Columbia High School

Columbia High School (File)

(NonStaff)

Cassandra McAfee's eighth-grade daughter is zoned to attend Columbia High School in Huntsville next fall. When McAfee saw last week that Columbia made the state's list of 'failing' schools, she immediately looked into a transfer.

The Alabama Accountability Act says that she can. The state law allows students to transfer out of 'failing' schools and into non-failing schools within the same school system.

But McAfee's daughter won't be eligible for transfer because she is white. Columbia is a majority-black school, and Huntsville is still under a decades-old desegregation court order that requires the district to consider race when granting school transfer requests.

"Because my daughter is white, she has to be held back in a failing school," said McAfee. "She's not being given the same opportunities as her black peers. I don't want my kid stuck in a school that's not going to help her thrive or move forward. These next few years are vital because that will determine where she goes to college."

The U.S. Department of Justice made the call four years ago, saying federal law trumps a state act.

Shortly after the accountability law passed in 2013, the DOJ instructed Huntsville to ignore the law's transfer requirements, saying students fleeing "failing" schools can't interfere with desegregation efforts - in other words, student transfers can't increase the racial imbalance at a school.

That means most school transfers in Huntsville are awarded through the majority-to-minority process, a decades-old practice of allowing students who are in a racial majority at one school to transfer to a school in which they'd be in the racial minority.

Columbia and Lee High School, the only Huntsville schools on the state's failing schools list, are both majority black.

Only students whose race is in the majority can be considered for a majority-to-minority transfer. In the case of Columbia or Lee, both majority-black schools, only black students are eligible to transfer out of those schools and into one of Huntsville's majority white schools. On the flip side, black students can't transfer out of majority-white schools.

The desegregation order has long required Huntsville to consider students as black or non-black, so Hispanic and Asian students - while in a racial minority - are not eligible for a majority-to-minority transfer.

For the 2016-2017 school year, 348 Huntsville students requested majority-to-minority transfers. The district granted 160. Of those, all but two were for black students.

The district granted 100 other transfers, including medical, personnel and superintendent assignments. According to the consent order, the district can grant other transfers only after the majority-to-minority transfers are complete, as long as space remains available.

The district granted no transfers under the Alabama Accountability Act, according to a statement from Huntsville City Schools.

Huntsville's transfer situation is increasingly rare. Most public school systems are no longer allowed to consider race when granting school transfers, according to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that specifically exempted systems like Huntsville that still operate under desegregation orders. Fewer than 200 school systems nationwide remain under federal desegregation orders.

The "failing schools" list from the Alabama Department of Education is not without its detractors. It was created through the Alabama Accountability Act, which was passed by GOP lawmakers with little input from educators.

The list comprises the six percent of Alabama public schools with the lowest math and reading scores on certain standardized tests. Regardless of how schools improve, six percent will always be labeled "failing."

Alabama State Superintendent Michael Sentence told AL.com last week that he was concerned about schools being judged only on one grade's test results. A larger proportion of schools on the list this year were high schools like Columbia and Lee. The overrepresentation could be due in part to the state using a new standardized test, and only considering scores from tenth-grade students when rating the schools.

Jefferson County Superintendent Craig Pouncey, a former state department official, criticized the law, saying it wrongly labeled public schools as 'failing' in a covert effort to establish a voucher system that would allow public funds to be redirected to private schools.

Huntsville school board member Beth Wilder, whose district includes Lee High, said last week that while staff are looking into ways to improve the school, "It's unfortunate that the results of one assessment for one grade level carry such a heavy weight and is used to characterize an entire high school."

For Cassandra McAfee, the "failing" label still stings. She's considering other schooling options for her daughter, and said other parents in their neighborhood were doing the same.

"When you have a failing school that has black, white, Hispanic and Asian students, it's not fair that only the black students can transfer out to get a better education and the other races have to be held back," said McAfee.