![]() ![]() This time, the law firm and school board are defending a policy that denies seats to Asian students. But this time, the discrimination is not against Black students. One of its clients is the Fairfax County School Board. Today, the firm is Hunton Andrews Kurth, with annual revenues of about $830 million. Constitution, which guarantees equal protection under the law. Supreme Court ruled racial segregation in schools violated the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the 1954 case in which the U.S. It became one of the five cases grouped together in Brown v. the County School Board of Prince Edward County, Virginia. A Richmond law firm, Hunton & Williams, represented the school board in the case of Dorothy E. In the 1950s, Byrd, an avowed white separatist, led a campaign called the “massive resistance” to oppose the racial integration of public schools. senator, led a Democratic Party political machine, the “Byrd Machine,” that dominated Virginia politics for much of the century. In the early 20th century, politician Harry Byrd, the governor of Virginia and later a U.S. Now, white officials, hoping to increase the representation of Black and Hispanic students in our most advanced school, were limiting the enrollment of Asian students. A few rows away, Marianne Burke, the local leader of Fairfax Indivisible, an arm of the national progressive organization Indivisible, cheered them on.Īs the security officials circled me, the mothers continued to chant, “Racist! Racist! Racist!” Suddenly the board chair, Stella Pekarsky, called a 15-minute recess, and the board members, superintendent, and other officials hurried off stage and out of sight.Īlmost seven decades ago, in 1956, white officials in Virginia tried to keep Black students out of certain schools. “Racist!” declared Ying Julia McCaskill, an immigrant from China.įrom the back, Robert Rigby, Jr., a Latin teacher who was a member of the local teachers union, yelled “Stunt!” Nearby, Vanessa Hall, a mother who had just started a pro-school-board group with leaders of Fairfax Democrats, joined Rigby’s counter-heckling. “Racist!” yelled Norma Margulies, an immigrant from Peru. “Racist!” shouted Suparna Dutta, an immigrant mother from India. Suddenly, the immigrant mothers in the first rows of the audience broke out in a chant against the school board. We parents had come to the school board meeting to protest the new admissions process. But not long after the ruling was announced, the Fairfax school board said that it would challenge the decision. ![]() On February 25, 2022, a federal judge had ruled that the new admissions policy was illegal, unfair, and discriminatory against Asian students. For the Class of 2025, assembled under the new standards, Asian students made up 54 percent of admitted students, in contrast to 73 percent of students admitted to the Class of 2024 under the old rules. The aim was to increase the number of Black and Hispanic students in the student body that aim was achieved, but only with a dramatic reduction in the number of Asian American students admitted. The new process eliminated the admissions test, guaranteed seats for 1.5 percent of each middle school’s 8th-grade class, and considered factors such as attendance at a middle school previously underrepresented at TJ. But in December 2020, the Fairfax County Public Schools board and superintendent, despite the pleas of many parents, had adopted an admissions policy aimed at increasing the representation of certain racial and ethnic groups at “TJ,” as it is known. 1 high school in the country, had for years admitted students through a merit-based and race-blind process. In my comments, I had criticized the school board for its persistent efforts to change the admissions process at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. I had just stood before the mostly white school board members, speaker number nine in the public-participation portion of the board’s meeting on March 10, 2022. ![]() The men-all of them white-were official security personnel for our local school district, Fairfax County Public Schools-and their presence here felt to me like a show of force on the part of the school board, whose members were seated on an elevated dais in front of the stage. “Are you trying to intimidate me?” I asked, watching the men inch closer to me, a Muslim single mother from India. Four men stepped toward me as I stood, five feet tall, with a stack of books in my arms and papers in my hand, my back to a stage in a middle-school theater in Falls Church, Virginia, a western suburb of Washington, D.C. ![]()
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