By Nate Raymond
(Reuters) -The Trump administration has launched civil rights investigations into whether an admissions policy aimed at diversifying an elite Virginia high school’s student body is racially discriminatory.
The U.S. Departments of Justice and Education opened the investigations a year after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a legal challenge alleging that same admissions policy at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology discriminated against Asian American students.
U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon in a statement on Thursday said the policy appears “contrary to the law and to the fundamental principle that students should be evaluated on their merit, not the color of their skin.”
Fairfax County Public Schools, the system that oversees the school, in a statement said the matter “has already been fully litigated.”
The Alexandria-based state-chartered magnet school, known as TJ, often ranks among the best U.S. public high schools. Before 2020, it took most students from a small number of “feeder” middle schools in more affluent parts of Fairfax County.
The admissions process at the time produced incoming classes with few Black or Hispanic students. Asian Americans comprised 71.5% of its student body in 2019, and white students accounted for another 19.5%.
In 2020, the school board adopted a new admissions policy that eliminated a standardized test from its admissions process, capped the number of students from each of the district’s middle schools and guaranteed seats for the top students from each.
After the overhaul, the share of Black and Hispanic students increased, but the percentage of admissions offers made to Asian-American students fell to 54% from 73% the year before. A parents group backed by a conservative legal organization sued, arguing the policy was discriminatory.
The Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case, a surprise to some given its 2023 landmark ruling rejecting race-conscious college admissions policies.
Following a referral from Virginia’s Republican attorney general, Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, in a letter said the department would investigate if the school was unlawfully using race in admission decisions.
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights said it also is examining whether Fairfax County Public Schools was violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi, Alexandra Hudson)
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