San Diegans Challenge Perpetual
Court Assignment of Pupils,
Emanating from Carlin v. Board of Education,
To Restore Local Control
According to the Constitution

illustrated that under the proposed plan a child able to walk to a neighborhood school could again have less priority to attend that school than a VEEP child, bused free from many miles away, by reason of racially gerrymandered school boundaries to accomplish racial balancing.

On January 25 the Board adopted a new Integration Plan headlined “S.D. magnet schools will drop race as a criterion.” Id., Appendix 4. Regardless of the objections, apparently this plan will use boundaries as racially clustered for magnet school assignments and as drawn by the District for VEEP school assignments. Thereby, applicants to schools participating in the magnet and VEEP programs will be given priority according to their residences, as may be gleaned from a close reading of the news report of the plan in Appendix 4 to Liberate Public Schools, and the following statement by the District's integration program manager reflecting the relation of race to the residence of applicants (Id., para.6):

The challenge has been in creating a program that eliminates race as a criteria but would not segregate our schools... I think you will find a close correlation across the country between race, socioeconomics and geography. [emphasis added]

Thus, unless corrected, San Diego students may await their assignments in coming years under a program whose manager states it is eliminating “race as a criteria (sic)”, but in which it comes into play by reason of its correlation with “socioeconomics and geography.” The implementation of such a program should be subjected to close scrutiny under applicable facts and law.
 

Study of the Facts

Salient facts faced the Board at the end of the Carlin case. The population of the classified “White,” majority-treated, students had dropped from 76% at the start of the case in 1967 to about 30% at its end on July 1, 1998; and that of the classified “Non-White,” minority-treated, students had increased conversely. District records showed that “African-Americans” and “Hispanics” grouped in the “Non-White” category were not testing academically as high as students classified as “Whites,” following racial balancing at the demand of the Carlin Plaintiff Class for
 

Carlin v. Board of Education, San Diego Unified School District,
San Diego Superior Court No. 303800 (1967-1998)
San Diego, California
 

Board of Education v. Superior Court, 61 Cal.App.4th 411 (Feb.1998)
[conclusion of Carlin v. Board of Education]
San Diego, California
 

— Handbook: Challenge Five, pages 65 - 74 —