Otken v. Lamkin

Citations

• 56 Miss. 758

Syllabus

<p>1. Public Education. School fund. Sow applied. Art. 8, Constitution.</p> <p>The school fund provided by art. 8 of the State Constitution can only be applied to such schools as come within the uniform system therein devised, are under the general supervision of the State superintendent of education and the local supervision of the county superintendent, are free from all sectarian or religious control, and are open to all children within the ages of five and twenty years; though this freedom of admission does not preclude the classification of the schools according to the ages, sex, race, or mental acquire-ments of the pupils, —provided, only, they remain free to all who come within the class to which the particular school is set apart.</p> <p>2. Same. High-schools. Act of 1878 unconstitutional.</p> <p>An act of the Legislature, passed March 5, 1878, éntitled “An act to encourage the establishment of high-schools and colleges in this'State,”, provides, in effect, that whenever a child has attended a private institution of learning, which has secured a suitable building and a library of two hundred bound volumes of miscellaneous literature, and is conducted by a teacher or teachers of good moral and educational standing, such child, whether the school so attended by him be within or without the school-district in which he resides, may receive from the common-school fund the same pro rata share thereof to which he would have been entitled if he had attended the public free school of his district. The act contains no requirement that the private institutions therein contemplated shall be free from sectarian or religious control, nor that they shall be under the supervision of the State or county superintendent of public education, nor that they shall be free from the charge of tuition; but it does require that the pupils shall pay the tuition which may be exacted by the persons conducting the institutions; and, as it makes such institutions wholly private, the person