The fact is that there was never any evidence that the delays in notification (which also occurred at other schools) were anything but the fault of local school administrators. There was no evidence that they had any sort of racial motive, nor that they were school or county policy.
On top of that, the awards in question were “commendations,” not the top National Merit Scholar awards, which could explain the lack of urgency on the schools’ part. TJHSST students did not appear to be overly perturbed. As students noted in their school newspaper:
A commendation’s ability to affect college admissions is also questionable—a PSAT commendation serves little use when most colleges use SAT or ACT scores to gauge students’ standardized testing abilities.
As for merit, it’s recognized at Jefferson, but a commendation on the PSAT is not considered a high-merit achievement, at least among most students. Here, a highly-merited distinction is launching a satellite into space or winning a national science fair award. At a school where the 2020 SAT average was 1,528, a PSAT commendation is seen as just the norm.
The charge that the school board was targeting Asian students for the sake of indulging people of color could provoke skepticism in light of the fact that the TJHSST student body was 54 percent Asian, down from 70 percent, after a modest increase in African American and Latino students. It is true that the school board was motivated to promote diversity at TJHSST, in the same way that universities have done—by not limiting admissions criteria to grades and test scores.