Opinion ID: 2509859
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Dictionary Meanings

Text: The first place that we usually look to determine the ordinary meaning of words is a good dictionary. See Clarke, 199 Ga. at 165, 33 S.E.2d 425; Williamson, 237 Ga. at 632, 229 S.E.2d 400. That is what the trial court did in this case, consulting Webster's New World College Dictionary, which says that special means simply of a kind different from others, followed by similar definitions that give the term a broad meaning juxtaposed to antonyms like common, general, or ordinary. Accord Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1967) (listing as the first definition of special: distinguished by some unusual quality: UNCOMMON. . . .). As discussed in Division I(I)-(J) above, commission charter schoolsand the three appellee schools in particularare different from common, general, or ordinary K-12 public schools in Georgia in multiple ways. Most significantly, each charter school is individually created by the Commission, exercising authority delegated by the General Assembly. They are established outside a local school system, pursuant to an individualized, performance-based contract, and the schools are not required to abide by all of the statutes and regulations that ordinarily govern public education. The charter schools are also different from ordinary public schools in the way they are managed, overseen, and funded. Tellingly, the majority gets around to mentioning the natural and ordinary meaning principle of constitutional interpretation only as a final consideration in its opinion, see Maj. Op. at 779and even then it studiously avoids reference to any dictionary or other source of ordinary understanding, because those sources demonstrate that special just means different from the norm. The majority contends that special in this context means special student body or special curriculum. Id. at 779. The first of these restrictive definitions is also proposed by the local systems, who argue that special schools has the narrow connotation of special needs schools, special education schools, or special student schools. It would have been easy, of course, for the drafters of the 1983 Constitution (or the 1966 Amendment or 1976 Constitution, for that matter) to include such limiting adjectives, if such a limitation were intended. But they did not do so. The local systems and the majority say that we need to look to other principles of interpretation to find the limited meaning, and we will examine and reject those arguments below. But it is important at the outset to identify a gaping hole in both the local systems' and the majority's textual arguments.