Class Action by Steven B. Frank

Class Action by Steven B. Frank - Samuel “Sam” Ellis Warren is in the 6th grade in Los Angeles. He is worn out by homework. He loves to play the piano but every night he has lots of homework. He has little time for any kind of play. He is already gifted at thinking logically.

A parenting teacher for the neighbourhood is dispensing “advice pills” such as “Failure is the greenhouse of success”.

His class, in addition to their regular homework, is given a packet to prepare for:

The CAASPP test. Your probably know it as the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress. We call it the GASP test because it makes it hard for us to breathe.

Sam in the great American tradition of civil rights says enough. He leads a protest that falters in his class when the principal, Mr. Hill, threatens a 3 day suspension to be put on a student’s permanent record. Sam stays strong and is suspended.

On the first day of his suspension the retired lawyer across the street, Mr. Kalman, urges him to return to school the next day as no hearing was held before the suspension was imposed and tells him to read the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Goss v. Lopez. With the aid of his sister he learns the case sets out the principle that an education is a property right that requires a “fair hearing” when discipline is involved. His older sister, Sadie, captain of the high school debate team will represent him.

Mr. Hill holds a hearing on Sam’s alleged defiant behavior. With the aid of his advocate Sam pleads:

“.... we come to school, we work all day, we go home, we work all night.

Then we wake up and do it all over again. There’s no time to just be a kid.”

The principal say the homework is needed to be number one and he can go to an alternative school if he does not want this school. The suspension is upheld.

A fired up Sadie, having lost her childhood to homework, is intent on restoring Sam’s childhood. They pester Mr. Kalman into representing them on a lawsuit pleading homework is unconstitutional. They succeed and a grand legal adventure begins that had me smiling.

Mr. Kalman plans a class action with Sam as the representative plaintiff. They raise money for the class action using the principle by such methods as preparing and selling essays for other students.

It is an infrequent day I get to call reading about a court case as fun. Little legal fiction is fun. Class Action is an exception. The bright young students and their aged legal adviser are serious but they are not solemn. They are witty and dedicated to, but not self-righteous, about the justice of their cause.

The action is filed and, at a hearing in U.S. Federal Court Judge Otis Wright the Third grants their application to proceed.

On YouTube they get over a million hits. They raise a hundred thousand dollars from online supporters.

I raced through the pages eager to find out if the kids win.

At trial Sam upstages the School Division’s lawyer, Livingston Gulch. After acknowledging he spends a lot of time playing video games Sam states:

“It’s a may-do. After my must-dos get done. Playing video games helps me feel better. If I didn’t have so much homework, I probably wouldn’t need to play them that often.”

A young overachiever, Cindy, is called by the school board. She is hardly dismayed by a couple of hours of homework a day:

“Your Honor,” Cindy Vale says, “if you abolish homework, students like me who are hungry for more challenge will get bored. And I’m afraid we’ll even further behind other countries. Like China.”

A teacher explains outside the courtroom why they are assigning so much homework:

“Because the district is broke. They cut the school year but not the curriculum. They cram so many kids into our classes, we can’t get everything done between eight and three. And because they tie our jobs, our raises, and our retirement to the test scores.”

Sam is somewhat bemused to be the leader of a cause. As with many representative plaintiffs he sees himself as an ordinary guy, here boy, rather than a crusader.

As Sam enters the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco he sees a sign:

Welcome to Sam Francisco.

Ultimately the Supreme Court is asked to decide the case. Among the questions to be answered by the Court are:

Does the policy of Respondent Los Angeles Unified School District of assigning additional tasks beyond the school day, a.k.a. “homework,” violate the implied privacy rights of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution?

Is the pursuit of happiness by a minor a guaranteed right under the Constitution?

In Washington D.C. Sam proudly leads a protest march of 100,000 kids to the Supreme Court building.

My only regret is professional. The timelines and documents and decisions do not reflect real life. I appreciate the need for a swift progression through the courts of America for dramatic purposes but the journey should have been longer and more difficult. I am sure procedure is but a quibble for non-lawyer readers but I cannot ignore process.

I am sure I have not read a work of legal fiction driven by pre-teenage kids. They have a directness and freshness lost to adults. It was not a surprise to read at the end of the book that the author is a middle school teacher in Los Angeles. Class Action is one of the finalists for the 2019 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction.