Members of Jamestown School Committee v. Schmidt

• Decision Date: 19 January 1983
• Docket Number: No. 82-1081,82-1081
• Citation: 699 F.2d 1
• Parties: 9 Ed. Law Rep. 70 MEMBERS OF the JAMESTOWN SCHOOL COMMITTEE, et al., Plaintiffs, Appellees, v. Dr. Thomas C. SCHMIDT, as Commissioner of Education of the State of Rhode Island, et al., Defendants, Appellants.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — First Circuit

Page 1

699 F.2d 1

9 Ed. Law Rep. 70

MEMBERS OF the JAMESTOWN SCHOOL COMMITTEE, et al Plaintiffs, Appellees, v. Dr. Thomas C. SCHMIDT, as Commissioner of Education of the State of Rhode Island, et al., Defendants, Appellants.

No. 82-1081.

United States Court of Appeals, First Circuit.

Argued June 10, 1982.

Decided Jan. 19, 1983.

Daniel J. Schatz, Sp. Asst. Atty. Gen., Providence, R.I., with whom Dennis J. Roberts, II, Atty. Gen., Providence, R.I., was on brief, for defendants, appellants.

Amato A. DeLuca, Warwick, R.I., with whom Sandra A. Blanding and Revens & DeLuca, Ltd., Warwick, R.I., were on brief, for plaintiffs, appellees.

Before COFFIN, Chief Judge, ROSENN ^* and BREYER, Circuit Judges.

COFFIN, Chief Judge.

The issue in this case is whether a Rhode Island statute providing bus transportation to nonpublic school children beyond school district limits constitutes a "law respecting an establishment of religion" and is therefore invalid under the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Plaintiffs are several federal, state and local taxpayers and two organizations, the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. ¹ The district court, finding that the law provides sectarian school children with "greater options at greater public expense than their public school counterparts", and that administrative contacts to coordinate the program together with the risk of political division along religious lines created "an excessive entanglement of church and state", held the law unconstitutional. Members of the Jamestown School Comm. v. Schmidt, 525 F.Supp. 1045 (D.R.I.1981) (Jamestown III ).

I. Litigation History

The State of Rhode Island has struggled persistently but thus far unsuccessfully to extend the benefits of its school busing program to nonpublic students who attend nonprofit schools outside of their local school districts. As originally enacted, the busing statute stated that "[t]he school committee of any town shall provide suitable transportation to and from school for pupils attending public schools ... who reside so far from any public school as to make their regular attendance at school impracticable ...." R.I.Gen.Laws Sec. 16-21-1 (former version). A second provision required such school committee to "provide for pupils attending private schools ... the same rights and privileges as to transportation to and from schools as are provided for pupils attending public schools." Sec. 16-21-2 (repealed).

The Rhode Island Supreme Court subsequently interpreted the statutory phrase "public schools" to apply only to public schools within a student's local school district; therefore, the court ruled that the provision requiring that private students be offered "the same rights and privileges" as public students did not authorize busing private students beyond local districts. Chaves v. School Comm. of the Town of Middletown, 100 R.I. 140, 211 A.2d 639 (1965). The statute was thereafter amended to require that public transportation be provided to students residing within an area served by any "public or private schools [which] are consolidated, regionalized, or otherwise established to serve residents of a specific area within the state ... notwithstanding the location of the school without the limits of the town." Although this law authorized interdistrict busing, it provided no standards to limit or guide the discretion of private schools in expanding the size of the areas they would serve. The state Supreme Court therefore held that it constituted an impermissible delegation of legislative power to a private entity, and invalidated the law with respect to "regions" not in existence when the statute was enacted. Jennings v. Exeter-West Greenwich Regional School Dist. Comm., 116 R.I. 90, 352 A.2d 634, 638-40 (1976).

