Capo Unified Finally Agrees To Stop Color-Coding School Children

Tonight, the Capistrano Unified School District finally agreed to stop classifying schoolchildren -- and determining what schools they'll attend -- based on the color of their skin.   The Board of Trustees voted to settle a lawsuit challenging the district's obnoxious policy of using race as a factor in assigning kids to schools.

Up until tonight, the district has been rigging attendance boundaries to get a "racial balance" in individual schools.   Kids have been assigned to schools based not on where they live, but on their racial or ethnic background.  This flies in the face of Proposition 209, which forbids race-based preferences or discrimination in public education, employment and contracting.

Pacific Legal Foundation brought the lawsuit, on behalf of Neighborhood Schools for Our Kids, a coalition of Capistrano parents and taxpayers.  The settlement that the Board approved tonight commits the district to stop using students' race to determine where they'll go to school. 

"We are very happy that the District has now abandoned racial gerrymandering," said PLF attorney Paul J. Beard. "The people of California spoke loud and clear when they passed Proposition 209 . They said government must stop treating people as racial statistics.    It is unfortunate that it took the Capistrano District a decade to hear the message.    But we can be grateful that, from this point forward, the District will stop the color-coding of kids."

Pursuant to the settlement, the Board of Trustees adopted a race-neutral policy for attendance boundaries that excludes all references to racial or ethnic balance.    The Board  also pledged to adopt a revised attendance boundaries plan  without any reference to students’ race or ethnicity.

The settlement comes after Superior Court Judge Gail Andler ruled this summer that the District’s 2005 plan for setting attendance boundaries "on its face, utilizes race ... in order to achieve racial balance within the schools." This was "in direct contravention of the state constitution as amended by Proposition 209," Judge Andler wrote.

"Public schools must not teach children the harmful lesson that their race is what defines them," said  PLF's Paul Beard  after the Trustees' vote tonight.    "Proposition 209 protects students from such abuse. It outlaws so-called ‘racial balancing’ programs that would classify kids by color and treat them differently based on their racial background."

Comments

[aj]

great. now we are gonna get schools that are all latino and schools that are all white. this is a great way of preparing our kids for the real world...

[Do The Right Thing]

Its too bad the lawsuit was ever needed to bring CUSD into legal compliance with the California Constitution or that this feckless and reckless Board of Trustees and their greedy unethical legal counsel chose to spend several hundred thousand dollars defending the indefensible. Jerks.

AJ: A school district is not the place to engage in social engineering to correct any actual or perceived ills of the world. A school district is a public entity that is supposed to follow the law, not break it. Talk about preparing kids for the real world. Scoffing the law is not the way to teach our kids. There is no school in this district that fits the mold you speak of except possibly for San Juan Elementary, which is is an issue entirely separate fron this lawsuit and this settlement. Why don't you ask the ACLU, who signed off on and approved this settlement, to do something about San Juan Elementary if you are so aggrieved? For that matter, what have you done to correct your perceived issue?