In an emotional, racially charged meeting, the Santa Barbara school board Tuesday night took a decisive step closer to merging the top two levels of advanced courses in the middle schools and high schools — GATE and honors — and scrapping the GATE label.

Despite the objections of some parents who fear the move will dilute the rigor for the highest-performing students, all five board members appeared ready to significantly broaden the tent, perhaps with an “open access” policy that would allow all willing students into the program regardless of their grades. But they aren’t slated to make a final decision on the debate over “Gifted and Talented Education” until March 23.

“I don’t ever want to look back and say, ‘We missed this opportunity,’” school board member Susan Deacon said. “The time has come.”

The issue of unintentional classroom segregation has rankled the district for years. School principals have long tried to improve upon the disproportionately low numbers of Latino students taking higher-level courses.

In Santa Barbara, while Latinos make up about half of the nearly 10,000 students attending public middle schools and high schools, they total just 18 percent of the students in GATE. White students account for 44 percent of the total enrollment, and 69 percent of the GATE population.

Meanwhile, although many experts say GATE courses should include no more than 5 percent of any given student population, in Santa Barbara’s secondary district, the figure is more like 20 percent, largely because students who don’t test into GATE can still get in through other measures, such as teacher referrals or parental lobbying. As is, the students who get into the program that way also tend to be white.

District administrators say the change would bring Santa Barbara more in line with how the majority of school districts operate throughout California. They also say the University of California System doesn’t recognize GATE as being a higher-level program than the honors coursework, even though it’s considered to be so here.

Perhaps the best way to understand the district’s proposal is to look at the junior high level, where students tend to be divided relatively neatly into four tiers of instruction. They are, from highest to lowest, GATE, honors, college prep and intervention. At the middle schools, about 25 percent of the students are in GATE, and about 5 percent are in honors, according to district officials. Merging them could potentially mean that the top tier would serve 30 percent of the students, rather than just 25 percent.

By those numbers, the difference doesn’t appear profound. But for many parents and students on both sides of the debate, the issue is highly emotional, and inextricably tied to issues of racial equity, educational fairness and — to some — political correctness. In general, both sides were represented fairly evenly among the 20 or so speakers Tuesday night.

“I believe very strongly that black, Latino — whatever race they are — if they test and they qualify for GATE, bring ‘em in,” parent Shari Kilstofte said. “But if they are not at that level, there is no reason that our GATE-level kids who are highly motivated, working their butts off every day, who are very challenged and happy, should be brought down, waiting for some of these children.”

Parent Gina Perry said a decision to merge the programs will be “long lasting” and would affect about half of the secondary district’s students.

“Teachers will simply be overwhelmed trying to bridge the very large intellectual span,” she said. “Teachers will have no choice but to teach to the lowest level.”

On the other end of the spectrum were parents such as Alma Flores.

“Although it isn’t being said, we all know this has nothing to do with removing the GATE label, it’s about race,” she said.

Flores added that she has two girls who graduated from San Marcos High School with 4.5 GPAs, and excelled in advanced classes despite coming to the local schools from out of the country in elementary school, and despite not being “GATE identified.” (That is the term educators use for the small percentage of students who have passed the test, often while in elementary school.)

“I can assure you, if given the same access to higher level classes, we will succeed,” she said. “We will not dumb down these classes.”

Also in support of the district’s proposal was San Marcos senior Madeleine Ranson, a GATE student.

“It would be unfair and unjust to assume that not every race has the same amount of Gifted and Talented people,” she said. “Unfortunately, it appears that some GATE students have developed a sense of racial superiority because of the misrepresentation of certain racial and ethnic groups in the program.”

The most emotional comments from a board member Tuesday came from Annette Cordero, the only nonwhite trustee.

“As a person of color, especially a Latina and the only Latina sitting up here, and on behalf of the Latino community, I really do need to say that I’m really offended by the question of a decline in the rigor of courses,” she said.

Cordero pointed out that non-GATE-identified students have been in the GATE courses for years. To date, however, very few of the non-GATE-identified pupils have been students of color. And until now, she said, “there has been no overwhelming outcry of concern for the rigor of these courses. … But now that we’ve raised the issue of wanting to include more students who look like me, all of a sudden I start hearing the term ‘dumbing down’ used.”

She added: “We have young Latina and Latino students out there who — you may be surprised to know — listen to this, listen to the things you say, and they take it to heart.”

Cordero, an instructor at SBCC, said last year she asked a group of her students why they thought Latino students were so under-represented in advanced classes.

“I was heartbroken — literally moved to tears — that my students of color said, ‘Because the white students are smarter,’ and the students who are white students said, ‘Because Latino students don’t work as hard.’ Neither one of those things are true,” she said. “And the message that gets told to Latino students is they are either stupid or lazy. Neither one of those things are true.”

Perhaps the most surprising comment from the board came from trustee Bob Noel, who said he favored the most open option on the menu provided by district administrators. The last time the board discussed the issue, he was the most critical board member, saying the district hadn’t yet shown that its teachers are ready to instruct classrooms filled with students whose academic skills vary widely. (The academic term for this is “differentiated instruction.”)

“I like the laissez faire model — open them up for everybody and hope for the best,” Noel said Tuesday, but he added that he would like to see some conditions. For instance, he said he wants the district to implement a plan for ensuring that teachers use differentiated instruction methods. He also said he wanted to see a policy in place for removing students who can’t perform at the high level required.

There are alternatives to the “open access” approach. District administrators provided a menu of other options, which included minimum grade requirements, such as scoring an A in a pre-requisite course, or a B along with a teacher recommendation.

— Noozhawk staff writer Rob Kuznia can be reached at rkuznia@noozhawk.com.