When Drudys Nicolas entered Boston Latin School for the first time in September 1994, a sixie from Hyde Park, nearly 23 percent of the faces she met looked like her own: young, energetic, and black.

When she walked out of the school for the last time in June 2000, with the coveted title of Senior Class President, the faces she met were still young and energetic, but fewer of them were black. In the six years that Nicolas attended Boston Latin, the number of minority students - black and Latino - had dropped from 32.4 percent to 27.5 percent, the direct result of a series of legal challenges to the school’s admissions policy that began during Nicolas’ first year.

The result is that today, while three-quarters of the city's school-aged children are either black or Latino and the nation as a whole is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse, Boston Latin is becoming more uniform. Not only are fewer minorities filling the seats on Avenue Louis Pasteur, but fewer are bothering to take the entrance exam required for consideration.

This slide toward uniformity didn’t happen overnight. It began in 1995 when Michael McLaughlin, a Hyde Park attorney, filed a lawsuit in federal court charging that the Boston School Department denied his daughter Julia admission to Boston Latin because she was white —even though she had scored higher than 149 other students who had taken the entrance exam and were admitted. Of the 149, 103 were black or Latino. McLaughlin, whose two older daughters attended Boston Latin, says that after Julia didn’t get in, he started asking questions.

"I came to the conclusion that the scores had been altered - weighted differently," he said. "The school department said they could do that because of the court order. I didn’t know there was a quota still in effect. No one knew. There was a lot of confusion."

McLaughlin's conclusion was, in fact, correct. A court order allowing the city’s exam schools to use race as a factor in deciding who gets in and who doesn’t had been in place since 1975, three years after a group of black parents from Dorchester filed a class-action suit in federal court. The group, represented by the NAACP, alleged in Morgan vs. Hennigan that the Boston School Department had intentionally delayed or evaded efforts to reduce the number of schools in the city that were more than 50 percent black, as required by the Racial Imbalance Act of 1965. At the time, reports showed that many of the black schools in the city were chronically short-changed on funding and facilities were unequal. Arthur Garrity Jr., the judge assigned to the case, concluded that indeed the school committee had knowingly used covert techniques to deny equal educational opportunities to all students in Boston. "Therefore," he wrote in his opinion, "the entire school system is unconstitutionally segregated." The Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court upheld the ruling.

What followed was a desegregation plan to integrate the city's public schools that ignited a war between the races and the neighborhoods and changed the reputation of the city forever. The most visible element of this plan was to bus black students to nearby white schools. For the most part, busing proceeded in the fall of 1974 relatively quietly. It was the exceptions — rooftop snipers and school stabbings in a few places like Charlestown and South Boston — that made national headlines.

Garrity’s wide-reaching effort to achieve racial balance in the Boston schools went well beyond busing, however. Hundreds of court orders were issued, including one in 1975 that had a major impact on Boston Latin: Explore whether or not to drop the entrance exam in an effort to do away with the perceived elitism of a system that chooses based on a set of criteria that could be biased against some students. That year, 78 percent of Boston Latin’s student population was white, 12 percent black, and one percent Latino.

Prior to this, explains Bill Looney '49, sixth-grade teachers would identify their "best" students and recommend them to Latin. Those with all As and Bs were admitted. "If you had a C in any of the major subjects like English or math," Looney says, "you had to take a test."

That test, according to Michael Contompasis '57, a former student and head master at Boston Latin and current COO of the Boston School Department, was dependent on all of the elementary schools in the city teaching students at a consistent level. "Over time," he says, “that consistency changed. By the time Garrity looked into the use of exams, there was an unlevel playing field in the school system. The question is, how do you remedy from past discrimination?"

A task force convened by then-head master Wilfred O'Leary, which included Contompasis and Looney, came up with what they hoped was the answer - a "set-aside" quota plan that retained the exam and guaranteed slots to minorities. Under the new plan, a residency requirement was implemented (until the mid-1960s, Latin accepted a few non-Boston students who paid tuition) and a composite score was calculated for each student based on exam score and GPA. Those who scored in the top 50th percentile were put into a pool of eligible candidates for admissions. From that pool, 35 percent of the seats were set aside for black and Latino students. Asian students, Contompasis says, were not considered minorities for the purpose of the plan. Currently, Asians make up the second largest group of students at Latin at nearly 25 percent.

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