School+law+cases

= = DRAKE SCHOOL LAW CASE SUMMARIES (UPDATED ANNUALLY)-Click Here! ASCD TOP 50 SCHOOL LAW CASES


 * __ IMPORTANT SCHOOL LAW CASES __**

// School initiated-prayer in the public school system violates the First Amendment. // In the New York school system, each day began with a nondenominational prayer acknowledging dependence upon God. This action was challenged in Court as an unconstitutional state establishment of religion in violation of the First Amendment. The Supreme Court agreed, stating that the government could not sponsor such religious activities.
 * Engel v. Vitale (1962) **

// Students do not leave their rights at the schoolhouse door. // To protest the Vietnam War, Mary Beth Tinker and her brother wore black armbands to school. Fearing a disruption, the administration prohibited wearing such armbands. The Tinkers were removed from school when they failed to comply, but the Supreme Court ruled that their actions were protected by the First Amendment.
 * Tinker v. Des Moines (1969) **

Public schools have to allow the children of illegal aliens to enroll, and state and local tax bodies have to pay the costs.
 * // Plyler v. Doe (1982) //**

// Students are entitled to certain due process rights. // Nine students at an Ohio public school received 10-day suspensions for disruptive behavior without due process protections. The Supreme Court ruled for the students, saying that once the state provides an education for all of its citizens, it cannot deprive them of it without ensuring due process protections.
 * Goss v. Lopez (1975) **

Pennsylvania was reimbursing private schools for teachers' salaries, textbooks, and instructional materials, as long as the courses were secular or non-religious in nature, the same as in public schools, and the curriculum was approved by the State. However, the practice was thrown out as constituting "excessive entanglement" between government and religion. The court also set up "The Lemon Law," to be used in future cases deciding whether there has been sufficient separation of church and state in various matters. A state law must have a secular, non-religious purpose; the effect of the law must neither advance nor inhibit religion; the money should flow to the parents and not to the schools, and it shouldn't foster over-involvement of church and state.
 * // Lemon v. Kurtzman ( //**** 1971 **** ) **

Homeschooling is an "enduring tradition" in the United States, and Amish families didn't have to keep their kids in school past eighth grade because that requirement violated their freedom of religion.
 * // Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972) //**

// Administrators may edit the content of school newspapers. // The principal of Hazelwood East High School edited two articles in the school paper // The Spectrum // that he deemed inappropriate. The student authors argued that this violated their First Amendment right to freedom of speech. The Supreme Court disagreed, stating that administrators can edit materials that reflect school values. Student Wideo Presentation About Case
 * Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier (1988) **

// Students have a reduced expectation of privacy in school. // A teacher accused T.L.O. of smoking in the bathroom. When she denied the allegation, the principal searched her purse and found cigarettes and marijuana paraphernalia. A family court declared T.L.O. a delinquent. The Supreme Court ruled that her rights were not violated since students have reduced expectations of privacy in school.
 * New Jersey v. T.L.O. (1985) **

Pickering v. Board of Education Marvin Pickering (plaintiff) was a teacher in Township High School District 205 (school) in Illinois. Pickering wrote a letter to a local newspaper that was critical of the Illinois State Board of Education (board) (defendant) regarding a proposed tax increase. Pickering took issue with the board’s previous handling of a bond issue and the board’s allocation of financial resources between the educational and athletic programs. Pickering signed the letter in his own name and did not represent his views as the views of the school. The board then terminated Pickering for writing and publishing the letter. The board held a hearing on the termination and determined that the letter contained numerous false statements that unjustifiably questioned the motives, honesty, integrity, truthfulness, responsibility, and competence of the board and the school administration. The trial court ruled in favor of the board. Pickering appealed, and the Illinois Supreme Court affirmed. The United States Supreme Court granted ruled for Pickering in matter of public interest.  Racial segregation of schools was ended because all citizens have "equal protection under the law." In Topeka, an African-American student named Linda Brown had to walk five miles to the local school that enrolled minority students, when a "white" school was right across the train tracks from her home.
 * // Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS (1954) //**

// Students do not have a First Amendment right to make obscene speeches in school. // Matthew N. Fraser, a student at Bethel High School, was suspended for three days for delivering an obscene and provocative speech to the student body. In this speech, he nominated his fellow classmate for an elected school office. The Supreme Court held that his free speech rights were not violated.
 * Bethel School District #43 v. Fraser (1987) **

// Students may not use a school's loudspeaker system to offer student-led, student-initiated prayer. // Before football games, members of the student body of a Texas high school elected one of their classmates to address the players and spectators. These addresses were conducted over the school's loudspeakers and usually involved a prayer. Attendance at these events was voluntary. Three students sued the school arguing that the prayers violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. A majority of the Court rejected the school's argument that since the prayer was student initiated and student led, as opposed to officially sponsored by the school, it did not violate the First Amendment. The Court held that this action did constitute school-sponsored prayer because the loudspeakers that the students used for their invocations were owned by the school.
 * Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe (2000) **

This suburban Omaha district shot itself in the foot when it took a teenage girl all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court for starting an after-school Bible club in the school. She wanted it to be treated like any other extracurricular activity: to be able to advertise and have stories in the school newspaper, be pictured in the yearbook, put meeting notices on bulletin boards, and have the same access to free meeting space as other after-school, non-curriculum related student groups like the chess club or community service clubs. Instead, the school board sued to try to shut her down, claiming that allowing the Bible club after school would be endorsing a particular religion. But the high court ruled that they were wrong, and the teenage girl was right, under the Equal Access Act, ensuring the rights of student-initiated clubs on government school property without "viewpoint discrimination."
 * // Westside Community Board of Education v. Mergens (1990) //**

Students cannot be forced to salute the [|American flag].
 * // West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1942) //**

// Random drug tests of students involved in extracurricular activities do not violate the Fourth Amendment. // In // Veronia School District v. Acton (1995) //, the Supreme Court held that random drug tests of student athletes do not violate the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures. Some schools then began to require drug tests of all students in extracurricular activities. The Supreme Court in // Earls // upheld this practice.
 * Board of Education of Independent School District #92 of Pottawatomie County v. Earls (2002) **

//No individual shall be excluded from participation in, denied the benefit of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity recieving Federal financial assistance// In 1971, we brought the seminal lawsuit //Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Children (PARC) v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania//, the first right-to-education suit in the country, to overturn that Pennsylvania law and secure a quality education for all children. The case quickly settled before the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pa., resulting in a consent decree in which the state agreed to provide a free public education for children with mental retardation.
 * PARC v. Commonwealth (1971)**

// Certain school voucher programs are constitutional. // The Ohio Pilot Scholarship Program allowed certain Ohio families to receive tuition aid from the state. This would help offset the cost of tuition at private, including parochial (religiously affiliated), schools. The Supreme Court rejected First Amendment challenges to the program and stated that such aid does not violate the Establishment Clause.
 * Zelma v. Simmons-Harris (2002) **

// Colleges and universities have a legitimate interest in promoting diversity. // Barbara Grutter alleged that her Equal Protection rights were violated when the University of Michigan Law School's attempt to gain a diverse student body resulted in the denial of her admission's application. The Supreme Court disagreed and held that institutions of higher education have a legitimate interest in promoting diversity.
 * Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) **

// It is cruel and unusual punishment to execute persons for crimes they committed before age 18. // Matthew Simmons was sentenced to death for the murder of a woman when he was seventeen years of age. In the 1988 case // Thompson v. Oklahoma //, the Supreme Court ruled that executing persons for crimes committed at age fifteen or younger constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment. Roper argued that "evolving standards of decency" prevented the execution of an individual for crimes committed before the age of eighteen. A majority of the Supreme Court agreed with Roper, and held that to execute him for his crime would violate the Eighth Amendment.
 * Roper v. Simmons (2005) **

The preferences of the parents are constitutionally more important than the preferences of the State in education. In this case, parents were allowed to let a teacher in a private Christian school teach a 10-year-old boy in German, even though a Nebraska state law at the time prohibited foreign-language instruction in schools in the post-World War I era.
 * // Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) //**

The court ruled that states can't force children to go to public schools and submit to government standardization if that violated their sincerely-held religious convictions. Children are not "mere creatures of the State," this law set out. The State of Oregon had enacted a compulsory education law that required attendance of all children ages 8-16 in public schools, in what was said to be an attempt to destroy Oregon's Catholic schools because of bigotry.
 * // Pierce v. Society of Sisters //**** (1925) **

This case was the beginning of a stricter enforcement of a separation between Church and State in K-12 education. Even though the high court ruled 5-4 that it was all right to reimburse parents who send their children to Catholic schools with taxpayer dollars offsetting their transportation costs, taxpayer dollars to a private school with a faith-based approach to education violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.The case came out of New Jersey, where local school boards were allowed to reimburse parents for the costs of transportation to and from schools, including Catholic schools. A citizen complained that that was indirect aid that helped religious instruction at taxpayer expense. Though the Court said that reimbursement was proper, it set down a precedent about the importance of the separation between Church and State in educational matters. This case is sometimes criticized as showing an anti-Catholic bias since four justices voted against the reimbursement.
 * // Everson v. Board of Education (1947) //**

It is unconstitutional for a school to require that at least 10 Bible verses be read aloud at the beginning of each day, since religious instruction by a public school violates the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. This case, out of Pennsylvania, did not preclude the use of the Bible as a teaching tool of history and literature, just its use as a tool for spiritual guidance.
 * // Abington v Schempp (1963) //**

An Arkansas statute banned the teaching of human evolution as fact in public schools, but the high court ruled that state and local officials cannot remove ideas from the course of study in public schools simply because those ideas conflict with the beliefs of religious groups, and that schools must maintain religious neutrality.
 * // Epperson v. Arkansas (1968) //**

Education is not a fundamental right under the federal Constitution, so those who were seeking "funding equity" for schools in less-advantaged areas went to the state courts. The basic claim is that the property tax base per pupil is a lot less in low-income school districts, so there should be more tax support collected from statewide sources and distributed to the low-income districts, to balance out the revenues for rich and poor within a given state. There have since been "equity" or "adequacy" school-financing lawsuits in 45 of the 50 states, with landmark cases in Kentucky and Montana.
 * // Rodriguez v. San Antonio ( //**** 1973 **** ) **

This case had to do with the rights of a minor child with mental health issues, but the majority opinion, written by the late Chief Justice Warren Burger, included a strong endorsements of parents' rights. In quoting past decisions in American law, Burger wrote that parents "have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare (their children) for additional obligations." He said that parents have the maturity, experience and judgment that children and youth lack, so it is natural for parents to have authority over their children. However, parents outrank school officials, too, because of the "natural bonds of affection" between parents and children that leads parents to act in the individual child's best interests much more often than the school bureaucracy does. This quote is famous from this case: "The statist notion that governmental power should supercede parental authority in all cases because some parents abuse and neglect children is repugnant to American tradition."
 * // Parham v. J.R. (1979) //**

Books in a school library that the school board deemed "anti-­American, anti­Christian, anti­-Semitic, and just plain filthy" could not be banned because they were not required reading, and school boards do not have the right to prescribe what is "orthodox" in books or to remove or suppress ideas in schools.
 * // Island Trees School District v. Pico (1982) //**

School-choice vouchers were declared constitutional under the First Amendment, even though sometimes they funnel money from state taxpayers to private, religious schools in this landmark case out of Cleveland, Ohio. The state's voucher plan provided $2,250 a year to some parents of students in the Cleveland City School District to attend participating public or private schools in the city and neighboring suburbs; it also allocated tutorial aid for students who remained in public school. Far more families applied for the vouchers than there was funding for them, and about eight out of 10 of the participating private schools had a religious affiliation. In a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court ruled that vouchers to private schools were allowable as long as the school's program had a valid secular purpose, the aid was going to the parents and not to the schools, a broad class of beneficiaries were participating, voucher allocation was neutral with respect to religion, and there must be adequate nonreligious options.
 * // Zelman v. Simmons-Harris //** **(2002)**

An atheist father who didn't have custody of his young daughter wanted to force schools to quit the long-time practice of having teachers lead the Pledge of Allegiance because it contains these words: "under God." The girl's mother didn't mind, but the father fought it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he lost, 8-0.
 * // Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow //** **(2004)**

A class action suit out of San Francisco in 2000 alleged that schools in California were offering less educational opportunity for low-income children and English Language Learners than for middle-income children. The suit alleged that the teaching quality, books, and school conditions were worse in low-income schools. The case was settled out of court and resulted in an extra $1 billion allocated to equalize conditions, including the phasing out of the chaotic and expensive "multi-track" year-round school calendar. Other states have taken note and taken steps to equalize their systems, too. Unfortunately, the additional money has not paid off in terms of improved test scores; indeed, they are going down in California.
 * // Williams v. California //** **(2004)**

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