Federal Judge Says Race was Motivating Factor Lower Merion, PA, School Plan

There is bound to be fallout from U.S. District Judge Michael M. Baylson's recent ruling that race "was a motivating factor" in the Lower Merion School District's 2009 plan to reassign students to Harriton, Pa., the smaller of its two high schools. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the parents of nine South Ardmore students complained last May that they lost the right to go to Lower Merion High because they are black, and that the situation violated their constitutional rights.

But U.S. District Judge Michael M. Baylson said he needed to hear more arguments before he decided if the plan amounted to unequal treatment for African American students, as nine families have contended in a long-running lawsuit.

Sifting through numerous e-mail messages and other evidence presented in the suit, Baylson likened district officials' discussion of race in crafting their redistricting plan to a "leitmotif" woven through a Wagner opera. He took aim at their methods, but stopped short of calling the plan patently illegal.

"The circumstantial evidence introduced at trial, leads like a well-worn path through the woods, inescapably to the finding that race was a motivating factor for the [district] administration," Baylson wrote in findings issued late in the day. Specifically, he wrote, there were "too many e-mails and conversations" that mentioned the race of children being switched from Lower Merion High School to Harriton High "to allow any other conclusion."

The judge ruled that the plaintiffs were entitled to "relief," but turns on whether the facts add up to the kind of unequal treatment proscribed three years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court in a Seattle school case.

Read more: Judge: Says Race 'Motivating factor' in L. Merion school plan | Philadelphia Inquirer