The First Circuit Court of Appeals has held that Boston Public School’s exam schools’ admissions policy used during the 2021-22 school year is constitutional, according to a ruling released last week.

A three-judge panel unanimously held that that policy, which weighed both student GPAs and their home ZIP codes, did not infringe the constitutional rights of white and Asian applicants, as the plaintiffs had argued.

The plaintiffs, known as the Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence, had challenged the policy by pointing to declining shares of seats awarded to white and Asian students at Boston Latin Academy, the O’Bryant School of Math and Science, and the Boston Latin School.

The 2021-22 policy, implemented partly in response to the pandemic, was expressly designed  to broaden access to the three public high schools and boost racial diversity in their enrollments — and it appears to have had that effect. 

The interim admissions policy was used to select the schools’ incoming 7th- and 9th-grade students for Fall 2021. It eliminated an entrance exam over fears it wasn’t safe to administer during the pandemic. It sought out students with the top grades in each of Boston’s ZIP codes. And it gave preference to qualified students from relatively low-income codes.

In a 34-page opinion, Judge William Kayatta, Jr., wrote that even if the policy did disproportionately exclude some applicant groups, it still used “valid, facially neutral selection criteria.”

Kayatta wrote that the approach “created less disparate impact, not more,” in that incoming exam school students better reflected the city’s racial makeup than under the previous policy, which simply ranked students citywide by their middle school grades and test scores.

Across Greater Boston, civil rights groups celebrated the panel’s decision, which comes just six months after the US Supreme Court barred universities from explicitly considering race in admissions.

Oren Sellstrom, the litigation director for Lawyers for Civil Rights, which intervened in the case, said the ruling reinforces the idea “that there’s nothing problematic about school districts seeking to ensure diversity, particularly through race-neutral means.”

The short-lived policy at issue in this case has since been abandoned and replaced by one along similar lines that includes a standardized test and uses smaller census tracts rather than ZIP codes.

In their arguments before the First Circuit, the plaintiff group was represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a nonprofit libertarian law firm that has challenged similar admissions policies in Virginia. PLF attorneys could not be reached for comment, but Jennifer Ohman, a spokeswoman for the foundation, said the court’s decision is out of step with the Supreme Court.

In a June decision barring the consideration of race in college admissions, US Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”

The majority’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard is cited repeatedly in Kayatta’s decision.

This article was first published by WBUR 90.9FM on its website on Dec. 20. The Reporter and WBUR share content through a media partnership.