Court Opinion

ID: 9498389
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 17:16:31.403361+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:48.780715
License: Public Domain

CUDAHY, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and concurring in the judgment.
While I concur in the affirmance of the district court, I would follow a different course of reasoning. Specifically, although I agree that Charter One, as a unique statutory creation with distinct sources of funding, is not similarly situated to other schools located in the RUSD (and thus may be subject to disparate treatment), I believe that the children of the two individual plaintiffs, who are Charter One students, are similarly situated to at least some of the students furnished busing by the RUSD. Accordingly, RUSD’s refusal to bus Charter One students based solely on their school affiliation seems irrational.
RUSD buses all public and private school students who live more than 1.5 miles from their chosen school or who face hazardous walks to school — even those it is not statutorily required to transport — ostensibly for safety reasons. It also denies transportation services to otherwise qualified Charter One students allegedly for cost reasons. Both safety and cost would seem to be eminently legitimate state interests. The question then becomes whether RUSD’s busing policy is rationally related to these interests — i.e., whether RUSD’s refusal to bus Charter One students (and only Charter One students) is rational in light of those interests.
Purely as a matter of logic, the RUSD policy does not hold up. Of course, as a general matter it is rational to base government policies on considerations of cost. Irizarry v. Bd. of Educ. of the City of Chicago, 251 F.3d 604, 610 (7th Cir.2001). And despite the plaintiffs’ allegations that many of the Charter One students could be accommodated with existing buses and existing bus routes, there will always be some additional cost associated with transporting new students, even if it is just the added time, fuel and mileage associated *688with making additional stops on existing bus routes. Yet even assuming that the Charter. One students will bring higher costs, there appears to be no rational basis for excluding these particular students versus the other students RUSD has chosen to transport. Put differently, since there is no indication in the record that Charter One students are somehow inherently more costly to transport per mile than other students that RUSD has chosen to bus, a per se policy excluding them on cost grounds is not rational.
RUSD (and the district court) point out that Charter One students have a longer school year than students at other public schools and a mandatory summer session, both of which, it is claimed, will make Charter One students uniquely costly to transport on an annual basis. Yet it is undisputed that RUSD already buses students of at least one year-round elementary school (James Elementary School) and provides busing for RUSD summer school students. (App. D. at 44.) Thus cost considerations related to the length of the Charter One school year do not explain why RUSD refuses to bus Charter One students but is willing to transport these other year-round students.
The RUSD policy is also irrational with respect to safety considerations. It is undisputed that RUSD already buses children who live in the same neighborhoods and walk similar distances along the same routes to school as Charter One students. The children of plaintiff James provide a case-in-point. All three of the James children must cross the same “hazardous” areas on their way to school,1 yet RUSD buses only the one child who attends Julian Thomas Elementary School, refusing to bus the two siblings who attend Charter One, solely because of their school affiliation. Purely as a matter of safety, there is no rational reason to deny two of these children transportation while busing their sibling.
The other criterion of eligibility for the RUSD policy is the distance a student must travel to attend school. And here again there is no rational basis- — -based on either cost or safety — for distinguishing between Charter One students who live 1.5 miles or more away from their chosen school and other children who must travel the same distances. In short, given RUSD’s own stated policy goals, there is no rational basis for distinguishing between Charter One students who face hazardous walks to school or live 1.5 miles or farther from Charter One and the other students whom RUSD is not statutorily required to transport2 but who receive busing services based on these same criteria.
Once RUSD has extended its transportation policy to include students that it is not legally required to transport, and has established objective criteria — based solely on distance and safety — to determine which students are eligible for transportation, RUSD cannot rationally exclude certain students based on school affiliation alone. Excluding Charter One students might save money; it might be good administrative practice; but the key consideration here is rationality, and such a policy is not rational in light of the other students RUSD already transports. It is not rational to treat equally expensive or equally at-risk students differently based solely on their school affiliation. Indeed if *689RUSD’s cost-based arguments here can succeed, any government official could deny service to any individual, regardless of the dictates of government policy, based solely on the proposition that serving one additional person would cost more than not serving him or her.
Yet the claims of the student plaintiffs still must fail for one simple reason: they have not alleged or introduced evidence suggesting that RUSD acted out of hostility or illegitimate animus toward them.
Contrary to the majority’s framing of the class of one inquiry, we have held quite recently that “ ‘to make out a prima facie case [of a ‘class of one’ denial of equal protection] the plaintiff must present evidence that the defendant deliberately sought to deprive him of the equal protection of the laws for reasons of a personal nature unrelated to the duties of the defendant’s position.’” Tuffendsam v. Dearborn County Bd. of Health, 385 F.3d 1124, 1127 (7th Cir.2004) (quoting Hilton v. City of Wheeling, 209 F.3d 1005, 1008 (7th Cir. 2000)) (emphasis added). That is, the plaintiffs must demonstrate that the defendant’s actions were not merely arbitrary and irrational, but motivated by “animosity” or “personal hostility” — a desire to make the plaintiff worse off than others similarly situated. Crowley v. McKinney, 400 F.3d 965, 972 (7th Cir.2005). Accord Hilton, 209 F.3d at 1008 (requiring class of one plaintiff to demonstrate that defendant acted out of “illegitimate animus”) (internal quotation marks omitted).3
This animus requirement was introduced out of concern that, in its broader formulations, the class of one theory opens up “breathtaking vistas of liability,” Tuffendsam, 385 F.3d at 1127, and threatens to transform ordinary state law disputes — or even previously unreviewable acts of police discretion — into fodder for constitutional lawsuits. See Bell v. Duperrault, 367 F.3d 703, 712 (7th Cir.2004) (Posner, J., concurring) (noting that since “irrational differences in treatment having nothing to do with discrimination against a vulnerable class abound at the bottom rung of law *690enforcement .... The federal courts will be swamped with ‘class of one’ cases remote from the purpose, and beyond the feasible scope, of the equal protection clause”); Vill. of Willowbrook v. Olech, 528 U.S. 562, 566, 120 S.Ct. 1073, 145 L.Ed.2d 1060 (2000) (Breyer, J., concurring) (registering “concern about transforming run-of-the-mill zoning cases into cases of constitutional right”); Hilton, 209 F.3d at 1008 (rejecting the “no rational basis” approach because “[i]f a merely unexplained difference in police treatment of similar complaints made by different people established aprima facie case of denial of equal protection of the laws, the federal courts would be drawn deep into the local enforcement of petty state and local laws”).
Indeed in the case before us one can certainly glimpse the enormous new areas of potential liability opened up by the “class of one” theory, as well as the corresponding need for a limiting animus requirement. If elementary school students may resort to a federal constitutional lawsuit to challenge any irrational misallocation of school district resources — even ones that implicate no fundamental right4 and involve no suspect classification5— what else might be covered by the Equal Protection Clause? Absent some restriction on the doctrine, Judge Posner’s nightmare scenario, outlined in Bell v. Duperrault, 367 F.3d at 709-10, of citizens bringing constitutional challenges against the uneven issuance of speeding tickets may not be hyperbole after all. Certainly RUSD’s policy here, as applied to the individual plaintiffs, is no more arbitrary or irrational than the decision of a traffic cop to ticket one particular speeding car while refusing to ticket other cars traveling at similar speeds.
Without any allegation or showing of animus against the plaintiff school children, the individual plaintiffs simply have not made out a prima facie case of discrimination under the class of one theory as articulated by this Court.
Before closing, I should also add that the current lawsuit appears not just legally misguided but also wholly unnecessary. For aught that appears, this dispute could have been settled simply by arranging for payments from Charter One to RUSD to cover the additional cost of busing Charter One students. Indeed this sort of thing seems to be standard practice in every other school district in the state. It is undisputed that virtually all of Wisconsin’s 120 other charter schools pay for their own students’ busing to some degree, and, as the majority notes, section 4.8 of Charter One’s own founding charter seems to anticipate a similar arrangement. In the end the key issue, as both parties apparently concede, is not whether the Charter One students will ultimately receive busing, but who must pay for it. Regardless of who is most at fault for the current impasse, this is just not the stuff of constitutional litigation.

