In the latest challenge to the role race may play in school admissions, a legal activist group asked the Supreme Court on Monday to hear a case on how students are selected at one of the country’s top high schools, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.

A divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled in May that Thomas Jefferson, a public school in Alexandria, Va., did not discriminate in its admissions. The Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian law group, wants the Supreme Court to overturn that decision, arguing that the school’s new admissions policies disadvantaged Asian American applicants.

At issue is the use of what the school board said were race-neutral criteria to achieve a diverse student body. The constitutionality of such practices was left open in the Supreme Court’s decision in June against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, effectively banning the use of race-conscious admissions practices by colleges, though the majority opinion said, quoting an earlier decision, that “what cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly.”

Although the new case involves a prestigious magnet high school, the decision could ultimately affect colleges, which are implementing new admissions criteria after the June decision. “This is the next frontier,” Joshua P. Thompson, a lawyer with the Pacific Legal Foundation, has said of the litigation.