As I mentioned yesterday, the San Diego Unified School District is currently studying whether the recent Supreme Court decision, finding ethnic-based school enrollment policies unconstitutional, will have any effect on its busing program.
In 1977, when a court ordered the city’s school system to integrate its inner-city schools, the district has had a voluntary busing program.
This morning, I had a chance to talk to Katherine Nakamura, the sole lawyer on the school board.
“I’m really concerned about,” Nakamura said, though she admitted she didn’t know the details of how San Diego’s program worked.
However, the head of the district’s Office of Enrollment Options, Sandra Robles, said she was less worried. Robles said the district’s Voluntary Ethnic Enrollment Program, despite its name, stopped using race as a factor about seven years ago.
The current program simply pairs a school with heavy minority enrollment to schools that are predominantly white, and allows any student at one of those schools to take a bus to the other.
“We don’t even ask [the ethnicity] on the application,” she said.