A federal appeals court upheld a new admissions policy at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, rejecting claims the policy discriminates against Asian-American students.

“Expanding the array of student backgrounds in the classroom serves, at minimum, as a legitimate interest in the context of public primary and secondary schools,” Judge Robert B. King, a Clinton appointee, wrote in the majority opinion. “And that is the primary and essential effect of the challenged admissions policy.”

The Fourth District Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 to uphold the admissions policy, reversing a lower court’s decision in 2022 to strike it down as having a disparate and unconstitutional impact on Asian-American students, who make up the majority of the school’s student population.

The appellate court had previously ruled that TJ administrators could continue using the controversial admissions process while the case moved forward — a decision the U.S. Supreme Court declined to reverse last April.

“The court reached the correct decision, and we firmly believe this admission plan is fair and gives qualified applicants at every middle school a fair chance of a seat at TJ. We look forward to offering seats to a new group of remarkable and incredibly well-qualified young scholars in the years to come,” said John Foster, division counsel for the Fairfax County School Board.

The Coalition for TJ, the group of parents who brought the original lawsuit, plans to appeal Tuesday’s decision to the Supreme Court again.

“WE WILL PREVAIL for kids, America and the fundamental values of equality and merit,” wrote Asra Nomani, a writer and Coalition for TJ leader who argues the Fairfax school board has used the concept of “equity” to target Asian students. Nomani, a former TJ parent, detailed her thoughts about the decision in a lengthy post on Twitter.

The Coalition is represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative legal organization also involved in challenges to elite high school admissions policies in New York and Montgomery County, Maryland.

The Fairfax County school board adopted the controversial new admissions policy in 2021, after years of concerns that the prestigious magnet school’s student body — which had few Black and Latinx students and typically came from just eight ‘feeder’ middle schools in the county — did not reflect the wider Northern Virginia community TJ serves.

The new policy got rid of a $100 application fee and ended the use of a high-stakes admissions test. Instead, students were evaluated on their grades, an essay, and class rank at their middle schools. The admissions criteria also took into account race-neutral factors like the student’s socioeconomic status, special education status, English language learner status, and whether they attended a public middle school that was historically underrepresented at TJ.

At the time, the school board specifically directed that the new policy “must only use race-neutral methods that do not seek to achieve any specific racial or ethnic mix, balance or targets,” the court decision notes. The school division removed candidates’ names, race, ethnicity, and sex from admissions materials.

TJ’s class of 2025, the first admitted under the new policy, had a higher GPA among its applicant pool than any in the previous five years. It also included many more low-income students, English language-learners, and girls, and students came from all middle schools in the county. It was the “most diverse class in recent history,” The Washington Post’s headline said at the time.

Representatives of the Coalition for TJ argue that the decrease in the percentage of total admissions offers given to Asian-American students that year is an indication of bias, though Asian-American students still received a majority of the admissions offers.

But the Fourth Circuit court disagreed.

“The policy visits no racially disparate impact on Asian American students,” the court said in its opinion. “Indeed, those students have had greater success in securing admission to TJ under the policy than students from any other racial or ethnic group.”

The court also found no convincing evidence that the school board adopted the policy with the intent of having an adverse effect on Asian-American students. King’s opinion criticized the Coalition and the lower court’s choice to focus exclusively on the year-over-year comparison of Asian-American student admissions without examining how other racial groups fared.

Even with the new admissions policy in place, King pointed out, Asian-American students still garnered more admissions than other racial groups. Asian-American students accounted for 49% of the applications but 54% of the admissions offers in 2021, the only racial group to receive a disproportionate share of admissions offers compared to their share of the applicant pool.

“An application of elementary arithmetic shows that Asian American students, as a class, experience no material disadvantage under the policy’s functioning,” King wrote. “In fact, they do better in securing admission to TJ than students from any other racial or ethnic group.”

The court also found the evidence the school board acted with purposeful discriminatory intent against Asian-American students was “too sparse” to be convincing.

A dissenting opinion from Judge Allison Jones Rushing, a Trump nominee, argued that the Board’s intent in adopting the policy was to “racially balance” TJ’s student body, and thus discriminated against Asian-American students.

Rushing noted that Asian-American students were the only group to experience a year-to-year decrease in admissions numbers under the new policy. She also quoted from text messages between school board members as evidence of discrimination.

“In text messages, Board members Stella Pekarsky and Abrar Omeish agreed that ‘there has been an anti [A]sian feel underlying some of this, hate to say it lol’ and that Asian students were ‘discriminated against in this process,’” Rushing wrote.

The appellate court’s ruling in favor of the admissions policy comes as the Supreme Court considers a high-profile affirmative action case over admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, which include race as one of many factors in admissions decisions.

The TJ admissions policy has come under scrutiny on the state level, too. Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, a Republican, launched a two-part investigation into possible civil rights discrimination  under Virginia law at the school in January. At the time, Miyares said he planned to investigate the admissions policy, along with a delay in sending out National Merit letters of commendation, for a possible disparate impact on Asian-American students. Another Fairfax County school came under Miyares’ scrutiny later in the spring for allegedly discriminating against Asian-American students in an email encouraging students of other races to apply for a college preparatory program.

Fairfax County Public Schools is the commonwealth’s largest school division, and a frequent political target for conservatives critical of the running of public schools.