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Court's ruling against race-based school policy won't affect Q-C

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By Sheena Dooley QUAD-CITY TIMES | Thursday, June 28, 2007 |

Local educators say a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that school districts cannot use race to decide which buildings students attend will not affect the way they do business.

Most said, however, they were not familiar with the decision.

“It really hasn’t been something we have been paying attention to,” said Kay Ingham, assistant superintendent for pupil personnel services for the Rock Island-Milan School District. “At this point, we don’t use race as a determining factor for transfer requests.”

Students in Rock Island, Bettendorf and Davenport attend their neighborhood schools but have the option to transfer. District officials do not look at a student’s ethnicity when granting those requests.

However, Horace Mann Choice School in Rock Island uses race as one of its top deciders when filling open slots, Ingham said. Created in 1991, the school was meant to attract a mix of students that reflected the district’s overall ethnic make-up.

In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that plans in the Seattle and Louisville, Ky., school districts to ensure racial diversity in their schools were unconstitutional. Both districts created plans that categorized students by race and then used that information to determine which schools they attended.

Parents who want to send their children to Horace Mann must apply and are put on a waiting list. Administrators decide whom they accept based on the student’s place on the list, whether they have siblings already attending the school and the effect it would have on “the maintenance of a school population representative of the district’s student demographics,” according to Horace Mann’s Web site.

“In light of this, we will have to study the opinion and determine if it would have an impact in how students are selected for Horace Mann,” said the district’s comptroller Mike Oberhaus, who had not read the court’s opinion. “I don’t know if I can answer that today.”

Davenport has a desegregation plan on the books, but no schools use it, said Karen Farley, district spokeswoman. The district implemented the plan in the 1970s at the state’s urging. Under it, officials at schools with a large percentage of minority children allowed only white students, for the most part, to transfer into their buildings, Farley said.

Although the district still has the plan written into its policies, no schools have a high enough minority population to implement it, Farley said.

Sheena Dooley can be contacted at (563)383-2363 or sdooley@qctimes.com.