In response to this ruling, the state legislature imposed the additional limitation that "a town shall not be required to transport any pupil beyond an area having a (fifteen) 15 mile radius from the school building which such pupil attends." The federal district court, however, held that this amended law violated the Establishment Clause. Members of the Jamestown School Comm. v. Schmidt, 427 F.Supp. 1338 (D.R.I.1977) (Jamestown I ). The court found, first, that the law "does not in practice, as its purports to, provide transportation benefits to public and sectarian school children alike." Id. at 1343. Because transportation must be provided for most public school children (aside from vocational and special education students) "only within the local school districts", the court concluded that the primary beneficiaries of the law were children "attending private schools, the vast majority of which are sectarian." Id. Therefore, the law as applied provided "an additional option to children attending out-of-district non-public (i.e., sectarian) schools". Id. at 1347. The court also found that the statute would impermissibly entangle church and state in two ways, by increasing the amount of administrative coordination necessary to plan transportation routes, and by exacerbating political fragmentation along religious lines. Id. at 1349. There was no appeal from this decision.

Finally, in 1977, the state legislature enacted the busing provisions challenged here, R.I.Gen.Laws Secs. 16-21.1-1, -2 & -3. The statute divides the state into five regions, and requires each local school committee to provide a resident student, whether attending a public or private school, with "bus transportation to the school or facility which the pupil attends", as long as the school is "within the region in which the pupil resides." Sec. 16-21.1-2. The law also has a variance procedure which allows a public or private student to attend a school outside of the region in which the student resides if the Commissioner of Education "finds that there is no similar school within the region, that such transportation is necessary to provide an educational opportunity which the pupil has a right to pursue, and that the school building which the pupil attends is within fifteen (15) miles of the city or town of which the pupil is a resident." Sec. 16-21.1-3. While these provisions appear neutral, a public student may "attend a public school ... outside of [his] city or town" only if the local school committee finds that such school "provides a program or curriculum not available within" the local school district, as authorized by R.I.Gen.Laws Sec. 16-3.1-1 ("Cooperative Service Among School Districts"). Sec. 16-21.1-1 (emphasis added). No similar requirement is imposed on private students. The same criteria of remoteness, however, apply to public and private students alike in determining their eligibility for busing in the first place--that is, all students, public and sectarian, are eligible for busing only if they "live at such distances from the schools which they attend as to make it impractical or hazardous to require [them] to walk to school." Sec. 16-21.1-1.

Plaintiffs in August 1977 initiated the present lawsuit in federal district court. Before deciding the federal constitutional issues raised, the district court certified several issues of state law to the Rhode Island Supreme Court. That court upheld the statute against the state constitutional challenges, ruling that the use of public funds to transport private school students was a proper means of "secur[ing] to the people the advantages and opportunities of education", R.I.Const. Art. XII, Sec. 1, and that, unlike the law invalidated in Jennings, the present law was not an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power because it established "five school districts [i.e., regions] and a variance procedure [which] has carefully circumscribed the interest that private schools may have in expanding for purposes of transportation." Members of the Jamestown School Comm. v. Schmidt, R.I. 405 A.2d 16, 23-24 (1979) (Jamestown II ).

Reaching the merits of the federal constitutional question, the district court in Jamestown III found the law "essentially indistinguishable" from the statute invalidated in Jamestown I and therefore held that it violated the Establishment Clause. 525 F.Supp. at 1048-49. Specifically, the court concluded that the statute unconstitutionally gave sectarian school children "greater options at greater public expense than their public school counterparts", id. at 1049, and that it had the impermissible effect of transferring a major cost of sectarian school regionalization to the taxpayers of the state. Id. at 1051. The court also found that the statute fostered excessive government entanglement with religion. First, it entailed "significant administrative interaction between public school and sectarian school officials" in connection with the busing program. Id. Second, it required the state Commissioner of Education to determine whether a sectarian school was "regionalized" and whether a sectarian school located outside a transportation region was "similar" to a sectarian school within the region. Id. Finally, the court noted that public school budgets have been "pared to the limit", id., and that the statute carried the potential, already realized in part, for political fragmentation along religious lines. Id. at 1052. The court stayed its decision pending appeal, however, finding that "a refusal to grant a stay will cause serious, irreparable harm to a large number of nonpublic school children" and that its decision on the merits was "not free from doubt."

With regard to the variance provision for busing beyond the five transportation regions, we agree with district court's entanglement analysis and affirm. As to the rest of its holding, we reverse.

II. The Relevant Authorities

In analyzing the validity of the statute under the Establishment Clause, the district court applied the familiar three-part test. First, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose; second, its principal or...