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Thursday, September 07, 2006
Ind. Decisions - More today on school expulsion decision and its implications
On August 17th the ILB had an entry on a 2-1 Court of Appeals decision in early July, Logansport School Corporation v. P.F., and its implications, quoting from the Indianapolis Star and the Monticello Herald Journal.
Today Krista J. Stockman of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette reports:
School districts across Indiana are changing their policies on how school boards handle the appeals process from students who have been expelled.Adam Van Osdol did a thorough analysis of the Logansport case in the 7/10/06 issue of of INdiana Education Insight. Some quotes (quoted with permission):An Indiana Court of Appeals ruling in July determined school boards cannot pick and choose which appeals to hear – a practice many school boards followed for years. A lawsuit against the Logansport Community School Corp. in which a student was denied a hearing before the school board prompted the new interpretation of the law.
The court determined that school boards only can decide to hear all appeals or no appeals but cannot decide on a case-by-case basis.
The East Allen County Schools board decided on Tuesday not to hear any future appeals. The board did come up with a compromise, however, in allowing a board member to be appointed to sit in on appeals with a district administrator.
Appeals will continue going through one of the assistant superintendents. Last school year, five appeals were heard by Andy Melin, assistant superintendent for secondary education and technology. None went to the board. * * *
The board voted 6-1 with board member Rick Allgeier voting against it. Allgeier said he was concerned about taking the board out of the process, and he didn’t like the process the board was going through to create the new procedure.
Fort Wayne Community Schools is also reviewing its policy, which allows appeals to the board only in certain circumstances, such as if there is new evidence or if the issues involved in the appeal raise significant questions about a board policy not previously resolved by the board.
When a student is expelled, the student and his or her parents can appeal to an administrator and then to the school board.
In the past four years, the FWCS board has heard six appeals out of the hundreds of students who were expelled.
FWCS spokeswoman Debbie Morgan said the district is reviewing its procedures to determine whether a change needs to be made.
EACS attorney Tim McCaulay said the changes the board made this week may be only temporary, if state officials take up the issue next year. “There’s a strong possibility the General Assembly may change the law,” he said.
The key issue in In Re P.F., Bd. of Trustees of the Logansport Comm’ty School Corp. v. P.F., was whether the School Board was required to hear the student’s expulsion appeal.Student P.F. allegedly scribbled a purported bomb threat on a table at school that was read by maintenance personnel and reported to the administration. After P.F. admitted he had written the phrase in question, the school recommended expulsion. the student then expressed his intention to appeal the decision to the School Board, which subsequently voted not to hear the case.
In September 2005, a Cass County Superior Court II judge ruled that the School Board was required by law to hear the appeal. But the next month, the School Board defied the court order (indeed, as the Court of Appeals wrote, the School Board “showed complete disrespect – and contempt – for the trial court and its order”) voting again not to conduct a hearing, which prompted the judge to order the district to vacate the expulsion and permit P.F. to make up his missed school work.
The Logansport School Board appealed the trial court’s conclusion that it was required to hear the expulsion case, arguing that Indiana statute grants school boards flexibility to vote on whether to hear appeals on a case-by-case basis.
In a 16-page ruling handed down July 6, the appellate court finds that the Logansport School Board must hear all appeals, unless it has “voted not to hear ‘appeals,’ which is written in the plural, rather than the singular, indicating that the school board’s vote on this matter must be broader than one student’s appeal .... Under these circumstances, it is apparent to us that the legislature intended that School Boards, if they so choose, must vote once not to hear any expulsion appeals, rather than on a case-by-case basis as argued by the School Board.” * * *
Judge Patrick Sullivan, who is the sole elected judge still sitting on the Court of Appeals, authors a partial dissent in which he takes exception to the majority’s interpretation that the school board is required to hear a student’s appeal unless it has already voted not to hear such appeals in general. Judge Sullivan believes this puts the cart before the horse. He writes, “Unless and until an appeal is taken to the governing body, i.e. the Board, it appears incongruous to say the Board may, or must, have previously denied to hear such appeal.” He does not find the same significance in the statute’s use of the plural “appeals” as does the majority, and his reading of the law is that a school board’s “decision whether or not to deny an appeal must be made on a case-by-case basis.” (emphasis in original).
John Hillis, the attorney for the Logansport Community School Corporation, is reviewing the opinion to determine whether the district should appeal the ruling to the Indiana Supreme Court. Julie Slavins, the attorney who filed an amicus curiae brief in the Logansport matter on behalf of the Indiana School Boards Association, explains that the intent of the rewrite of the statute in 1995 was to afford boards the option of whether they wanted to hear an appeal or not. The majority opinion, as we read it on deadline, would seem to remove that discretion.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on September 7, 2006 07:25 AM
Posted to Ind. App.Ct. Decisions