Schools taking close look at summer court rulings

School has resumed across the suburbs following a landmark summer.

The Supreme Court authored back-to-back decisions that curbed student speech, limited the use of race to achieve school diversity and protected parents' rights to represent themselves and their children in court.

Together, the rulings shifted the constitutional footing of public schools nationwide.

Educators across the suburbs and the country now must rethink whether their policies toe the new legal line.

This comes as renewal of the high-stakes No Child Left Behind law looms.

National lawmakers this summer considered extending the five-year-old law. A bill could be moved as soon as this month. The shape it takes will affect public schools confronted with the expectation that every child reads and calculates math at grade level by 2014.

In the midst of such churn, a new year has begun.

School leaders must determine in short order what, if anything, the new slate of legal precedent means for Illinois districts and the way they operate.

Illinois Association of School Boards officials said the impact here should be minimal.

"I'm just not finding any basis for us to advise our districts to come out and do anything different than what they are doing already," spokesman Jim Russell said.

Still, many school board members, lawyers and educators are wrestling with how school policies might change as a result of rulings that touch everything from where kids attend school to what they can say while there. The ultimate effect may not be known for years.

"It's a situation that people are certainly interested in," said Ken Arndt, superintendent of Dundee Township's Community Unit District 300. "Unless it's something blatant, usually those changes do not take place immediately."

Sue Ramstedt tracks education news out of Washington, D.C., be they changes to the No Child Left Behind law or new protections for special education parents. That's about all local educators can do until an issue arises closer to home.

"I don't think it's a high level of concern for any district on any of these topics until it hits," said Ramstedt, the school board president of Mount Prospect Elementary District 57. "You keep informed and rely on the fact you're ready if it does affect you."

Student speech

The court authored in June its most significant ruling on student speech in two decades.

The decision gave school officials new latitude to govern what students say if their speech or actions might be "reasonably" viewed as promoting illegal drug use.

The case centered on a high school principal in Juneau, Alaska, who suspended a senior after he unfurled a banner that read "Bong Hits 4 Jesus." The incident occurred while students waited for the Olympic torch relay to pass in 2002.

In a 5-4 vote, the court said the principal did not tread upon the teen's constitutional rights, but the ruling hinged on concern about illicit drug use.

Legal experts caution the decision did not open a door for educators to proscribe any student comment or poster they find objectionable. Because this summer's ruling was narrowly tailored to illegal drug use, legal experts say the impact could be limited.

"If you take the case out of the illegal drug context, clearly the court would have had a much harder time dealing with it," said John Marshall Law School professor Michael Seng, who studies the Supreme Court. "It's not a green light either way, not to students and not to school administrators."

This is not the first time the court has grappled with issues of students and free speech.

In 1969, the Supreme Court ruled an Iowa school could not ban students from wearing arm bands to protest the Vietnam War so long as learning was not disrupted.

A litany of limitations steadily ensued. In 1986, the court allowed school administrators to restrict sexually explicit speech and, two years later, it allowed them to censor a school-sponsored student publication.

Race in schools

Race alone no longer may be used to determine where students attend school, a divided Supreme Court held this summer.

Race may be considered as part of several factors used to achieve diversity among students, a caveat that legal experts caution could be overlooked.

In a 5-4 ruling, the court struck down desegregation plans in Seattle and Louisville, Ky. In doing so, the ruling cast in doubt integration efforts nationwide.

"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority.

Yet Justice Anthony Kennedy -- who sided with the five-vote majority but authored a separate opinion -- contended "race may be one component of that diversity."

Justice Stephen Breyer countered for the minority view, saying the decision is one "the court and the nation will come to regret."

"This is hugely significant," said DePaul University professor Andrea Kayne Kaufman, who specializes in education law. "Any school action that wants to kind of enhance integration is now called into question."

Still unclear is the ruling's influence on a clause in the Illinois school code that requires school boards charged with drawing attendance boundaries take "into consideration the prevention of segregation and the elimination of separation of children in public schools because of color, race or nationality."

Illinois State Board of Education attorneys are reviewing the decision and studying how other states and large school districts respond, agency spokesman Matt Vanover said.

School boundaries are drawn and determined locally. But state attorneys may advise local districts who seek direction in light of the court's ruling. To date, none have.

"It is a complex issue that you will not be able to settle in finite terms overnight," Vanover said.

A parent's right

Far less contentious and divisive, the Supreme Court protected the right of parents with special needs children to represent themselves and their kids in court.

At issue was whether parents -- in this case, Jeff and Sandee Winkelman of Ohio whose son, Jacob, has an autism spectrum disorder -- could represent their disabled child in both administrative hearings and federal court.

Parents' ability to do so had varied by state.

A federal appeals court ruling upheld a family's right to represent their child and themselves in every stage of the legal process in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Puerto Rico and Rhode Island. But in Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky and Tennessee, courts required that parents hire an attorney. In Illinois, and 11 other states, parents could represent themselves, but not their children under the Individuals with Disability Education Act, or IDEA.

The Supreme Court ended the patchwork of precedents.

In a 7-2 ruling, the court determined parents may represent themselves and their children under the special education law. Requiring that families hire and pay for an attorney would have barred them from exercising such rights.

"Parents clearly have an interest in representing their children in those types of situations," Seng said. "To me, that was a very common-sense opinion."