Court Opinion

ID: 9453506
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 18:15:37.128494+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:33:41.293600
License: Public Domain

GODBOLD, Circuit Judge
(specially concurring):
I concur fully in the opinion of Judge Gewin and add some views of my own.
The American community groups together in its schools hundreds, even thousands, of energetic, volatile and sometimes aggressive young people in close contact with one another and in confined areas, during a substantial part of each school day for three fourths of each year and twelve years of their lives.
The bare process of teaching them in the traditional sense demands the best that the profession can offer. But in addition we call upon the schools to give our children driver training, vocational skills, public speaking, music instruction, and sex education, and to maintain their physical fitness, to carry on everbroadening athletic programs, engage in fund raising, and plan, produce and chaperone social events. Whether it should or should not do so, the American community calls upon its schools to, in substance, stand in loco parentis to its children for many hours of each school week.
Citizens expect and demand that their children be physically safe in the schools to whose supervision they are consigned, and the citizenry is outraged if the schools are less than safe and orderly. At the same time we expect that the requirements of order, and of protection and implementation of the educational program of the school, will be met by limited enforcement means — the force of the school establishment itself and the school-related disciplines of reprimand, suspension, and expulsion — recognizing that the schoolroom is an inappropriate place for the policeman to be either called or needed.
A school may not stifle dissent because the subject matter is out of favor.) Free expression is itself a vital part of the educational process. £But iu measuring the appropriateness and reasonableness of school regulations against the constitutional protections of the First and Fourteenth Amendments the courts must give full credence to the role and purposes of the schools and of the tools with which it is expected that they deal with their problems, and careful recognition to the differences between what are rea*705sonable restraints in the classroom and what are reasonable restraints on the street corner.^