Court Opinion

ID: 9666589
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 01:21:07.081589+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:15:30.719242
License: Public Domain

RICKHOFF, Justice,
concurring.
The court’s concurrence delivered August 31, 1995 is withdrawn and this opinion is substituted.
I agree with the majority opinion but write separately to urge trial courts to cautiously apply the appropriate standard of review, especially in light of the new Texas Education Code. Desperate parents will be searching for that one trial judge they can cajole into accepting the education code’s invitation to review “de novo”1 the school board’s decision to expel their child. Thus begins costly litigation that may only end after the improvidently readmitted student’s graduation. All can be avoided if the standard of review, as laid out in Sanchez v. Huntsville Indep. Sch. Dish, 844 S.W.2d 286, 289-90 (Tex.App.—Houston [1st Dist.] 1992, no writ), is followed.
As early as 1985, a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court commented:
The maintenance of discipline in the schools requires not only that students be restrained from assaulting one another, abusing drugs and alcohol, and committing other crimes, but also that students conform themselves to the standards of conduct prescribed by school authorities. We have “repeatedly emphasized the need for affirming the comprehensive authority of the States and of school officials, consistent with fundamental constitutional safeguards, to prescribe and control conduct in schools.” Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 U.S. 503, 507, 89 S.Ct. 733, 737, 21 L.Ed.2d 731 (1969). The promulgation of a rule forbidding specified conduct presumably reflects a judgment on the part of school officials that such conduct is destructive of school order or of a proper educational environment. Absent any suggestion that the rule violates some substantive constitutional guarantee, the courts should, as a general matter, defer to the judgment and refrain from attempting to distinguish between rules that are important to the preservation of order in the schools and rules that are not.
New Jersey v. T.L.O., 469 U.S. 325, 342 n. 9, 105 S.Ct. 733, 743 n. 9, 83 L.Ed.2d 720, 735 n. 9 (1985). As recently as June of 1995, seven members of our supreme court agreed that courts should be reluctant to intervene with the “heavy hand of justice” in local school matters. See Barber v. Colorado Indep. Sch. Dish, 901 S.W.2d 447,453 (1995) (declining to address constitutionality of school’s grooming code).
In 1992, the Sanchez court determined that school board actions should be reviewed by substantial evidence de novo review. 844 S.W.2d at 290. Trial judges are not authorized to cavalierly exercise equity jurisdiction and “do the right thing” to correct the school board’s decision. As long as the school board’s decision is “reasonable”, even if, in the trial judge’s mind, the evidence may preponderate against the board’s decision, that decision stands.
*129This record shows the student was expelled pursuant to Tex.Educ.Code Aun. § 21.3011(b)(1) (Vernon Supp.1995) for pushing a teacher. This alone should alert a trial judge there may exist a reasonable basis for the board’s action. Moreover, the trial judge requested and received briefs on the appropriate standard of review. Nevertheless, one could read the court’s judgment in awarding attorney’s fees, ordering readmission, and declaring the expulsion void as creating a new common law action for wrongful expulsion. This judicial interference in local school board matters is precisely what the U.S. and Texas Supreme Courts have urged the trial courts to avoid.

. See Tex.Educ.Code Ann. §§ 13.215, 19.02(d), 19.022(i), 19.02210), 21.041(d), 21.3011(e) (Vernon 1987, 1991 & Supp.1995) (using the words "de novo " without characterizing the review as "substantial evidence" or "pure” de novo).