A ruling by St. Louis Circuit Judge Robert H. Dierker Jr. will allow St. Louis voters to decide whether St. Louis schoolchildren should be allowed to attend neighborhood public schools.

Readers will recall a 1998 settlement in the St. Louis "desegregation" case requiring suburban districts to accept inner-city students bused to their districts for ten years or until the suburban district reached a certain level of integration in itself. The settlement included millions in state funding.

Dierker said a neighborhood school plan in St. Louis was not in conflict with the settlement because it does not mandate particular student assignments to achieve prescribed racial balance.

Dierker's order requires the issue to be put on the ballot this Nov. 5,2002.

The ruling is a real victory for Alderman Tom Bauer who as a state representative in 1998 began pushing the legislature for a student bill of rights. Bauer had sued to get his plan before the voters.

Bauer's plan would bring back K-8 grades schools, give pupils the right to attend such a school closest to their homes and the right to transfer to any other such school in the city.

In a voter poll conducted for the Post Dispatch in 1999, 81 percent of the voters polled approved the plan.

The school board which had continued the original 1980 court order requiring it to scrap its original elementary school system, is complaining that such a change, if approved by voters, would create absolute chaos. The board threatens to appeal Dierker's order.