High court won't hear Lynn plan for schools

The US Supreme Court declined yesterday to hear a case challenging the constitutionality of the Lynn public schools' voluntary desegregation plan, which uses race as a factor in student transfers.

The order marked the end of a suit filed in 1999 by a group of white, black, and Hispanic parents, who had urged the court to overturn a federal appeals court's ruling in June that had endorsed the Lynn plan.

''I think the message is that Lynn's voluntary school assignment plan is a system that works and a plan that meets constitutional muster," said Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly, whose office defended the plan.

A Boston lawyer, Chester Darling, who represents the plaintiffs and who filed the lawsuit, said he was extremely disappointed that the Supreme Court had opted not to take the Lynn case. The Supreme Court has never weighed in on voluntary desegregation plans in public schools.

''It's a quota system," said Darling, who had argued that Lynn's plan is racially discriminatory because it generally denies transfer requests by students if the move is perceived as possibly upsetting a school's racial balance. ''Color coordinating should be confined to judges' homes, not classrooms," Darling said.

Lynn's plan was adopted in 1989 to achieve racial balance after white enrollment plummeted. Students can attend neighborhood schools, regardless of race. But a white student generally cannot transfer to a school with a higher percentage of whites than his or her neighborhood school.

And a minority student generally cannot transfer to a school with a higher percentage of minority students than that in his or her neighborhood school.

Students may appeal a denial on grounds of hardship, safety, or other reasons.

Lynn Mayor Edward ''Chip" Clancy Jr., who chairs the School Committee, said the system's transfer policy had dealt well with ''a difficult and potentially divisive issue, racial balance in the schools." The Lynn case has been closely watched by 21 other cities and towns in Massachusetts with voluntary desegregation plans.

But Tracey Maclin, a constitutional law professor at Boston University, cautioned yesterday that observers should not read too much into the Supreme Court's decision not to hear the case.

''There's nothing in the denial itself that suggests the court was thinking one way or the other," Maclin said.