Court Opinion

ID: 9752194
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 17:43:02.030975+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:27:09.171078
License: Public Domain

Concurring Opinion by
Mr. Justice Cohen :
I concur in the opinion of the majority but am compelled to comment upon what I consider the unwarranted appearance of the school districts in this case. In my opinion, they have no standing to attack the constitutionality of the School Reorganization Act of 1968.
“The Constitution of 1874 . . . directed the legislature to maintain A thorough and efficient system of public schools’ .... The school system, or the school districts . . . are but agencies of the state legislature to administer this constitutional duty .... They possess only the administrative powers that are expressly granted by the central government or inferred by necessary implication . . . .” Wilson v. Philadelphia School District, 328 Pa. 225, 231-232, 195 Atl. 90 (1937).
“Within [the] school system, a school district is an agency of the State, created by law for the purpose of promoting education, deriving all of its powers from the statute, and discharging only such duties as are imposed upon it by statute.” Slippery Rock Area Joint *548School System v. Franklin Township School District, 389 Pa. 435, 442, 133 A. 2d 848 (1957).
How is it that the school district, the creature of the Legislature, given life for the sole purpose of carrying out the Legislature’s duty to provide education in the manner directed by the Legislature, can attack the Legislature’s directions for discharging its duty? Certainly the Legislature has not given the school district the duty of making sure that the Legislature acts constitutionally. And the school district has no powers that are not either expressly conferred upon it by the Legislature or implied from the nature of its duties.
Moreover, the school district is not an elector or a taxpayer or an entity that can claim an injury arising from unlawful delegation or discriminatory classification or impairment of contracts. It has no constitutional rights which the Legislature can impair. In Hughesville Borough School District v. Wolf Township School District, 40 Pa. Superior Ct. 311 (1909), a school district without a high school attacked the constitutionality of the Act of March 16, 1905, P. L. 40, which required it to pay the tuition of a resident student who attended high school in a neighboring district. According to the court at p. 315: “The argument seems to be that ‘the money raised by taxation for school purposes is the property of the school district, that the possession and disposition of the school funds belong to the board of directors’, and that, therefore, no obligation rests upon them for the payment of any money, unless it arises under a special contract made by the board itself.” The court’s correct answer to the argument was at p. 315: “A school board is exclusively the creature of law. It has such rights, and such only, as are conferred upon it by its creator. True it is for some purposes a legal entity but becomes such solely by the operation of law, and so cannot assume, as such entity, the rights, privileges and immunities which be*549long to the individuals composing the legal entity as natural persons. 'In Pennsylvania, a school district is but an agent of the commonwealth, and as such a quasi corporation for the sole purpose of administering the commonwealth’s system of public education:’ .... It is, therefore, impossible to try the constitutionality of a law which restricts the power and authority of such a creature by a constitutional provision which has no relation to it but relates entirely to the rights, liberties, privileges and immunities of natural persons.”