Supreme Court Asked to Review Top Virginia High School’s Race-Based Admissions Policy

“Equal Justice Under Law” engraving above entrance to U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 3, 2016. Bob Korn/Shutterstock

A group of parents and students is asking the Supreme Court to review the admissions policy of a top-rated high school in Virginia that they say engages in illegal racial discrimination against Asian American students.

The case gives the court’s conservative-leaning majority an opportunity to expand on its landmark June 29 ruling that struck down the use of racially discriminatory admissions policies at U.S. colleges—a longtime goal of the conservative movement. It’s unclear when the justices will consider the new petition.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion in Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard two months ago that for too long, universities have “concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin.”

“Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice,” he wrote in the ruling, which doesn’t cover military academies.

The new petition in Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board was filed with the nation’s highest court on Aug. 21, according to the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF)—a national nonprofit public interest law firm that challenges government misconduct.

Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) is rated the best public high school in the United States by U.S. News and World Report. The school teaches ninth through 12th grade, with a total enrollment of 1,809, and has a student-to-teacher ratio of 18 to 1.

The student body is 59 percent male and 41 percent female. Asians make up 72 percent of the student body, compared with whites at 18.3 percent, two or more races at 4.8 percent, Hispanics at 3 percent, and blacks at 1.8 percent.

The petitioning group, Coalition for TJ, with more than 200 members, was founded in August 2020 to oppose changes in the admissions policy, which its members say discriminates against Asian American students.

The group claims in the petition that the board “overhauled its admissions” to TJ in 2020 “to racially balance the freshman class by excluding Asian Americans.” The new policy came at about the time that George Floyd died in Minneapolis police custody, an event that sparked widespread, sometimes violent protests in the United States and abroad.

A federal district court agreed and granted summary judgment to the group. But later, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit reversed the decision.

“Despite evidence that the Board chose the new criteria to further its racial balancing goal—and evidence that the policy substantially reduced both the raw number and the proportion of Asian Americans admitted—the Fourth Circuit held that the admissions changes did not violate the Equal Protection Clause,” the petition reads.

‘Effective Proxy for Race’

The group is asking the Supreme Court to decide “whether the Board violated the Equal Protection Clause when it overhauled the admissions criteria at TJ.”

“We are very encouraged by [the Supreme Court’s] decision, to be sure,” one of the group’s lawyers, PLF attorney Erin Wilcox, told The Epoch Times in an interview.

“There’s this difference in that in K through 12 schools like TJ, school boards and school officials are not allowed to use overt racial preferences like they were able to do in higher education.

“So what’s happening at TJ is proxy discrimination.”

The school board had data showing that most of the Asian American students “go to a handful of advanced middle schools, because, obviously, kids who are going to get into a school like TJ probably also go to an advanced placement middle school, and those kids just go to a handful of middle schools.”

So the school board imposed a cap on every middle school in the district, “and instead of every child who scored highly enough on the standardized test and who had the highest [grade point average] and best teacher recommendations, instead of just admitting kids based on merit like that, it said, only 1.5 percent from each middle school can get in.”

These advanced middle schools might send 90 kids to TJ every year and suddenly, they could only send about 12 students, “so that had a dramatic impact on reducing the number of Asian American kids who got into TJ,” according to the attorney.

“So if a kid didn’t make that 1.5 percent cutoff from their middle school, they got thrown into this other pool, and they could compete against everybody else,“ Ms. Wilcox said. ”But if you’re in that pool, you get bonus points if you went to a middle school that traditionally didn’t send a lot of kids to TJ in the past.

“Kids who went to one of these competitive, academically advanced middle schools, who were probably more likely than not Asian American, got a double whammy [because] they had to compete against other kids likely to go to TJ. And then, if they went into that other pool, they didn’t get bonus points because a lot of kids in their school already went to TJ.

“So it was a pretty effective proxy for race. ... And it really was a targeted strike on Asian American students who apply to TJ.”

Eyes on Supreme Court

The coalition sought emergency relief last year from the Supreme Court, arguing at the time that the school’s removal of standardized tests from its admissions analysis, coupled with adding experience factors, led to a reduced percentage of Asian American students being accepted.

In February 2022, U.S. District Court Judge Claude Hilton, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, struck down the system, holding that it “causes, and will continue to cause, a substantial racial impact.” Judge Hilton found that it “does not treat all applicants to TJ equally” and that “it is clear that Asian-American students are disproportionately harmed by the Board’s decision to overhaul TJ admissions.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit voted 2–1 in March 2022 to grant the school board’s request for a stay pending appeal because changing admissions policies would inconvenience the school officials who are discriminating against Asian students.

Judge Toby Heytens, who was appointed by President Joe Biden, wrote in a concurring opinion that the school board was entitled to a stay “in no small part because of the significant logistical difficulties and time constraints associated with creating a new admissions policy, and making thousands of admissions decisions for the class of 2026 under that new policy after the application process was complete, and just as decisions were about to go out under the current one.”

The school board criticized Judge Hilton’s decision in an April 2022 filing with the Supreme Court, calling it “unprecedented” and asserting that the admissions policy was “race-neutral.”

On April 25, 2022, the Supreme Court denied the Coalition for TJ’s request to vacate the stay issued by the 4th Circuit.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch dissented from the decision, saying they would have granted the application to vacate the stay.

Representatives of Fairfax County Public Schools didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.

If at least four of the nine Supreme Court justices vote to grant the newly filed petition, oral arguments could be scheduled. If that happens, a decision in the case could come by June 2024.

The court, which is in recess for the summer, resumes oral arguments on Oct. 2.