Record: Rachel R. Hadrick, “Slippery Rock Area School District v. Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School: A Fight on the School-Funding Playground” in Widener Law Journal 22, no. 2 (2013): 289-305.
Summary: Hadrick, now an Associate at the law firm McNees, Wallace, and Nurick, graduated from the Widener School of Law in 2013. Here she summarizes and evaluates the 2011 Pennsylvania Supreme Court case Slippery Rock Area School District v. Pa. Cyber Charter School.
Hadrick begins by summarizing the laws relevant to the case. The Pennsylvania Public School Code (PSC) of 1949 empowers residents of each school district to elect a board of directors to operate the district’s schools, giving it the authority to determine whether or not to operate kindergarten programs and to set a minimum age. In 1997 the PSC was amended to include a Charter School Law (CSL), which established parameters for the creation and maintenance of charter schools in Pennsylvania. Though charter schools have significant independence, they are nevertheless still considered public schools, funded by tax payers and subject to certain forms of governmental oversight. Charter schools receive their funding from districts where children who attend the charter reside, on a per-pupil basis.
In recent years there has been no little controversy in Pennsylvania over the dramatic growth of online, or “cyber” charters. Whereas brick and mortar charter schools typically attracted students from the same school district where the charter school was located, cyber charters have attracted students from all over the state. A problem emerged when the Slippery Rock school district, which does not fund kindergarten programs for children under six, was asked by Pennsylvania Cyber Charter to pay for such a kindergarten program run by the online school. Slippery Rock school district objected to the charges, but their objection was overruled by the PA Department of Education, which argued that the law’s provision that the board of directors had the authority to set a minimum age should be read to include the board of directors at the cyber school, not just the school board. Slippery Rock school district appealed to the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania, which agreed with the Department of Education. Slippery Rock appealed again to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.
The PA Supreme Court engaged in a very careful reading of the relevant PA laws and concluded that there was an unreconciled conflict of interest in the way the PSC gave authority to determine age of kindergarten to the school board but the CSL gave authority to determine the age of kindergarten to the charter school. If the two parties disagreed, whose view should take precedence? The Majority decided that the local school board’s rules should trump the charter school’s, both on statutory grounds and because of other arguments (like the fact that it would be unfair to the other children of the district to pay only for kindergarten for cyber-schooled children). PA Cyber can still offer kindergarten to a four-year old in the Slippery Rock school district, but the district itself doesn’t have to pay for it.
After summarizing the case, Hadrick affirms the Supreme Court’s decision, calling the loose interpretation of the relevant statutes by the Secretary of Education “drastic.” (p. 301) The Court did not defer to the Department of Education’s interpretation of its own statute but instead relied on the plain language of that statute to counter the Department’s decision. Hadrick points out that the Court usually starts with the plain language of a statute and only when forced by ambiguity or disagreement over interpretation looks secondarily at the original intent of the legislators who debated and passed the law. In this case the wording of the statute was “clear and unambiguous,” so they didn’t have to resort to historical spadework trying to uncover original intent. Hadrick herself provides some of this, which only reinforces that the Court’s interpretation here is completely in line with what the legislators who passed the relevant statutes had in mind.
Appraisal: Hadrick’s clear and careful analysis convinced me. I know that there is a lot of controversy over the fundamental interpretive paradigms she is discussing here. In interpreting a law do we look at the actual language used even if that language might not always ally with what the legislature that passed the law originally intended? Do we defer to the stated intentions of the legislators even if their final product was perhaps worded unclearly or ambiguously? Do we read the law to capture its general spirit when applying it to new circumstances even if that spirit doesn’t necessarily coincide with what the law literally says? Hadrick wades into these treacherous waters a bit but happily is spared the worst of it since in this particular case the law is clear and the Secretary’s spin on it obviously out of step with that clear literal meaning (not to mention her reconstructed legislative intent).
Milton Gaither, Messiah College, author of Homeschool: An American History
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