Appellants seek reversal of decisions of the Board made on January ;27, 1997, which denied their open enrollment requests on the basis of desegregation. The Waterloo District has an open enrollment/desegregation policy and plan. The open enrollment program (Policy JECCE) provides that "Maintaining the District's current racial characteristics is critical to its: desegregation efforts, ability to comply with state guidelines on minority/nonminority ratios, [and] long-term racial and economic stability. Therefore, minority/nonminority student ratios at both the District level and building levels will be primary determinants when making decisions on transfer requests.The open enrollment/desegregation policy contains a sibling preference, so that applications of siblings of students previously approved for open enrollment will be given first priority. However, the desegregation guidelines outweigh the sibling preference policy.

Two of the appellants' children, Stephanie Dusenberry and Dale Schultz, were denied open enrollment because their assigned school for the 1997-98 school year is Central Middle School. Both children are nonminority students. The District determined that since Central Middle School has a minority enrollment of 39.2%, and the District average minority enrollment is 29.2%, that no nonminority students would be able to transfer from the building and thus out of the District. This is pursuant to the part of the District's desegregation plan which provides that nonminority students who wish to transfer from the District will be denied approval if they attend a building with a minority enrollment that is five percent greater than the District average.

Zachary Sinram will attend West High School next year, and was denied open enrollment under the composite ratio portion of the District's desegregation plan. Zachary is also a nonminority student. In this portion of the District's plan, the District developed a composite ratio of minority to nonminority students for the District as a whole for the 1996-97 school year.

The District has consistently applied its open enrollment/desegregation policy during all the years in question in this case. In her prior application, Stephanie Dusenberry would have been open enrolling from a building not closed to open enrollment for nonminorities if she had not been attending private school last year, and thus her request for last year was granted. The siblings of Dale Schultz also were open enrolling from buildings not closed to open enrollment for nonminorities, which is why their applications were granted while Dale's was not.

The District's practice of denying open enrollment applications under its open enrollment/desegregation policy was upheld by Black Hawk District Court Judge Briner in the Decision on Appeal in Waterloo v. Iowa Dept. of Education, Case Nos. LACV075042 and LACV077403, dated August 8, 1996. There have been no changes to the open enrollment/desegregation policy and plan since the decision was entered by Judge Briner. The circumstances have not changed since Judge Briner's decision almost a year ago. Therefore, the important governmental interest of the District remains, the remedies upheld by Judge Briner as substantially related to the important governmental interest are the same, and the allegations of reverse discrimination by some of the parents therefore fail.

That the decision of the Board of Directors of the Waterloo Independent Community School District made on January 27, 1997, which denied the appellants' requests for open enrollment for their children for the 1997-98 school year, on the grounds the transfers would adversely impact the District's desegregation plan, was affirmed.