A St. Louis Desegregation Policy That Segregates

If La’Shieka White’s 9-year-old son weren’t African-American, next year he’d still be attending the school he likes.

The landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Educationstriking down state-sponsored racial segregation is now more than six decades old. But if you think that black children can no longer be turned away from a school because of their race, then you’re probably unfamiliar with La’Shieka White and her 9-year-old son Edmund.

Edmund is a third-grader at Gateway Science Academy, a charter school in south St. Louis that he has attended since kindergarten and where he maintains a 3.83 grade point average. Ms. White, who moved to St. Louis from Davenport, Iowa, five years ago, told me that she and her husband chose a charter school because the traditional public schools in the city were in such awful shape that they weren’t fully accredited by the state.

The Whites were thrilled with Gateway but not with the neighborhood where they were living. “There was a lot of crime, break-ins. You heard gunshots all the time,” Ms. White explained. “I think anywhere you live in the city you’re probably going to hear gunshots. You have some good streets, but then a few streets over it might be terrible. We have three kids and a dog. We wanted a safer neighborhood.” A week before Christmas, someone broke into the family’s car. “That was the last straw for me. I said we’re getting out of here.”

In February, the family purchased a home in a nearby suburb. Asked to describe her new surroundings, Ms. White began with words like “safe” and “quiet.” She added: “We live at the end of a street. The only people who come back here live back here. The kids can play out front or out back, even in the street.” They don’t hear gunshots anymore.

Understandably, the family had no interest in pulling Edmund out of a school where he was thriving. Gateway is located 10 minutes from the nonprofit where Ms. White works, so transportation to and from school wouldn’t be an issue. St. Louis County, where the Whites now live, participates in a school-transfer program with the city that derives from a 1980 federal court ruling that the city and county were maintaining racially segregated school systems. Ms. White checked with Gateway to make sure that Edmund qualified for the program.

The family received an email reply from the school. It said that Edmund would not be able to attend the school next year due to the transfer program guidelines, which were attached. “The guidelines said that if you’re African-American, you can’t come back to the school,” Ms. White said. “I couldn’t believe it. I said to myself, maybe I’m reading this wrong. Then I called the principal and said, ‘You do realize this says Edmond can’t come to the school because he’s black, right?’ ”

Ms. White wasn’t misreading the guidelines. The goal of the transfer program, according Missouri’s education department, is “to try to balance the racial makeup of the city and county schools.” To achieve this objective, the school districts devised an overtly race-conscious plan: Only black kids living in the city are permitted to transfer to schools located in the county, and only non-black kids living in the county are allowed to transfer to schools located in the city. If Edmund were white or Asian or any race other than black, he could continue at Gateway while living outside of the city. Because he’s black, he can’t.

Gateway wants Edmund to stay, and the school told his mother that they would work to rectify the matter. But Ms. White isn’t the patient type. “I talked it over with my husband and at first we were going to let it go, since he would still be in a good school district in the new neighborhood,” she told me. “Then it hit me. There’s no way this is right. I just broke down crying and thinking, how am I going to tell my 9-year-old that he can’t go back to the school, not because we moved but because of his skin color.”

Ms. White started a petition in February. Within three days it had 1,000 signatures. Now it has more than 134,000. Last week the family sued the organization of superintendents that administers the transfer program. Filed by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a public-interest law firm, the suit alleges that the race-based transfer restrictions are unconstitutional discrimination.

The superintendents haven’t officially replied to the lawsuit, so we don’t know how far officials will go to keep Edmund out of the school of his choice because he’s black. But if racial balance is the goal, it’s worth noting that Gateway is a predominantly white school. When a desegregation policy is having the opposite effect, maybe it’s outlived its usefulness.

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal

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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator.

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal