As president of Parents Involved in Community Schools (PICS), Brose objected to using race as a tiebreaker in school assignments. Initiative 200, the successful 1998 reverse-discrimination initiative, "clearly states that race shouldn't be used in assigning kids to public schools," she said.
"We feel vindicated that someone believes the same way we do," Brose said of herself and more than 60 mostly Seattle families who joined PICS.
The appeals court decision overturned a 2001 U.S. District Court decision that ruled I-200 did not prevent the school district from using race as a tiebreaker.
The Seattle School District slammed the latest decision, a ruling that Ballard High School Principal David Engle said caused him to resign in protest.
"I think we were very disappointed; I think we were saddened by the decision," said school district spokeswoman Lynn Steinberg. "We're trying to prepare students to live and thrive in the 21st century."
That goal will be more difficult to accomplish if students aren't exposed in school to people of different backgrounds and cultures, she said.
The matter still isn't settled, however. On April 26, the school district filed an appeal to be heard by a larger panel of the 30-member circuit court.
The school district's move prompted the appeals court to issue an order the same day instructing the district to drop race as a tiebreaker for assignments while the new appeal is heard.
Queen Anne resident Harry Korrell - a Davis Wright Tremaine lawyer who represents PICS - doesn't think the school district has a chance in its appeal. The district might have had a shot if the ruling had been a split decision, but that's not the case here, he said. "It was a three-nothing decision."
School district attorney Mike Madden has said previous decisions made by the Ninth Circuit court and the Supreme Court support the school district's belief that I-200 does not eliminate race as tiebreaker for school assignments.
Korrell isn't buying it. Madden, Korrell said, used the same arguments in front of the Ninth Circuit three-judge panel which sided with PICS. "There's no new evidence," Korrell said.
Korrell also said that the Ninth Circuit court ruled against race-based school assignments in California, where the reverse-discrimination-initiative movement was born.
"The statute was upheld as perfectly legal," he said.
For many, the ruling comes too late.
"The fact that the process has taken two years means some kids who fought for it won't get anything out of it," Korrell said.
That's the case with Brose's oldest daughter. She listed Ballard High School as her first choice, but the girl was assigned last year to Ingraham High School in north Seattle, Brose said. Her daughter now attends the new Center High School on lower Queen Anne.
"It all worked out for her."
Others took a different approach.
"Many parents who didn't get their first choice left the school system," Brose said of families who enrolled their children in private schools or who moved out of the city or state.
Korrell suggested that socioeconomic factors might be used as a tiebreaker to maintain diversity in the school system, but Brose doesn't think that would be a good idea.
"If they're using that as a proxy for race, I wouldn't be comfortable with that," she said.
Using socioeconomic factors to promote diversity in school systems is also under attack in several states, according to the web site for the National Association for Neighborhood Schools (NANS). Based in Columbus, Ohio, NANS is a conservative organization that labels such moves as "social engineering."
The PICS web site includes pie charts that show enrollment won't change very much if race is eliminated as a tiebreaker. Steinberg, however, said the racial makeup will change over time at schools such as the high school in Ballard, which is not an "exceptionally diverse" neighborhood.
Seattle itself is a very diverse city, she added.
"Unfortunately, we don't see that (diversity) in many neighborhoods."
The court battle also will be costly for the school district if PICS prevails in the newest appeal, because the school district will be forced to pay his law firm's fees, Korrell said. He said the bill will be in the $400,000 range. Steinberg said the school district's own legal bills will be "in the low six figures."
In response to the April 16 court ruling, Steinberg also said the Seattle School District has begun to reprocess approximately 9,000 applications from incoming ninth-graders, sixth-graders and kindergartners without using race as a tiebreaker.
Other tiebreakers that still will be used when there are not enough slots for the number of students who want to go to a particular school are having a sibling at a school, distance from a school and a lottery system, she said. It's too late this year to include socioeconomic factors as a tiebreaker, Steinberg said.
Families normally receive school assignments in early May, but reprocessing the applications means assignments will be delayed about a month, she added.
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