Crowley v. McKinney

Decision Date11 March 2005
Docket NumberNo. 02-3741.,02-3741.
PartiesDaniel CROWLEY, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Donald McKINNEY and Berwyn South School District # 100, Defendants-Appellees.
CourtU.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

Daniel Crowley, Naperville, IL, pro se.

J. Brett Busby (argued), Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw, Houston, TX, for Plaintiff-Appellant.

Thomas G. Dicianni, Allen Duarte (argued), Ancel, Glink, Diamond, Bush, Dicianni & Rolek, Chicago, IL, for Defendants-Appellees.

Before POSNER, WOOD, and EVANS, Circuit Judges.

POSNER, Circuit Judge.

The district court dismissed, for failure to state a claim, Daniel Crowley's civil rights suit (42 U.S.C. § 1983) against the principal of his children's school, and the school district itself. His appeal presents questions mainly about the right of a noncustodial divorced parent to participate in his children's education. Our only source of facts is the complaint itself plus the divorce decree, of which we take judicial notice. The summary that follows assumes the truth of the plaintiff's allegations, but of course without vouching for them.

The children, a boy and a girl, were 8 and 7 when the complaint was filed in 2002. The parents had been divorced four years earlier. A marital settlement agreement incorporated in the divorce decree provides that Mrs. Crowley "shall have the sole care, custody, control and education of the minor children." But this is qualified by a later provision that the parties "shall have joint and equal rights of access to records that are maintained by third parties, including ... their education... records. Each of them shall direct the school ... to send them each duplicate notices of all records, events, and issues concerning the children, and neither of them shall be responsible to inform the other of any such records, events or issues if such direct notice has been or can be provided for. They shall cooperate to ensure that the children and other authorities do provide the requested notices and information to both parents regarding their progress and activities.... Each party shall direct the children's school authorities to promptly advise each of them of the children's grades and progress in school and of all school meetings, functions and activities that are open to attendance by parents. They shall cooperate to ensure that such dual notice is in place."

The children attend the Hiawatha Elementary School, a public school in a Chicago suburb. Defendant McKinney is the school's principal and is directly responsible for all the acts of which the plaintiff complains. The superintendent of the school district (William Jordan, not named as a defendant), the policymaker for the district, knew about McKinney's acts but did nothing to stop them.

Crowley had long been critical of the "leadership and direction" of the school by McKinney and Jordan, and had expressed these criticisms at public meetings. He had also complained directly to them about his son's being bullied by other children and about the school's "failure to adequately provide Plaintiff with notices, records, correspondence and other documents" that custodial parents receive. As a result of that failure, Crowley "must rely on his children telling him about matters such as upcoming school events or injuries suffered at school, and only hears about incidents such as a gun being brought to Hiawatha School through third parties." In letters to McKinney, Crowley "asked for increased supervision and response to bullying of his children, and asked that he receive all of the documents received by custodial parents with children attending Hiawatha School." He even "provided the teachers and McKinney each with 100 self-addressed envelopes, to facilitate his receipt of all correspondence." All to no avail; "Plaintiff's requests have never been granted, and Plaintiff still does not receive all of the items to which he is entitled." After his son was again beaten up on the school playground, Crowley went to observe his son during recess and was told that he (that is, Crowley) was not allowed on the playground. He volunteered to be a playground monitor, but McKinney turned him down. Once, because his son had been feeling ill, Crowley called the school to ask whether his son was at school that day, and the person who answered the phone refused to tell him. The school also forbade him to attend a book fair held at the school on Hiawatha School Day.

These incidents and others narrated in the complaint caused Crowley emotional distress for which he seeks damages. No injunctive relief is sought, which is surprising and casts some doubt on the bona fides of the suit, since we were told at argument without contradiction that Crowley's relations with McKinney and Jordan have not improved. There is nothing in the complaint about the reaction, if any, of Mrs. Crowley to her husband's efforts to obtain school records of their children or otherwise participate in school activities.

Crowley contends that the defendants' conduct deprives him of a federal constitutional right to participate in his children's education, denies him equal protection of the laws by arbitrarily distinguishing between custodial and noncustodial parents, also denies him equal protection by treating him worse than similarly situated parents because of McKinney's personal hostility to him, infringes his freedom of speech, and violates Illinois' school-records act and the state's common law of tortious infliction of emotional distress. The two state law claims are "supplemental" because they have no independent basis of federal jurisdiction (i.e., diversity of citizenship), and, as is usual, the district court relinquished jurisdiction over them when it dismissed Crowley's federal claims before trial. 28 U.S.C. § 1367(c)(3).

The claim he presses hardest is that he has a constitutional right, which the defendants violated, to participate in his children's education. Such participation, he argues, is an aspect of his liberty, and so a state may not deprive him of it on arbitrary grounds, that is, without according him due process of law. He thus is claiming a denial of "substantive" due process. He also claims that he was denied procedural due process, which is to say notice and an opportunity for a hearing before his (substantive) right was taken away from him. We won't have to consider this claim separately. Both claims founder on the scope of the federal constitutional right over the education of one's children.