. Specifically, the children must cross Washington Avenue, which has been deemed "hazardous” by the relevant district authorities.

. In fact the plaintiffs argue that RUSD might be statutorily required, under Wisconsin law, to transport Charter One students. However, this state law claim is not before this Court on appeal.

. Admittedly, the precise contours of the class of one theory have not always been drawn with total clarity. Here the majority acknowledges the existence of two lines of cases in this circuit — one of which recognizes animus as a requisite to a class of one discrimination claim while the other apparently recognizes only irrationality. See Tuffendsam, 385 F.3d at 1127 (noting this ambiguity); McDonald v. Vill. of Winnetka, 371 F.3d 992, 1001-02 (7th Cir.2004) (same); Bell v. Duperrault, 367 F.3d 703, 709-10 (7th Cir.2004) (Posner, J., concurring) (discussing the ambiguity and collecting cases). The majority then suggests (I think incorrectly) that the animus line of cases might be withering on the vine.
Yet at least two of the cases upholding an animus requirement actually post-date authorities relied upon by the majority, comprising some of this Court's most recent pronouncements on the issue. Additionally, while the Supreme Court’s cursory treatment of the class of one theory in Village of Willowbrook v. Olech, 528 U.S. 562, 564-65, 120 S.Ct. 1073, 145 L.Ed.2d 1060 (2000), does not reach this animus requirement, the Court also does not disavow it, and over the last year we have concluded that some level of animus is implied in the requirement that any adverse treatment be "intentional”: “[W]e don’t think the Supreme Court in Olech intended to overrule Personnel Administrator of Massachusetts v. Feeney, 442 U.S. 256, 99 S.Ct. 2282, 60 L.Ed.2d 870 (1979), which holds that an official ’intends' a consequence when he acts because rather than in spite of it.” Tuffendsam, 385 F.3d at 1127.
More fundamentally, as long as the cases recognizing the animus requirement have not been overruled or otherwise authoritatively rejected. I think it preferable in cases like this to rely on a lack of animus rather than, with all respect, to have recourse to rather tortured analyses of irrationality. The present case is an excellent example of the need for a sensible limiting principle less elusive than the sometimes will-of-the-wisp of irrationality.

. It is well established that the right to an education is not considered a fundamental right, San Antonio Indep. Sch. Dist. v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 1, 33-35, 93 S.Ct. 1278, 36 L.Ed.2d 16 (1973); Martin v. Shawano-Gresham School Dist., 295 F.3d 701, 712-13 (7th Cir.2002), and students have no right whatsoever to free transportation to school, Kadrmas v. Dickinson Public Schools, 487 U.S. 450, 458-61, 108 S.Ct. 2481, 101 L.Ed.2d 399 (1988); Johnson v. Daley, 339 F.3d 582, 586 (7th Cir.2003) (en banc) ("A right to education does not imply a right to free transportation to school.'') (citing Kadrmas).

. There is no allegation that RUSD refuses to transport Charter One students based on their race, nationality, gender, age or other (quasi) suspect classification.