San Francisco Desegregation Decree To End

By Caroline Hendrie

San Francisco school officials agreed last week to stop using race and ethnicity as determining factors in assigning students to school, as part of a broader settlement that will bring the district's 16-year-old desegregation plan to a close by 2002.

The deal, reached Feb. 16, headed off a trial that had been slated to start that day in a federal discrimination suit brought by a group of Chinese-American students and their parents five years ago. U.S. District Judge William H. Orrick Jr. gave preliminary approval to the deal the following day.

At week's end, the actual terms of the settlement were subject to dueling interpretations by various parties in the case. But all agreed that the district will abandon racial-balance limits for individual schools in the coming year. After that, it will devise a new student-assignment system designed to preserve racial and ethnic diversity through alternative, but...