Crowley relies primarily on a trio of famous Supreme Court decisions that discuss the constitutional rights of parents with respect to the education of their children. Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390, 43 S.Ct. 625, 67 L.Ed. 1042 (1923), invalidated a Nebraska law that forbade the teaching of foreign languages in private (or public, but that was not in issue) schools. Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510, 45 S.Ct. 571, 69 L.Ed. 1070 (1925), invalidated an Oregon law requiring children to attend public school. And Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205, 92 S.Ct. 1526, 32 L.Ed.2d 15 (1972), invalidated a Wisconsin law that required children to attend high school (public or private) despite the religious objections of the parents, who were Amish and didn't want their children to have a high-school education. Yoder isn't pertinent to our case because the parents based their claim on the free-exercise clause of the First Amendment rather than on the due process clause. Meyer and Pierce, however, establish the principle that the "liberty" that the due process clauses protect includes a degree of parental control over children's education.

But those cases are remote from the present case in two pertinent respects. They are about a state's right to deny, in effect, the option of private education, a denial that is a greater intrusion on parental control of their children than limiting parents' involvement in the activities of the public school that their children attend. And they concern the rights of parents acting together rather than the rights retained by a divorced parent whose ex-spouse has sole custody of the children and has not joined in the noncustodial parent's claim. In both respects the parental claim in this case is weaker. It is weaker because the challenge is to only one parent's control, the other's remaining unimpaired. It is also weaker because the state interest is stronger. Nebraska's interest in forbidding private schools to teach foreign languages was tenuous to the point of weirdness, while Oregon's project of forcing all children to attend public schools implied a hostility to private education that had no footing in American traditions or educational policy. Quite apart from parental interests, the statist character and conformist consequences of giving the state a monopoly of education sapped Oregon's policy of constitutional weight.

The defendants in the present case are not denying parents the right to send their children to private schools that will not be arbitrarily forbidden to teach subjects of which the state disapproves. They are not prohibiting home schooling. They are not even denying the parents the opportunities that parents commonly enjoy to participate in the education of their children; they are denying these opportunities only to one parent, and that the one who has no custodial rights.

It is difficult for a school to accommodate the demands of parents when they are divorced. The school does not know what rights each of the parents has. It knows which parent has custody, because that parent's address is the student's address, but unless it consults the divorce decree it won't know what rights the other parent has. And since physical and legal custody are different, In re Custody of Peterson, 112 Ill.2d 48, 96 Ill.Dec. 690, 491 N.E.2d 1150, 1152 (1986); In re Howard ex rel. Bailey, 343 Ill.App.3d 1201, 279 Ill.Dec. 201, 799 N.E.2d 1004, 1005 (2003...

To continue reading

Request your trial
34 cases
  • Montanye v. Wissahickon School Dist., 02-8537.
    • United States
    • United States District Courts. 3th Circuit. United States District Court (Eastern District of Pennsylvania)
    • November 3, 2005
    ...there is no equal protection class of one violation, regardless of whether the decision was motivated by animus. Crowley v. McKinney, 400 F.3d 965, 972 (7th Cir. 2005); Nevel v. Village of Schaumburg, 297 F.3d 673, 681 (7th Cir.2002); Olech, 160 F.3d at 388 ("If the defendant would have tak......
  • Asociación De Educación v. García-Padilla
    • United States
    • United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (1st Circuit)
    • April 11, 2007
    ...keep the old version (if they can find enough copies) rather than choosing the new one for pedagogical reasons. See Crowley v. McKinney, 400 F.3d 965, 969 (7th Cir.2005) (noting that litigation over the correctness of a school's decisions "would be bound to interfere with the educational mi......
  • Brace v. Cnty. of Luzerne
    • United States
    • United States District Courts. 3th Circuit. United States District Court of Middle District of Pennsylvania
    • June 12, 2012
    ...protection class of one violation.” Montanye v. Wissahickon Sch. Dist., 399 F.Supp.2d 615, 621 (E.D.Pa.2005) (citing Crowley v. McKinney, 400 F.3d 965, 972 (7th Cir.2005); Nevel v. Village of Schaumburg, 297 F.3d 673, 681 (7th Cir.2002); Olech v. Village of Willowbrook, 160 F.3d 386, 388 (7......
  • Asociacion De Educacion Privada v. Garcia Padilla
    • United States
    • United States District Courts. 1st Circuit. District of Puerto Rico
    • December 13, 2005
    ...private, in controlling their own destiny and thus in freedom from intrusive judicial [and governmental] regulation." Crowley v. McKinney, 400 F.3d 965, 969 (7th Cir. 2005) (citing Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306, 324, 123 S.Ct. 2325, 156 L.Ed.2d 304 (2003); Keyishian, 385 U.S. at 603, 8......
  • Request a trial to view additional results

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT