Court OKs Fees to Ride School Bus : No Constitutional Right to Education, Justices Maintain

The Supreme Court, concluding that children do not have a constitutional right to an education, ruled Friday that local governments may charge parents to bus their children to school, even if poor families cannot afford the cost.

On a 5-4 vote, the high court flatly rejected the argument that forcing the poor to pay to send their children to school denies them the “equal protection of the laws.”

The court opinion was issued in a case of minor significance: whether rural school districts in North Dakota may charge a fee for school busing. In most of the nation’s public school districts, children are not charged for busing and even the family that appealed this case to the high court was able to drive its daughter to school in a pickup truck.

But the conservative court majority used the opportunity to announce a narrow interpretation of constitutional protections.

“Statutes having different effects on the wealthy and the poor are not, on that account alone, subject to strict equal protection scrutiny,” wrote Justice Sandra Day O’Connor for the court. “Nor is education a ‘fundamental right’ that triggers strict scrutiny when government interferes with an individual’s access to it.”

Justice Thurgood Marshall, writing the dissenting opinion, declared: “Today, the court continues the retreat from the promise of equal educational opportunity by holding that a school district’s refusal to allow an indigent child who lives 16 miles from the nearest school to use a school bus service without paying a fee does not violate the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.” He was joined by Justices William J. Brennan Jr., Harry A. Blackumn and John Paul Stevens.

Fees for Textbooks

The decision appears to uphold the practice in some public schools of charging fees for textbooks, gym uniforms and extracurricular activities. However, education lawyers said that such fees still could be challenged under state constitutions, many of which, unlike the U.S. Constitution, guarantee their citizens a free public education.

The high court majority said that Friday’s ruling merely applies its earlier decisions. In 1973, for example, the justices held that children in school districts in poor Texas communities were not deprived of the equal protection of the laws just because less was spent for their education than for the schooling of children in wealthy communities.

As the dissenters pointed out, however, the court said in its landmark Brown vs. Board of Education ruling in 1954: “Education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments.” And in 1982, the court ruled that Texas could not deprive illegal alien children of a free public education.

Since the Brown decision, the court regularly has intervened when it has believed that black and Latino children have been denied an equal education. But, as O’Connor noted, the court has not imposed the same level of “strict scrutiny” on state and local programs that discriminate against the poor.

Moreover, she said, because the U.S. Constitution does not require states to provide public schooling or school busing, “it is difficult to imagine why choosing to offer the service should entail a constitutional obligation to offer it for free.”

Civil rights lawyers said that they are disturbed by Friday’s ruling because the conservative court majority showed itself to be unconcerned by government services that discriminate against the poor.

“This is an unfortunate decision, particularly at a time when our society has come to recognize the importance of public education,” William Taylor, an attorney for the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, said.

He said that the court’s 1973 decision upholding unequal educational property tax rates in Texas was driven in large measure by the justices’ fear of becoming entangled in rewriting state and local tax plans. But striking down North Dakota’s busing fees in some of its rural school districts, he said, would not have required so much judicial interference.

“One can only hope that one day they (the justices) come to realize the need to apply the equal protection clause to poor people when they are denied services that are vital to their success,” he said.

This case arose in 1985, when Paula Kadrmas refused to pay a $97-a-year-fee to bus her daughter to a school in Dickinson, N. D. She and her husband, a part-time oil field worker, had two preschool children for whom they soon would have had to pay the fee, and they said they could not afford it on their poverty-level income.

A legal aid attorney filed a suit on their behalf, noting that children in other districts in the state were not charged a busing fee. The North Dakota courts upheld the fee, a position that the Supreme Court subsequently endorsed.

“The statute challenged in this case discriminates against no suspect class (of persons) and interferes with no fundamental right,” O’Connor wrote. Her opinion (Kadrmas vs. Dickinson Public Schools, 86-7113) was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Byron R. White, Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy.

In other rulings, the court:

--Refused to hold that federal officials could be held personally liable for their decisions in the early 1980s to remove thousands of persons from the Social Security disability rolls. On a 6-3 vote, the justices said that Congress took specific steps to remedy this problem and gave back benefits to persons whose disability payments had been unjustly cut off (Schweiker vs. Chilicky, 86-1781).

--Refused to require that police and prosecutors urge suspects to refuse to talk to them without a lawyer. On a 5-4 vote, the court rejected the contention of a Chicago man convicted of murder that suspects should be given an even stronger warning than now required to keep quiet after they have been accused of a crime (Patterson vs. Illinois, 86-7059).