In an email to the TJ community, school principal Ann Bonitatibus wrote that “each of us has a responsibility to our community to speak up and take action against racism,” adding that the TJ community “does not reflect racial makeup.” in public schools in Fairfax County.
Over the next few months, the Fairfax County School Board considered various changes to the admissions process for a series of meetings that the Coalition for TJ said were rushed and opaque—an argument the judge ultimately agreed with. In October, the board voted to eliminate the standardized testing requirement, promptly raising objections from parents, many of whom had paid substantial sums for exam preparation courses, and alumni who felt it would weaken the school’s reputation as a rigorous academic center.
In December, the board approved a new admissions process that, in addition to guaranteeing eligibility for every high school in the school system, added four “experience factors” such as whether students were economically disadvantaged or in the process of learning English.
The school argued in court that the factors it intended to eliminate included many factors other than race – for example, after the changes, the percentage of economically disadvantaged students rose from less than 1 percent to more than a quarter of the incoming class. But Judge Hilton, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, was not convinced, arguing that internal emails and messages and racial data seen by board members “clearly show that diversity means racial diversity in the first place.”
The school board could do this through other measures, such as increasing the number of TJ students or offering free exam preparation courses, he wrote. But the policy designed by the school to “increase the enrollment of blacks and Hispanics,” he wrote, “would of necessity reduce the representation of Asian Americans.”
Julia McCaskill, who has three daughters in Fairfax County schools — two of them in TJ — said the parents gathered outside the school after Judge Hilton’s decision, having a little celebration despite the cold.
“We’re just very happy,” said Ms. McCaskill, a Chinese-American who participated in the lawsuit. “We feel like common sense has prevailed because a school can deny it’s about race, but it sounds like it’s about race.”