Emily Batchelder is a nonminority student, attending kindergarten. Her mother timely filed an open enrollment application to Hudson, where Emily's grandmother lived. Ms. Batchelder is a single parent and cannot afford a different daycare. The Board denied Emily's open enrollment application because she was a nonminority student attending a school with a minority enrollment that is at laeast 5% greater than the District's percentage as a whole.

The District adopted its current open enrollment/desegre-gation policy and regulations in 1999. The Board policies contain objective criteria for determining when open enrollment transfers would adversely impact the District's desegregation program and for prioritizing requests that would not adversely impact the program. These criteria are detailed in Board Policy 501.12-R. The policy contains criteria for determining how transfers from individual school buildings will be approved or denied.

Board Policy 501.12 and Regulation 501.12-R2 were, for all relevant purposes, the same policy and regulation reviewed by the Department of Education in its decision In re Megan, Mindy, & Drew Engel, 11 D.o.E. App. Dec. 262(1994) and upheld in that de-cision as to the building ratio portion in view of the District's voluntary desegregation plan as contemplated by Iowa Code section 282.18. That finding by the Department of Education was upheld by Judge Briner in the Iowa District Court for Black Hawk County in Waterloo Community School District v. Iowa Department of Edu-cation, Case No. LACV075042, decided on August 8, 1996.

That the decision of the Board of Directors of the Waterloo Community School District made on July 17, 2000, denying the open enrollment application for Emily Batchelder, was affirmed