Court Opinion

ID: 9616698
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 04:49:01.952136+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:04:00.439884
License: Public Domain

Neely, Judge,

dissenting:

I must respectfully dissent from the Court’s opinion upon the grounds that I do not believe that the courts, in general, are the repositories of all wisdom. The majority opinion concedes that Mr. Beverlin’s rights to notice, confrontation, and a fair hearing were vouchsafed and that the exclusive ground for reversing the circuit court and the Board of Education is the majority’s disagreement with the substantive result. Under the standard of “arbitrary” any use of discretion by an administrative tribunal can be second guessed by the courts. W. Va. Code, 18A-2-8 [1969] permits a county board of education to dismiss a teacher for “willful neglect of duty.”
*1076The majority’s opinion is yet one more example of the increasing tendency of courts to undermine the ability of those charged with responsibility to discharge their duties in a competent manner. The increasing substitution of court judgment for the judgments of all other decision-makers causes administration to become increasingly chaotic because of paralysis prompted by a surplusage of procedural and substantive due process which leads not to justice but to total incompetence and inability to govern. W. Va. Code, 18A-2-8 [1969] provides standards for the dismissal of a teacher including, in the absence of a unanimous decision by the Board of Education, an appeal to the State Superintendent of Schools. Although members of this Court sitting as a board of education might not have found Mr. Beverlin’s absence on one day for the purpose of registering at West Virginia University sufficiently willful neglect of duty to warrant discharge, this Court was not elected to the Board of Education of Lewis County and is not charged with administering the overall program for school personnel and students in that county. The safeguards afforded a teacher by the procedural due process requirements of W. Va. Code, 18a-2-8 [1969] are far in excess of the procedural safeguards in any private employer-employee relationship, at least in the absence of a collective bargaining agreement. Government, like any other employer, must be able to impose a predictable system of order and discipline upon its employees to insure some efficiency with regard to costs and benefits, without fear of endless litigation, expense, annoyance, and ultimate second guessing by people who have never seen the administrative problems first hand.
In spite of the universally observed fact that employers are not always just with employees and that there is a great deal of arbitrary and capricious enforcement of regulations within any organization designed for production, whether that production generates tangible goods, services, or as in this case, education, there must be some hierarchy of authority to assure a semblance of discipline, and the courts’ increasing quest for perfect *1077justice is likely to produce no great improvement in the quality of decisions, but rather a total lack of any decisions.
In the case at hand it was conclusively demonstrated that Mr. Beverlin was absent from school on a day on which his presence was mandated by his contract, that the rules and regulations of the County Board of Education required a teacher to be present on all working days except in the event of illness or family emergency, and that Mr. Beverlin’s absence was willful, in spite of its laudatory purpose. Under those circumstances the County Board of Education’s determination that Mr. Be-verlin could be dismissed for willful neglect of duty was supported by the evidence and his dismissal was within the sound discretion of the county board. The board followed fair procedures with regard to a hearing and the decision was unanimous. This Court’s duty in a situation of this type is exclusively to assure that the statutory standards have been applied by the Board of Education sitting as an administrative tribunal and not to make school board policy.
If we as Americans are at the moment dissatisfied with the permissive and chaotic nature of society in general, then surely one of the reasons for this unfortunate state of affairs is the myopic fascination of courts not only with procedural due process which is within their sphere, but also with substantive due process which, except in extraordinary circumstances, is wholly outside the courts’ legitimate sphere in any well reasoned apportionment of governmental powers. Once legislative standards have been established, this Court should have no choice but to enforce the decisions of administrative tribunals operating under them in a lawful manner, and exercising lawful discretion.
I am authorized to say that Mr. Justice Berry joins with me in this dissent.