators pushing desegregation (“Good riddance,” said one), some applauding (“With the heroes of New York, you are a hero in Seattle,” wrote another).

Teachers have talked of mounting a civil disobedience action to skirt the district’s enrollment process and invite minority students turned away from Ballard directly into their classrooms.

Normally dispassionate school administrators are rallying behind the principal.

“They [the district] can take as bold a step as he’s taking!” said Colleen Walls, Ballard’s soft-spoken vice principal. “Defy the decision! What are they going to do? Put us all in jail?”

Parents who won the victory in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals shrugged at Engle’s resignation. “He’s entitled to his opinion, but we still believe that there will be diversity without the racial tiebreaker,” said Kathleen Brose, president of Parents Involved in Community Schools, the group of about 60 parents who sued the district.

Only a few years ago, Ballard was among the grungiest facilities in the district, with a crumbling building and poor academic record. But Ballard now has a new campus and several new academic programs, including specialized academies for maritime studies and biotechnology, that make it the most sought-after high school in Seattle.

Brose and several of her neighbors had hoped to send their children to Ballard, the closest to their homes. In part because of the racial tiebreaker, Brose’s daughter was instead offered two other schools. One didn’t have an orchestra (her daughter plays cello), the other required her to get on three different city buses for more than an hour and a half just to get to school.

“We tried everything. We tried logic, we tried reasoning, we tried crying,” Brose said. “I just felt like, this isn’t fair.”

Seattle was the biggest city in the country to voluntarily adopt a busing program to end segregation two decades ago; most other school districts were forced into it by the courts.

Tiebreaker System

Poses a Problem

An African American school superintendent, John Stanford, phased out the last vestiges of the mandatory busing program in 1997 and introduced a free-choice, market-based enrollment system for the city’s 10 high schools.

Now, students can apply to any high school in town, and the high schools offer programs to lure students and the state money that comes with them.

The problem comes when a school attracts more applicants than it has room for. In that case, race is brought in as a tiebreaker. In schools that are substantially outside the school district’s overall racial profile--60% minority and 40% white--students who help bring the school back into racial balance get priority.

In fact, there are three tiebreakers. Admitted first are students who have a sibling at the school. Next are students who help bring the school into racial balance. The remaining available spots are given to applicants according to the proximity of their homes to the school.

Racial preference comes into play at three high schools in the city: at Ballard and at Garfield, in the north, where minority students get an edge, and at Franklin in the south, where white students get priority.

Racial preference is used at elementary and middle schools as well, but students are assured of a spot in a school near their homes. Overall, officials said 200 to 500 students this year were assigned to a school on the basis of race.

The district says the tiebreaker is not really a racial preference. But the appeals court disagreed.

“While this may well be a reasonable policy choice by the school district,” Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain wrote, “the citizens of Washington have collectively decided that ... the price of that diversity--that some students are told that they may not attend their high school of choice simply because their skin is the wrong color--is too high.”

The district has filed a petition for a rehearing. But the decision echoes a number of court decisions in recent years that have stepped away from the landmark court desegregation orders of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, and moved to sharply limit the instances in which school districts can use such racial preferences.

In California, Proposition 209 has outlawed some efforts such as Seattle’s, but not all. A federal judge in 2000 barred Pasadena from using race, ethnicity and gender as factors in some school assignments, but Beverly Hills decided it would not have to scrap its voluntary recruitment program for minorities.

Under the court’s order, 52 minority students who would have been admitted to Ballard next year now will have to go to schools nearer their homes.

Engle, who joined the Seattle district in 2000 from nearby Bellevue, said he realized quickly that the response to the ruling would likely be a demand from the community “to just hunker down and make it work, David.” It was an alternative that made him feel increasingly uncomfortable.

Quitting, he thought, might set an example for his students. He discussed it with his wife, a fourth-grade teacher in another district. They realized they probably would have to sell their home, but both agreed that that would be part of the point.

“For me, one of the biggest benefits to the kids has been seeing adults make a hard decision and act on their values,” Engle said. “To do that, I had to have a hard landing ... a clean break.”