By Reporter Staff
Reporter Staff
The ruling will not affect the bulk of admissions already offered for the exam schools for September, because the parents group had already said it would not fight those. US District Court Judge William Young did not grant the group s request to re-open the case entirely; the matter now goes to the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, which has the power to have him re-open the case.
During a hearing on the case today, Young also said that even if the case is re-opened, his decision today does not mean he might still find that the School Committee did nothing racially biased in approving an exam-free admissions policy, but he said he simply could not let an opinion stand that was not based on facts, in this case, an assertion by the city that an eight-page transcript of School Committee text messages was accurate, when it wasn t.
By Reporter Staff
Reporter Staff
A School Committee lawyer argued Tuesday that leaving out the Westie whites exchange from text messages handed over to the Globe and a woman who turned out to be a secret member of the parents group suing over exam-school admissions was an innocent mistake, not part of some nefarious scheme to hide racial hatred by School Committee members.
In a motion asking a federal judge not to re-open the case, the committee s outside lawyer, Kay Hodge, added that even if those texts had been included in response to public-records requests, it s hardly proof of racial bias in the way the committee devised a system using both pre-Covid grades and Zip codes to figure out who to offer seats at the three exam schools - because Alexandra Oliver-Dávila and Lorna Rivera s feelings about certain White parents they felt were biased were already evident in the thousands of pages of documents the parents group wanted to submit as part of its case.