KADRMAS v. DICKINSON PUBLIC SCHOOLS

487 U.S. 450 (1988)

JUDGES: O'Connor, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Rehnquist, C. J., and White, Scalia, and Kennedy, JJ., joined.  Marshall, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Brennan, J., joined. Stevens, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Blackmun, J., joined.  

JUSTICE O'CONNOR delivered the opinion of the Court.

Appellants urge us to hold that the Equal Protection Clause forbids a State to allow  some local school boards, but not others, to assess a fee for transporting pupils between their homes and the public schools.  Applying well established equal protection principles, we reject this claim and affirm the constitutionality of the challenged statute.

North Dakota is a sparsely populated State, with many people living on isolated farms and ranches.  One result has been that some children, as late as the mid-20th century, were educated in "the one-room school where, in many cases, there [we]re twenty or more pupils with one teacher attempting in crowded conditions and under other disadvantages to give instructions in all primary grades." The State has experimented with various ameliorative devices at different times in its history. Beginning in 1907, for example, it has adopted a series of policies that "in certain circumstances required and in other circumstances merely authorized [local public] school districts to participate in transporting or providing compensation for transporting students to school." Since 1947, the legislature has  authorized and encouraged thinly populated school districts to consolidate or "reorganize" themselves into larger districts so that education can be provided more efficiently.

Appellee Dickinson Public Schools, which serves a relatively populous area, has chosen not to participate in such a reorganization. Until 1973, this school system provided free bus service to students in outlying areas, but the "pickup points" for this service were often at considerable distances from the students' homes. After a plebiscite of the bus users, Dickinson's School Board instituted door-to-door bus service and began charging a fee. During the period relevant  to this case, about 13% of the students rode the bus; their parents were charged $ 97 per year for one child or $ 150 per year for two children. Such fees covered approximately 11% of the cost of providing the bus service, and the remainder was provided from state and local tax revenues.

In 1979, the State enacted the legislation at issue in this case. This statute expressly indicates that nonreorganized school districts, like Dickinson, may charge a fee for transporting students to school; such fees, however, may not exceed the estimated cost to the school district of providing the service.

Appellants are a Dickinson schoolchild, Sarita Kadrmas, and her mother, Paula. The Kadrmas family, which also includes Mrs. Kadrmas' husband and two preschool children, lives about 16 miles from Sarita's school. Mr. Kadrmas works sporadically in the North Dakota oil fields, and the family's annual income at the time of trial was at or near the officially defined poverty level. Until 1985, the Kadrmas family had agreed each year to pay the fee for busing Sarita to school. Having fallen behind on these and other bills, however, the family refused to sign a contract obligating them to pay $ 97 for the 1985 school  year. Accordingly, the school bus no longer stopped for Sarita, and the family arranged to transport her to school privately.  The costs they incurred that year for Sarita's transportation exceeded $ 1,000, or about 10 times the fee charged by the school district for bus service. This arrangement continued until the spring of 1987, when Paula Kadrmas signed a bus service contract for the remainder of the 1986 school year and paid part of the fee. Mrs. Kadrmas later signed another contract for the 1987 school year, and paid about half of the fee for that period.

In September 1985, appellants, along with others who have since withdrawn from the case, filed an action in state court seeking to enjoin appellees -- the Dickinson Public Schools and various school district officials -- from collecting any fee for the bus service.

Unless a statute provokes "strict judicial scrutiny" because it interferes with a "fundamental right" or discriminates against a "suspect class," it will ordinarily survive an equal protection attack so long as the challenged classification is rationally related to a legitimate governmental purpose. See, e. g., San Antonio Independent School Dist. v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 1, 16-17 (1973). Appellants contend that Dickinson's user fee for bus service unconstitutionally deprives those who cannot afford to pay it of "minimum access to education." Sarita Kadrmas, however, continued to attend school during the time that she was denied access to the school bus. Appellants must therefore mean to argue that the busing fee unconstitutionally places a greater obstacle to education in the path of the poor than it does in the path of wealthier families. Alternatively, appellants may mean to suggest that the Equal Protection Clause affirmatively requires government to provide free transportation to school, at least for some class of students that would include Sarita Kadrmas. Under either interpretation of appellants' position, we are evidently being urged to apply a form of strict or "heightened" scrutiny to the North Dakota statute. Doing so would require us to extend the requirements of the Equal Protection Clause beyond the limits recognized in our cases, a step we decline to take.

