Safferstone v. Tucker

• Decision Date: 14 May 1962
• Docket Number: No. 5-2655,5-2655
• Citation: 235 Ark. 70,357 S.W.2d 3
• Parties: M. A. SAFFERSTONE et al., Appellants, v. Everett TUCKER, Jr., et al., Appellees.
• Court: Arkansas Supreme Court

Page 3

357 S.W.2d 3

235 Ark. 70

M. A. SAFFERSTONE et al., Appellants, v. Everett TUCKER, Jr., et al., Appellees.

No. 5-2655.

Supreme Court of Arkansas.

May 14, 1962.

U. A. Gentry, Julius C. Acchione and Harold L. King, Little Rock, for appellants.

Mehaffy, Smith & Williams, by Herschel H. Friday, Jr., and Robert V. Light, Little Rock, for appellees.

BOHLINGER, Justice.

The school that is known as Rightsell School is located in the south central portion of Little Rock and is within the Little Rock School District.

The appellants in this case are property owners within the attendance area of the Rightsell School and the appellees are the officials of the Little Rock School Board. Serving the general attendance area of the Rightsell School, or adjacent thereto, are two other exclusively White elementary schools and two Negro elementary schools.

Prior to the institution of this suit, the appellees announced the intention of transferring the White pupils in the Rightsell School to adjacent White schools and moving 421 Negro pupils from two Negro schools to the Rightsell School. To prevent this transfer and change, the appellants brought an action in the Pulaski Chancery Court to restrain and enjoin the appellees from making that change. The principal allegation of the appellants is that the Board was guilty of an abuse of discretion in transferring the Rightsell pupils to other schools and converting what had always been an exclusively White school in an exclusively White residential district to a Negro school; that such action by the School Board would be arbitrary, unreasonable, capricious, wrongful and discriminatory, and would result in great disadvantage to the White pupils being transferred and would result adversely on the property values within the area where the Board purposes to convert a White to a Negro school.

The cause was duly presented to the Pulaski Chancery Court which sustained the action of the Board and dismissed appellants' complaint and from that action comes this appeal.

The law involved appears to be well settled. In this State a broad discretion is vested in the board of directors of each school district in the matter of directing the operation of the schools and a chancery court has no power to interfere with such boards in the exercise of that discretion unless there is a clear abuse of it and the burden is upon those charging such an abuse to prove it by clear and convincing evidence. White v. Jenkins, 213 Ark. 119, 209 S.W.2d 457; Merritt v. Dermott Special School Dist., 188 Ark. 243, 65 S.W.2d 33; Connelly v. Earl Frazier Sp. School Dist., 167 Ark. 49, 266 S.W. 929; Pugsley v. Sellmeyer, 158 Ark. 247, 250 S.W. 538, 30 A.L.R. 1212; State v. School Dist. No. 16, 154 Ark. 176, 242 S.W. 545.

This declaration is in line with Ark.Stat. § 80-509.

'The board of school directors of each district in the State shall be charged with the following powers and perform the following duties:

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'(b) Purchase buildings or rent school houses and sites therefor, and sell, rent, or exchange such sites or school houses. * * *

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'(m) Do all things necessary and lawful for the conduct of an efficient free public school or schools in the district.'

In a very recent case, Evans v. McKinley, 234 Ark. 465, 352 S.W.2d 829 [Law Rep. No. 11, Jan. 15, 1962] this court said:

'Under these [Ark.Stat. § 80-509] and other powers, the School Directors could, in good faith, reach the decision they did about the Star School [closing it]; and the evidence herein does not show that the School Directors acted in bad faith. In Pugsley v. Sellmeyer, 158 Ark. 247, 250 S.W. 538, 30 A.L.R. 1212, we said: 'Courts will not interfere in matters of detail and government of schools, unless the officers refuse to perform a clear, plain duty, or unless they unreasonably and arbitrarily exercise the discretionary authority conferred upon them.''

47 Am.Jur., Schools, § 44, p. 325, states it in this manner:

'The courts will not interfere with the exercise of discretion by school directors in matters confided by law to their judgment, unless there is a clear abuse of the discretion, or a violation of law. Every presumption is in favor of the proper exercise of power when its object is reasonably germane to the purposes of the grant.'

In White v. Jenkins, supra, this court said:

'It is well settled that courts may not intervene to control matters in the discretion of administrative bodies such as school boards in the absence of a showing of an abuse of such discretion. Necessarily, some latitude in the exercise of this discretion must be given to these boards. They represent the people of the locality affected and naturally are closer to the problems to be solved than any court or other agency could be. 28 Am.Jur. 352; Connelly v. Earl Frazier Special School District, 167 Ark. 49, 266 S.W. 929; Pugsley v. Sellmeyer, 158 Ark. 247, 250 S.W. 538, 30 A.L.R. 1212; State v. School District No. 16, Montgomery County [Sp.] 154 Ark. 176, 242 S.W. 545.'

The law therefore being clear on the authority of the school boards, the matter addresses itself to the question as to whether or not the action taken in this case was arbitrary, unreasonable, capricious, wrongful, discriminatory or oppressive. The question which presented itself to the school board was this: Rightsell School was constructed by the Little Rock School District as a White elementary school some 55 years before this controversy arose. At the time of the erection of the Rightsell School the area involved was an exclusively White area and the construction of the Rightsell School provided school facilities for 421 pupils and for many years the school cared for the educational primary requirements of all the White children within the area.

With the changing years we now find that there are registered in the Rightsell area 944 pupils, of which 300 are White and 644 are Colored. The adjacent schools of Parham and Centennial have approximately the same ratio of Negro to White residents. In the case of the Rightsell School, we have a plant designed for 420 pupils with but 300 White children eligible in the registered area. At the same time we have three adjacent Negro schools which were overcrowded at the time of the conversion. Therefore, we must assume that the Board weighed the problem that in one instance we have vacant classrooms in three White schools and 420 Negroes as an overflow from the Negro schools. Confronted with this problem, the appellees decided upon the conversion of Rightsell to an all Negro school.

Did that conversion place an undue hardship on the pupils attending Rightsell School? A careful perusal of the record in this case discloses that of the White children to be transferred, 50 will be closer to their newly assigned school, 240 will be about the same distance, and only 7 will be as far as 22 blocks from their new school. The plight of these 7 pupils is unfortunate but the added distance to their new school appears minimal when weighed in the scales of the congested condition of some Negro schools which retard not only the educational advantages for transferred Negroes but all the other Negro pupils in those schools.

The appellants state, however, that the matter could have been resolved with fewer dislocations had the School Board erected a new school for the Negroes. The proof shows that while the income of the Little Rock School District is impressive, there remains over as a surplus at the end of the year somewhere between nine and eleven thousand dollars which we assume is reserved for emergencies. One of the prime duties of a school board is to conserve the resources of the district and if the school board had elected to build a new school, it would have been confronted with the proposition that in three White schools there were available vacant classrooms which it was their duty to utilize in the best possible manner. It is true, as appellants point out, that the Board might have considered the conversion of the other two White schools that are most nearly adjacent to Rightsell, but it appears that this problem was thoroughly explored by the Board and discarded for the reason that the transferees, both White and Colored, would have greater distances to travel than is the case in the conversion of the Rightsell...