Judges: Brookfield must bus students to Warren

By Ed Runyan

Two judges in the Valley were parties to the lawsuit.

WARREN — Brookfield schools must provide busing to schoolchildren who attend Catholic schools in the Warren area.

Judges for the 7th District Court of Appeals in Youngstown reversed a visiting judge in Trumbull County, who ruled parents in Brookfield were not entitled to have the school district bus their children to the Catholic schools outside the district.

The decision, by Judges Joseph Vukovich, Cheryl Waite and Mary DeGenaro, says the Brookfield school system must immediately provide the busing.

The case was filed by Valerie Luchette of Brookfield, whose lawyer was Judge Ronald Rice, judge of Eastern District Court in Brookfield. The judge’s wife, Judge Cynthia Wescott Rice, serves on the 11th District Court of Appeals in Warren.

The Rices and Luchette have children who want to be transported by a Brookfield school bus to Warren John F. Kennedy High School or Blessed Sacrament (K-6) school in Howland.

The case had to be handled by the appeals court in Youngstown instead of the one in Warren because of the conflict of interest posed by Judge Cynthia Wescott Rice being a party to the action.

Judge Thomas Patrick Curran of Cuyahoga County was brought in to handle the initial ruling for Trumbull County Common Pleas Court because of the conflict posed by two local judges being parties in the case.

The parents filed a suit in February 2008 asking the court to order the school system to adhere to a ruling by the Ohio Department of Education that said the school board did not have a good reason to deny transportation to the students.

The school board has maintained that its offer to provide cash to the parents instead of transportation is all that state law requires.

The three appellate court judges, however, ruled that interpreting state law on the matter in the way the school district did renders the entire statute to be almost “without meaning.”

Judge Ronald Rice, during an earlier hearing on the matter, said the state law governing whether a school district must bus students going to a private school is “poorly written.”

Of the five members of the Brookfield school board, only one — Joseph Pasquerella — could be reached to comment. Superintendent Stephen Stohla also was not available Tuesday afternoon when The Vindicator called his office.

Pasquerella said he is no longer in the majority on the school board and therefore doesn’t know whether the board will appeal the latest decision.

He said he thinks the reason the board lost at the appellate court level is that it got rid of the attorney who handled the matter at the trial court level — Atty. David Millstone — and hired a new lawyer.

“He handled it successfully, and it hurt us when we changed law firms in the middle of the stream,” Pasquerella said of Millstone.

Pasquerella said running an additional bus to JFK and Blessed Sacrament would cost between $35,000 and $70,000 per year, compared to less than $5,000 to pay cash to the families of about five children as compensation.

Last August, the families wanting the transportation said there were about a dozen children who needed the transportation.

runyan@vindy.com

needed the transportation.

runyan@vindy.com