Students, schools fear end of racial diversity

By Andrea Hopkins

LOUISVILLE, Kentucky (Reuters) - Seventeen-year-old Quantae Williams doesn't understand why the U.S. Supreme Court struck down his school district's racial diversity program.

He now dreads the prospect of leaving his mixed-race high school in suburban Louisville and returning to the poor black downtown schools where he used to get in fights.

"I'm doing good in J'town. They should just leave it the way it is," said Williams, using a fond nickname for suburban Jeffersontown High School, where he's bused every day from his downtown neighborhood.

"Everything is mixed, we get along well. If I go where all my friends go, I'll start getting in trouble again," Williams said as he took a break from his summer job sorting clothing donations for poor families.

Last month's 5-4 ruling by the Supreme Court struck down programs that were started voluntarily in Louisville and Seattle, using race as a factor to determine public school placements. The court's decision has left schools across the country scrambling to find a way to protect diversity in their classrooms.

Critics have called the decision the biggest threat to the ideals of the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education case, which outlawed racial segregation in U.S. public schools and led to often divisive efforts at many schools, including busing kids from black schools to white schools, and vice versa.

With students already assigned to schools for the academic year that begins in September, few will be immediately affected by the Supreme Court decision. In Jefferson County, officials said it could be two years before a new plan is in place, leaving most students in their current schools.

But with the old rules overturned, many parents, students and officials worry that gains in diversity may be lost for good.

BUSING HARDSHIP

"I know (the busing) is a hardship sometimes for a few parents but in the long run their kids are going to school with a multitude of different types of kids and I think that's society, that's how we should be raised," said Traci Priddy, president of the Jefferson County Parent Teacher Association.

The Supreme Court's new conservative majority declared that taking race into account to integrate a school is just as bad as using race to segregate one. Justice Clarence Thomas, the court's sole black member, agreed.

Under Jefferson County's voluntary program, racial guidelines were used to keep black student enrollment at most schools between 15 percent and 50 percent. That often meant busing black kids to suburban schools and trying to lure white students to downtown schools by creating "magnet" programs with exceptional math, computer, language or arts departments.

Some schools remain majority black, however, and some parents resented having their children bused to a lower-performing school in the name of racial diversity.

Crystal Meredith sued in 2003 when her 5-year-old son was refused a place in his preferred schools because he was white.

"Going to the U.S. Supreme Court is not really what I had in mind," Meredith said after the decision. "But when I tried to make sure my son got an education that was the best fit for him, and the Jefferson County Public Schools denied him that because of his race, the Supreme Court is exactly where I had to go to keep my promise."