Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has turned down an emergency request from a Brooklyn mother who wanted her son enrolled at Stuyvesant High School while her discrimination lawsuit against New York City moves through the courts, Fox News reported.
Sotomayor denied the request Monday and offered no explanation, according to the report. The denial does not end the case.
The underlying lawsuit, filed in April, remains pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
The mother, Yi Fang Chen, sued after her Asian-American son, identified in court documents only as M.P., was refused a seat at Stuyvesant, one of the city’s elite public high schools. He scored 558 on the Specialized High School Admissions Test, three points short of the cutoff.
Chen’s lawsuit targets the Discovery program. In 2018, under then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, the city expanded the program to reserve 20 percent of seats for students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Eligibility was limited to students from middle schools where at least 60 percent of pupils qualified as economically disadvantaged.
Her attorneys at the Pacific Legal Foundation argue that the change pushed the regular cutoff score higher and that the burden fell disproportionately on Asian-American applicants.
According to the report, nearly three-quarters of Asian-American students in the city come from low-income families, yet many attended middle schools that did not meet the 60 percent threshold. The highest score among students admitted through Discovery this year was 495, the report said, which is 66 points below the regular cutoff.
The suit alleges violations of the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
It also cites internal city communications that, the plaintiffs allege, show officials intended to increase Black and Hispanic enrollment at the expense of Asian-American students.
Those are the plaintiffs’ claims. The Fox News report carried no response from the city or its education officials.
“Delayed justice is always frustrating,” said Dean McGee, an attorney with the foundation, adding that his side remains “confident that the courts will ultimately uphold core equal protection principles.”
McGee said the city had turned “a program meant to help economically disadvantaged students into a tool for racial engineering” and argued that the policy excluded disadvantaged children across the city.
“Equal protection means treating kids as individuals, not as demographic statistics,” he said.
For now, the practical result is narrow. M.P. will not be placed at Stuyvesant while the appeal proceeds, and the question of whether the Discovery program is lawful stays with the Second Circuit.
