Court Opinion

ID: 9584408
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 22:47:52.732344+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:07:44.740824
License: Public Domain

Neely, Justice,

dissenting:

I dissent for reasons which must be so obvious that exhaustive discussion is hardly necessary. In West Virginia school attendance is compulsory — all children between the ages of six and sixteen must be under the supervision of the county boards of education regardless of whether they are enrolled in the public schools, private schools, or privately tutored. W.Va. Code, 18-8-1 [1951]; State v. Riddle, _ W.Va. _, _ S.E.2d _ (1981).
It is a denial of certain sacred parental rights to require that parents relinquish their children to the pernicious *71influence of confessed misdemeanants, particularly when the misdemeanor is a crime of moral turpitude. Morally there is no difference between one who commits grand larceny and petit larceny.
The appellant was employed as a high school guidance counselor. What type of example does a confessed shoplifter set for impressionable teenagers? Since juvenile crime is among this society’s most pressing social problems, is it not reasonable that we should forbear teaching crime or exalting its commission in the public schools? I can hear the dialogue now in the guidance office of this particular counselor: “Excuse me teach, but is this the right size boosting drawers for a girl my height?” or, “Say, Miss Golden, do you know a good fence for some clean, hot jewelry?”
Furthermore, I quarrel with the majority’s expression: “Immorality is an imprecise word which means different things to different people. ...” There are few reasonable people who do not consider stealing — except possibly for survival — as immoral. Certainly a reasonable person is justified in experiencing outrage when his child is involuntarily subjected to the influence of an authority figure and role model who advocates, at least by example, crime as a legitimate way of supplementing her income. It is this type of situation that justifies the low regard in which many persons hold the public schools. Yet in this case the schools used every effort to eliminate the problem only to be confounded by the courts.
The result in this case is absurd and works a great injustice on the Harrison County Board of Education. The Board went to a great deal of expense and trouble to rid its school system of the appellant. The people who suffer most from this Court’s largess, as always, are the children and parents. Children and parents must work not only against the pernicious influences of drug dealers, other children already engaged in crime, and the host of underworld characters who profit from juvenile vice, but also they must now work against the example of the public schools themselves.