Four non-Hawaiian students and their families have filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to overturn Kamehameha Schools' admission policy, which gives preference to native Hawaiian students. The lawsuit is nearly identical to a court challenge filed in 2003. That lawsuit was settled for $7 million last year after a panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the policy.
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FROM MAY 2007: The private Kamehameha Schools in Hawaii have settled a civil rights lawsuit brought against them by a student denied admission because he did not possess Hawaiian ancestry. The settlement avoided the possibility of a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court on the status of Native Hawaiians. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed. But it left in place an 8-to-7 decision of the federal appeals court in San Francisco that allows the schools to admit only students who can prove that at least one of their ancestors lived on the Hawaiian Islands in 1778, when the British explorer Capt. James Cook arrived. The schools, supported by an endowment from a 19th-century Hawaiian princess, have 6,700 student with campuses on three of the state's islands.
