Legal Aspects of the School Plant

Abstract

THIS CHAPTER is designed to cover the literature dealing with the legal aspects of the acquisition, use, and disposition of school buildings, school grounds, and school plant equipment. There are, however, certain omissions that should be noted. A number of magazines, such as the American School Board Journal, publish regularly brief paragraph summaries of current court decisions, and others, such as the Journal of Negro Education, publish longer discussions of single cases. These are essentially news items. There are also numerous signed magazine articles dealing with one or more cases in a fashion that is primarily reportorial. There are undoubtedly research technics involved in preparing these materials for publication. However, the decision in a given case is so often dependent upon the statutes of the particular state or upon the particular facts of the case that the reporting of cases without generalization represents incomplete research and might properly be thought of as providing raw materials for research. These several types of articles are, therefore, generally omitted from this review. The liability of the school district for its and those of its employees is the most discussed subject within the scope of this chapter, and there are many articles in the legal periodicals which deal in a general way with governmental tort liability. Since there is much material in the educational literature, the articles in legal publications are omitted unless they bear directly on school matters or bring out some aspects of the general subject not well covered in other sources. Anyone wishing to study fully the subject of school district liability will find it helpful to examine these general articles, all of which may be located under the topic of torts in the Index to Legal Periodicals. While buses and other vehicles might be brought within a definition of school plant, the literature dealing with them has not been included in this chapter. An outstanding event in this field in the past three years is the publication in 1943 of Volume 47 of American Jurisprudence (14), which includes a concise summary of the law on all phases of school operation. The generalizations are carefully stated and well documented, and this volume might well be the starting point for more detailed investigations of specific aspects of school law.