The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Monday, Oct. 19, to hear a challenge to a Maryland school district's magnet admissions policy. The case grows directly out of the legal fight over Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology admissions that divided Fairfax County families.

At issue is whether parents alleging racial discrimination in a formally race-neutral admissions policy must prove their racial group is underrepresented compared with the applicant pool. That legal standard was set by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in 2023, when it ruled against parents challenging TJ's admissions overhaul. A Supreme Court ruling overturning that standard could open the door to new challenges against selective public school admissions policies in Virginia and beyond.

The court's decision could also affect FCPS, which approved a plan in August to expand advanced academic programs to all middle schools on a 10-1 school board vote.

What the case is about

A parent group called the Association for Education Fairness, or AFEF, sued Montgomery County Public Schools in 2020. The group alleged the district changed its magnet middle school admissions criteria to boost Black and Latino enrollment while disadvantaging Asian American students, WTOP reported.

Montgomery County's system educates more than 150,000 students and runs four selective magnet middle schools. About a decade ago, the district hired a consulting firm to evaluate its admissions process. The resulting changes factored in the poverty levels of students' home schools, according to the WTOP report. The share of Asian American students admitted to the magnet programs fell.

The district later replaced its competitive admissions process with a lottery. Students qualify based on standardized test scores, but the cutoff is "locally normed." According to data cited in the parent group's Supreme Court petition, students at the lowest-poverty schools had to score at the 93rd percentile on a math assessment to enter the STEM program lottery. Students at the highest-poverty schools needed only a 60th percentile score.

Montgomery County has argued the policy is race-neutral. District attorneys called it "a colorblind lottery" in a brief asking the justices not to take the case, according to the WTOP report.

The TJ connection

The Fourth Circuit dismissed the Montgomery County parents' lawsuit by relying on its own 2023 ruling in Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board. In that case, a 2-1 panel found that the school board had a legitimate interest in increasing diversity at TJ. The judges said the admissions changes did not constitute discrimination against Asian American students, because they remained overrepresented relative to the applicant pool.

The TJ admissions overhaul, adopted by the Fairfax County School Board in 2020, replaced a standardized test with a process that allocated seats on a geographic basis and considered "experience factors" such as household income and English-language status, according to AP News reporting from June 2023. The first class admitted under the new rules saw Asian American representation drop from 73% to 54%. Black student representation rose from 1% to 7%, and Hispanic representation went from 3% to 11%.

The Supreme Court declined to hear the TJ case in 2024. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito said they would have taken it up, according to Bloomberg.

What it means locally

The justices will now decide whether the Fourth Circuit's legal standard is correct. The parent group's attorneys at Pacific Legal Foundation argued that comparing a racial group's admission rate to its share of the applicant pool is not enough.

"A school district should not be able to defeat a discrimination claim by showing that its policy did not harm enough Asian-American children," Pacific Legal Foundation lawyer Chris Kieser said in a statement, according to Bloomberg.

Federal appeals courts are split on the question. The First and Fourth Circuits require challengers to show aggregate underrepresentation. The Second and Third Circuits do not, according to the petition.

A ruling is expected by the end of June 2027.