NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani and senior city Democratic officials are being accused of “racially engineering” New York City’s most selective public high schools, according to a Brooklyn mother who filed a federal lawsuit last week against the mayor and the Department of Education.

Yi Fang Chen, 45, is contesting the admissions system used for the city’s nine Specialized High Schools after her eldest son was not accepted to Stuyvesant High School, even though he ranked in the top five percent on the entrance exam he took in November.

Roughly 26,000 students sit for the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test each year, competing for about 5,000 available seats.

Chen told The NY Post that her 13-year-old son earned a score of 561 on the exam, while Stuyvesant’s cutoff is 551, yet he was still rejected. Her lawsuit challenges changes implemented for the 2019 school year that set aside 20 percent of seats for students admitted through an alternative pathway, including those with lower test scores who qualify based on other factors such as low-income status.

“Starting in 2020, the City began reserving 20 percent of its SHS seats for a separate admissions pathway — the Discovery program — that excludes students based on criteria the City purposefully selected to change the racial composition of those schools,” according to the lawsuit.

“The City adopted and continues to enforce that policy in an effort to reduce the number of Asian-American students and increase the number of black and Hispanic students admitted to the SHSs.

Chen says her son did not meet the eligibility requirements for the Discovery Program.

“Any student who scored a 495 or above is not eligible for the Discovery program,” states the NYC public school website.

She added that students with scores up to 100 points lower than her son’s are admitted through the program. “It’s very upsetting,” said the data scientist and mother of three.

Mamdani, an alumnus of the Bronx High School of Science, is accused in the lawsuit of continuing practices that disadvantage Asian American students.

According to the Pacific Legal Foundation, which filed the case on Chen’s behalf, the admissions criteria were intentionally structured to reduce Asian American enrollment.

“The City inverted the purpose of the Discovery Program by making certain disadvantaged kids categorically ineligible for Discovery through middle-school screens calculated to exclude heavily Asian-American schools.

“So rather than expand opportunity for disadvantaged students generally, the City rewrote the program in an effort to engineer a different racial result,” a representative for the foundation told The Post.

The Discovery Program itself predates Mamdani’s tenure as mayor. It was expanded under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, who sought to increase admissions of black and Hispanic students.

Eligibility requires attendance at and recommendation from a “high-poverty public school,” along with meeting criteria such as receiving public assistance, being in foster care, or qualifying as an “English language learner,” according to the education department.

Chen said she plans to keep pursuing the case on behalf of her son and other Asian-American students in the city.

Yi Fang Chen said she intends to continue challenging the policy affecting admissions.

The Pacific Legal Foundation argues that the revised system violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The Department of Education declined to comment.

Chen, who came to the United States in 1996 as a teenager from China with limited English, later earned a PhD in statistics from Stanford University. She said she brought the lawsuit to help other students facing similar barriers.

She also hopes to protect her two younger children from what she views as the same discrimination.

“Yi Fang Chen…has lived and worked in New York City for decades and raised her family with the expectation that merit — not race — would determine their opportunities in public education,” says the lawsuit, which also names Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels as a defendant.

Stuyvesant High School, located in Battery Park City, is one of nine Specialized High Schools in New York City.

Chen was previously involved in a similar lawsuit filed in 2018 against the city and former Mayor Bill de Blasio. That case was dismissed in 2022, but later reinstated in 2024 by the Second Circuit Court, which found evidence of “discriminatory intent,” according to the Pacific Legal Foundation.

Before filing the current case, Chen said she discussed it with her son, who supported her decision.

“Regardless of outcome, I have to do this because it’s not just my son but each year there are hundreds of students who are victims of racial discrimination,” said Chen. “I don’t understand Mamdani. He went to Bronx Science, and he benefited from that experience.”

Chen says she remains committed to pursuing the case until the policy is changed.