A state appeals court has overturned a lower court’s ruling and said the East St. Louis public school district violated state law by refusing to bus Catholic school students in the same manner as its own population.
St. Clair County Circuit Court Judge Julie Katz granted summary judgment to East St. Louis School District 189 in August 2023 as it defended a lawsuit from Chandres Johnson and Antonio Brown, whose children attend Sister Thea Bowman Catholic Elementary School.
The families challenged that ruling before the Illinois Fifth District Appellate Court. Justice Amy Sholar wrote the panel’s decision, filed March 20; Justices James Moore and John Barberis concurred. The order was issued under Supreme Court Rule 23, which restricts its use as precedent.
According to Sholar, District 189 stopped transporting Bowman students to school in August 2015.
A lawsuit immediately followed and a St. Clair County judge issued a temporary restraining order by the end of that month ordering bus services be reinstated. That October, a preliminary injunction provided that order stay in place pending further court action, which was the status quo until August 2022.
At that point, District 189 again told Bowman it would no longer bus its students. That October, the Johnson and Brown families asked the court for an injunction and a declaratory judgment that the Illinois School Code requires public districts to provide free transportation to private school students. They also wanted reassurance the 2015 ruling remained in effect.
On appeal, District 189 argued the families improperly took one position on the state law in their complaint, but incorporated a different approach in their circuit and appellate court arguments.
The complaint asked a court to force the district to “provide appropriate bus transportation for plaintiffs, using either a regular existing route nearest to plaintiffs’ homes and to Sister Thea Bowman, or by a separate regular bus route if that is found to be safer, more economical and more efficient.” But the later arguments were that state law requires “districts to provide transportation for nonpublic school students either from the student’s home located on or near a regular route to their schools; or from the student’s school located on a regular route to their homes” and that “the statute does not require that nonpublic school students must live on or near defendant’s regular routes and that the school be located on the same regular route.”
The panel didn’t find a significant shift in legal strategy or material inconsistencies in explanations of what the law requires. The justices said Judge Katz erred by granting summary judgment on those grounds.
“Rather,” Sholar wrote, “it appears that defendant attempts to avoid implementing public policy and their duty by employing a technical procedural bar to this litigation.”
Looking at the merits of the families’ lawsuit, the panel said because the School Code includes “the word ‘shall,’ the legislature imposed a mandatory duty on public school boards who provide transportation to their students to likewise provide transportation to the students attending charter schools and any school other than a public school.”
The district doesn’t deny that duty, Sholar explained, but argued the law only requires it to bring students to the point on its regular routes nearest their private schools. Sholar said District 189 was wrong to cite a 2015 ruling from the same appellate court because that opinion involved whether District 189 was obligated to bus private students on days public schools were closed.
She further explained the importance of interpreting the word “extend” in the relevant code language requiring “such transportation to extend from some point on the regular route nearest or most easily accessible to their homes to and from the school attended, or to or from a point on such regular route which is nearest or most easily accessible to the school attended by such children.”
Whereas District 189’s position seems to read “extend” as “to offer,” such as in a contract, Sholar said, the panel found it to mean an extension of transportation in consideration of student health and safety, under the same legal obligations a district has for its own students.
“The school district is required to deliver those children to their school, just as it does its own students,” Sholar wrote. “Dropping the Bowman students off at a location other than their school is contrary to the statute.”
The panel reversed the summary judgment and remanded the complaint for further proceedings.
District 189 leadership did not respond to a request for comment from The Record about the decision.