Price v. New York City Bd. of Educ., 109703/06 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. May 7, 2007)
A state trial court in New York has upheld the New York City Department of Education’s policy prohibiting students from bringing cell phones to school without permission. The lawsuit was brought in 2006 by parents who charged that the policy violates students’ constitutional rights. The suit argued that a ban on use, not possession, of cell phones in school would be sufficient and appropriate, but that the outright ban lacked a rational basis for purposes of a state law challenge to an agency rule or regulation and violated parents’ and children’s rights under state and federal constitutions to communicate with each other between school and home.
After initially disposing of some procedural questions and determining that the question was a justiciable matter, the court found that the policy had a rational basis. A system focusing on use rather than possession would require a higher level of enforcement that would involve teachers in addition to security personnel and would be detrimental to the schools’ pedagogical mission, the court found. These burdens constitute a rational basis for the policy. The court found an additional rational basis for the policy in the rapidly changing nature of cell phone technology, which makes it hard to devise narrower policies that attempt to address particular types of disruption. The plaintiffs had failed to present a “viable universal alternative which could be appropriately ordered by a court to applicable to all the schools” in the school system. The policy does no more than ban cell phone possession “without authorization,” the court pointed out, and school officials have the authority under the policy to allow a student to carry a cell phone based on a special need or to allow students in general to possess cell phones where they might not be disruptive of certain after-school activities on school grounds, such as football games.
Regarding the constitutional claims, the court began by observing there is no state or federal “constitutional right to bear cell phones.” It rejected the state constitutional claim as unsustainable, finding that “the doctrine of substantive due process no longer exists as a principle of [f]ederal constitutional law,” because “no recent majority of the [U.S.] Supreme Court has recognized in over a half century ‘Substantive Due Process’ as a basis to review the action of a State or State agency.” Substantive due process thus could not serve as the basis for an expanded reading of an earlier state constitutional holding that was grounded on that federal principle, the court determined. The court also rejected the federal constitutional claim of interference with parental liberty interest in rearing their children as they see fit. While acknowledging the “fundamental rights of parents to make decisions concerning the care, custody and control of their children” based on the Fourteenth Amendment, the court found that “principle provides no basis for this Court to set aside the Cell Phone Rules.” The court suggested the U.S. Supreme Court would be unlikely to conclude that cell phones are “fundamental” instrumentalities to the exercise of constitutional rights or that a ban on possession of cell phones on school property so fundamentally prevents parent-child communication as to violate Fourteenth Amendment liberty interests.
Price v. New York City Bd. of Educ., 109703/06 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. May 7, 2007)
[Full opinion]
[Editor’s Note: Background on the case is below. The parents were represented pro bono (without charge) by the law firm of Morgan Lewis, which devotes a website page, below at the second link, to the case.]
[NSBA School Law pages on cell phone lawsuit]
[Morgan Lewis cell phone ban litigation page]