This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, July 19, 2011 - Students in unaccredited school districts who want to transfer to neighboring districts, without having to pay tuition, have another court ruling on their side.
As lawyers in the Turner case prepare to meet with the judge later this week in advance of trial this fall, St. Louis County Circuit Judge Barbara Wallace has ruled that Webster Groves must admit immediately a girl from St. Louis who sought to enroll in that district's high school.
In her order issued June 22, Wallace said Webster Groves did not successfully make its case that being forced to accept Jordan Danielle King-Willman would violate the Hancock amendment to the Missouri Constitution because it amounts to an unfunded mandate -- an order without accompanying money to carry it out.
Citing several legal precedents, Wallace said, "Webster has the burden to prove an unfunded mandate exists by offering specific evidence of new or increased duties and increased expenses; these elements cannot be established by mere 'common sense,' or 'speculation or conjecture.'"
In King-Willman's case, she added, "on these specific facts, the court is unable to determine from the evidence before it whether Webster will incur increased costs by enrolling plaintiff in its school. Plaintiff is but a single student. Although Webster argues there will be other students seeking enrollment in its schools... the court does not know this. To date, the court has not been made aware of any other student that has requested entry into the Webster Groves School District."
Douglas Copeland, attorney for the Webster Groves schools, said the district plans to appeal Wallace's ruling and that action should result in her order being delayed and King-Willman's not enrolling for classes this fall. He also noted that Wallace pointedly said that because the more wide-ranging Turner case is pending before the circuit court, her ruling in the King-Willman case should not be taken as having an effect on that lawsuit.
"It's kind of a weird case," Copeland said. "Judge Wallace said it doesn't apply to anybody but her. There are all sorts of problems with the case; it leaves so many questions unanswered. We need to flesh out all these different issues that weren't fleshed out in this case.
"We're going to have to appeal. We have got to be consistent."
The King-Willman case was filed last August, one month after the Missouri Supreme Court sent school districts in the St. Louis area scrambling with its ruling that students in unaccredited Missouri districts -- at the moment, only St. Louis and Riverview Gardens -- have the legal right to transfer to districts in the same county or neighboring counties, with their home districts paying the cost. The receiving districts have no discretion in which students to accept or how many, the court said.
After the effect of the court's ruling became clear, lawmakers said they would fix it during the legislative session earlier this year by restoring to the law a provision, which had fallen out several years ago, that would let districts decide which students they would accept in such situations.
But the effort fell short as a variety of other education issues, from open enrollment to tenure to expansion of charter schools, made what could have been a simple change too complicated to win passage.
The Turner case, in which city students sought to be able to transfer to the Clayton schools tuition-free, is far from over. In its ruling last July, the Supreme Court sent the lawsuit back to the lower courts for further action. After a delay to see what action legislators might take, St. Louis County Circuit Judge David Lee Vincent set a trial date for Sept 26, with a status conference for attorneys in the case scheduled for this Friday in Clayton.
Chris Tennill, a spokesman for the Clayton schools, said the district intends "to argue everything. One of the things the dissenting opinion said is that we have to have the opportunity to argue the impossibility to comply" with the ruling.
He said that no one should read Clayton's decision to fight the transfers to mean that the district does not want to educate students from the city. He noted that Clayton has been the biggest participant in the area's voluntary desegregation program, with more than 460 students currently enrolled, and "we took kids from Wellston up until the day that district was dissolved."
What is at stake in Turner, Tennill added, is a larger principle.
"The root of all this, and I think it gets lost in all of the technicalities, is this is a fundamental issue about local control of public schools," he said. "It goes beyond just Clayton. This is about everybody now. This is about school districts being able to set and maintain their schools at a size and capacity that their local community expects.
"The Supreme Court ruling said that accredited districts have to accept students from unaccredited districts regardless of their local ability to serve those students. If you are looking at an unending number of students, every school district in St. Louis County, especially those in the eastern part of the county, is landlocked. There's a breaking point where we can't fit anybody else on the bus, and we don't have the discretion to stop anybody else from coming once we hit that breaking point."