Parents to sue over city HS admissions

Parents, Asian-American groups and schools are lining up to join a federal suit opposing the city’s planned changes to specialized high school admissions.

Joshua Thompson, a lawyer for a California-based libertarian law firm, said a range of individuals and groups have reached out to join the planned lawsuit.

“Our goal is to build as broad a coalition as possible,” he said. “We want to be able to show the court how this is impacting different people on different levels.”

The charge is being led by parents at Intermediate School 187 in Dyker Heights, one of the city’s top middle schools that sent the highest number of kids to specialized high schools last year, with 205.

The school’s PTA voted Tuesday night to launch the suit — and Thompson, of Pacific Legal Foundation, said he expects the list of plaintiffs to swell.

The suit will specifically challenge changes to the city’s Discovery program, which allows admission to low-income applicants who fall just below the cutoff line on the entry exam.

Thompson said the proposed changes will inordinately — and purposefully — lower the number of Asian kids who are admitted into the schools.

“Discrimination against Asian-Americans is becoming prevalent,” he said, not- ing high-profile cases that include a legal brawl over admissions practices at Harvard. “This is becoming a major civil rights issue.”

Backers of changes argue the single-test admissions system is an unfairly narrow measure of student potential and unjustly limits the number of Hispanic and black enrollees.