High court clouds waters
Page Schools deny any segregation

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

PAGE, Ariz. — June 27 was an important day for a group of Navajos trying to erase a decade of de facto segregation within the Page Unified School District. After years of legal wrangling, that was the day the district finally agreed to balance out the racial mix of its two elementary schools.

With comic timing, the U.S. Supreme Court knocked down a pair of desegregation plans in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle, Wash., the next day. Attorneys for Page Unified, however, say the decision is unlikely to hinder their own plans.

Charles Herf, of the Quarles and Brady law firm, said he had yet to pick apart the 109-page Supreme Court ruling or the district's U.S. Justice Department-brokered settlement with Diné Communities for Equality in Education. But based on what he's read so far, he said, Page Unified "should not be impacted."

Majority Navajo
Stretching east from the rocky red shores of Lake Powell, the 7,000-student district hosts a Navajo population of just about 70 percent. Its two elementary schools, both in Page, are also majority Navajo. But while Navajos make up 90 percent of Desert View Elementary, they account for only 55 percent of counterpart Lake View. Desert View also happens to be older.

As Diné Communities President Collier Greyhat put it the day the district signed off on the settlement, "there was an Indian school and a white school."

Diné Communities claims the district deliberately made it that way. The district disagrees. Superintendent Jim Walker said the district has had open enrollment since 1994, allowing parents to send their children to whichever Page Unified school they wish. He attributes the racial disparities mostly to a former Desert View principal who left to start a charter school, taking several teachers and a number of mostly white students with him. He said it was a "hit the school never fully recovered from."

In any case, the district decided to settle the dispute rather than fight it out in court.

Settlement steps
The 18-point settlement lays out a list of steps the district will take to more thoroughly integrate Navajos into the system, from parent involvement to cultural training for staff. But the crux of the deal is a short paragraph that requires the district to bring the Navajo populations of its two elementary schools within 15 percent of the district average by 2012.

In Louisville and Seattle, the districts used race as one but not the only factor in assigning students to schools in an effort to maintain a desired racial mix at each. By a slim 5-4 majority, the Supreme Court concluded they'd gone too far. While Justices Samuel Alito, John Roberts, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas said race had no place in school assignment whatsoever, Anthony Kennedy help out a small role for race in limited circumstances but voted with the majority.

That's just fine with Page Unified. While its settlement with Diné Communities sets specific race-based targets, it spells out no race-based steps for achieving them. In fact, it spells out no steps for achieving the targets at all. Herf and Walker insist their methods will be purely voluntary. That way, Herf said, the district should have no trouble staying on the right side of the Supreme Court's ruling.

But if nothing else, the attorney conceded, the ruling does limit the district's options.

The district's first shot at voluntary desegregation will be to set up a magnet science and technology program at Desert View "a school within a school," said Walker it hopes will attract more whites. It also hopes a new dual language program at Lake View will attract more Navajos.

Hope is all it can do. As Walker conceded, "there are no guarantees."

Assigned by race?
The only guarantee would be to assign students to one school or the other by race, and the Supreme Court has taken that option off the table.

And besides, Walker added, for all of Diné Communities' complaining, he believes Navajo parents like the schools their children are attending just fine; If they wanted to send them to another, they would.

"The building at Desert View is older, but it's well maintained," Walker said.

The district even built a K-8 school in Kaibito so that students in the area would not have to make the 37-mile trip to and from Page every day. But just because you build something, they learned, does not mean they will come.

"We have a lot of kids who ride right past the school to Page because that's where their parents want to send them," said Walker.

But the district has a settlement to fulfill. And if the magnet and dual language programs don't work, a more dramatic options would be to split the two elementary schools by grade, housing all the first few grades at one, and the rest at the other. The thinking goes that the racial mix within each grade should reflect the district average, so as long as those grades aren't split between two schools there's no way for either school to stray too far. The problem, Walker said, is that districts tend to lose students whenever moving up a grade also means moving to a new school. Splitting the elementary grades would only add to the problems of a district he said was already losing students.

But if the settlement spells out no specific steps for reaching the race-based targets, neither does it spell out any penalties for failure. If Page Unified can't bring the Navajo populations of its elementary schools within 15 percent of the district average by 2012, Walker said, the Justice Department could potentially threaten to sue the district again, or it could give the district another chance. Herf said they may just have to accept that, with the tools they've been given, it simply isn't possible.

But Herf said it was too early for such speculation. Walker said the district intends to implement the magnet program in the fall of 2008.

Diné Communities could not be reached for comment.