San Diego Intervenors
Challenge Court Assignment of Pupils
in Carlin v. Board of Education
Toward Restoring Local Control
of San Diego Public Schools

... Pursuant to the language of that proposed initiative (Prop. 209), it could be illegal for the District to continue to take race and ethnic status into account in its integration program. There is, however, an exception for such actions pursuant to “pre-existing” Court Orders. Under the circumstances, the existence of this proposed initiative is yet another reason why the District seeks this Final Order as proposed.

This signified a determination to continue racial assignments of nonclass students under its integration program, immunized from charges by Intervenors of illegality under Proposition 209.

Intervenors contrarily saw that racial assignments until January 1, 2000 and beyond would place non-class students in a position of being unable to assert constitutional rights, in a manner disapproved in Goss v. Lopez, (1975) 419 U.S. 565,574:

Although Ohio may not be constitutionally obligated to establish and maintain a public school system, it has nevertheless done so and has required its children to attend. Those young people do not “shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse door.”

San Diego students should not have to shed the right, which their counterparts have in other California districts not under a court order, to challenge their assignments as unconstitutional.

Carlin v. Board of Education, San Diego Unified School District,
San Diego Superior Court No. 303800 (1967-1998)
San Diego, California
 

Lopez 

Goss v. Lopez, 419 U.S. 565 (1975)
 

— Handbook: Challenge Four, pages 55 - 63 —