When Public Schools Aren't Color-Blind

Stephanie Brown admits that moving from a small Kentucky town into sprawling Louisville made her a "very paranoid" mother-- so much so that she won't let her kids play in the front yard unless she's with them. But she willingly puts Joe, 8, and Julianna, 6, on a bus every day for the 75-min. ride to a school in a rundown, mostly black neighborhood. The bus picks her kids up in their mostly white suburb at 7:30 a.m. and doesn't bring them back until 5 p.m. "It was a very hard thing to put my baby girl on a bus and let her go out into the world with people I don't know," says Brown, who is white.

Some 58,000 children crisscross Jefferson County on school buses in much the same manner, with 1 out of 7 of these kids traveling an hour or more each way. What's more, most of their parents--Brown included --are happy with the system. So much to-ing and fro-ing is a result of the school district's generally popular racial guidelines, which aim to keep the percentage of African Americans in any one school from falling below 15% or rising above 50%. The district as a whole is about one-third black.

Parents aren't simply bystanders in this numbers game. They can apply for the schools they want their child to attend--many have magnet programs that make it worth going that extra mile--and 92% of families wind up with their first or second choice. Even if some don't get what they ask for, race is never the sole factor in how assignments are made. "We look at choices first, we look at siblings, we look at capacity," says Pat Todd, the district's student-assignment director. "Race is way down the list."

The system, which has been in place for a decade, has made Jefferson County one of the most integrated school districts in the country. But if Crystal Meredith, a single mom who was told her son could not transfer to another elementary school because he is white, has her way, the whole thing will be dismantled. And plenty of critics agree that it should be. Meredith and others contend that the guidelines amount to an unconstitutional quota system. So Jefferson County finds itself in an ironic position. After years of court-ordered desegregation, the school district will appear before the U.S. Supreme Court next Monday, arguing that it should be allowed to use the same system voluntarily.

Jefferson County is one of two cases that will help the Supreme Court decide how--or if--race can be used to deploy kids across a school district. The court next week will also consider whether Seattle can continue to use a student's race as one of several tiebreakers when too many kids seek admission to the same high school. Taken together, these cases could represent, as Georgetown law professor James Forman puts it, "the last gasp of the integration movement."