1961 US Commission on Civil Rights Report Book 2 - University of ...

public schools because of tuition grants and diminished enrollment is
substantial, 138 and the Arlington County Board of Education complained
bitterly of the tuition grant law in <strong>1961</strong>. 13T
The director of administration and finance for the State Department
of Education of Virginia reported that during the 1960-61 school year,
8,127 pupils in Virginia received tuition grants, an increase of 3,359 over
the previous school year. (About 40 percent of the increase was for
attendance at the Prince Edward County Foundation schools.) The
cost of the grants to the taxpayers was $i>755,543, or about $700,000
over the previous year. Of this total, $1,014,582 came from State funds
and $740,961 from local funds, the increase from the preceding year
being about $550,000 in State funds and $160,000 in local funds. 138
CONCL<strong>US</strong>ION
The threat to popular education posed by the closing of public schools,
State support of private schools, and reduced State aid to public schools
under "freedom of choice," has been discussed. Both practical and
constitutional questions arise out of the State laws creating this threat.
The practical questions can be resolved into one: Can private schools
to serve all children—the nonacademic child as well as the academically
talented, the poor as well as the rich—be substituted for a system of
public schools without sacrificing educational standards or the educational
welfare of at least some children? The constitutional questions
are three: (i) May a political subdivision of a State withdraw from
public education while others continue to operate public schools? 138a (2)
What amount of State management, control, or support is required
before a private school becomes an instrumentality of the State for the
purpose of invoking the 14th amendment? (3) When do actions taken
to avoid desegregation of schools become evasion of the law of the
land? 138b
Some of these constitutional questions were decided in the litigation
pending in the Federal courts as to the closed schools of Prince Edward
County, Va., and the threatened closing of schools in St. Helena
Parish, La.
These questions involve the exercise of State power in an area long
recognized as entirely within the domain of the States. In November
1960, the Supreme Court had occasion to speak on the exercise of a
similar State power with relation to rights protected by the
Constitution: 188 97