We have previously rejected the suggestion that statutes having different effects on the wealthy and the poor should on that account alone be subjected to  strict equal protection scrutiny. Nor have we accepted the proposition that education is a "fundamental right," like equality of the franchise, which should trigger strict scrutiny when government interferes with an individual's access to it.

Relying primarily on Plyler v. Doe, however, appellants suggest that North Dakota's 1979 statute should be subjected to "heightened" scrutiny. This standard of review, which is less demanding than "strict scrutiny" but more demanding than the standard rational relation test, has generally been applied only in cases that involved discriminatory classifications based on sex or illegitimacy. In Plyler, which did not fit this pattern, the State of Texas had denied to the  children of illegal aliens the free public education that it made available to other residents.  Applying a heightened level of equal protection scrutiny, the Court concluded that the State had failed to show that its classification advanced a substantial state interest. 457 U.S. at 217-218, and n. 16, 224, 230. We have not extended this holding beyond the "unique circumstances" that provoked its "unique confluence of theories and rationales." Nor do we think that the case before us today is governed by the holding in Plyler.  Unlike the children in that case, Sarita Kadrmas has not been penalized by the government for illegal conduct by her parents. On the contrary, Sarita was denied access to the school bus only because her parents would not agree to pay the same user fee charged to all other families that took advantage of the service. Nor do we see any reason to suppose that this user fee will "promot[e] the creation and perpetuation of a subclass of illiterates within our boundaries, surely adding to the problems and costs of unemployment, welfare,  and crime." ("A [school] board may waive any fee if any pupil or his parent or guardian shall be unable to pay such fees. No pupil's rights or privileges, including the receipt of grades or diplomas, may be denied or abridged for nonpayment of fees"). The case before us does not resemble Plyler, and we decline to extend the rationale of that decision to cover this case.

Applying the appropriate test -- under which a statute is upheld if it bears a rational relation to a legitimate government objective -- we think it is quite clear that a State's decision to allow local school boards the option of charging patrons a user fee for bus service is constitutionally permissible. The Constitution does not require that such service be provided at all, and it is difficult to imagine why choosing to offer the service should entail a constitutional obligation to offer  it for free. No one denies that encouraging local school districts to provide school bus service is a legitimate state purpose or that such encouragement would be undermined by a rule requiring that general revenues be used to subsidize an optional service that will benefit a minority of the district's families. It is manifestly rational for the State to refrain from undermining its legitimate objective with such a rule.

In sum, the statute challenged in this case discriminates against no suspect class and interferes with no fundamental right.  Appellants have failed  to carry the heavy burden of demonstrating that the statute is arbitrary and irrational. The Supreme Court of North Dakota correctly concluded that the statute does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and its judgment is Affirmed.  

JUSTICE MARSHALL, with whom JUSTICE BRENNAN joins, dissenting.

In San Antonio Independent School Dist. v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 1 (1973), I wrote that the Court's holding was a "retreat from our historic commitment to equality of educational opportunity and [an] unsupportable acquiescence in a system which deprives children in their earliest years of the chance to reach their full potential." Today, the Court continues the retreat from the promise of equal educational opportunity by holding that a school district's refusal to allow an indigent child who lives 16 miles from the nearest school to use a school-bus service without paying a fee does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.  Because I do not believe that this Court should sanction discrimination against the poor with respect to " perhaps the most important function of state and local  governments," Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 493 (1954), I dissent. A statute that erects special obstacles to education in the path of the poor naturally tends to consign such persons to their current disadvantaged status. By denying equal opportunity to exactly those who need it most, the law not only militates against the ability of each poor child to advance herself or himself, but also increases the likelihood of the creation of a discrete and permanent underclass. Such a statute is difficult to reconcile with the framework of equality embodied in the Equal Protection Clause. For the poor, education is often the only route by which to become full participants in our society. In allowing a State to burden the access of poor persons to an education, the Court denies equal opportunity and discourages hope. I do not believe the Equal Protection Clause countenances such a result.