228 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 
itself, and cannot be divested—even by the legislature or by any other 
department of government. 
In accordance with the authority granted by the constitution the 
first legislature after Colorado became a state passed laws defining the 
powers and duties of the State Board of Education, and provided for 
the ascertainment of school districts and the organization of district 
schools and of high schools, and prescribing the powers and duties of 
their governing boards, which laws have remained until the present 
substantially unchanged. The governing boards of high schools are 
called in the original act and in the amendatory and supplemental acts 
passed from time to time, committees, but these committees, whether 
of “district”? or ‘‘union” or “county” high schools, are taken in turn from 
the district directors; and it is a noticeable fact that in this distribution 
of powers and duties among the various educational boards no attempt 
has ever been made so far as the writer can ascertain, to derogate from 
the high-school committees the powers originally granted by the consti- 
tution to the district directors, namely, that of the control of instruction 
in the public schools.* 
The constitutional grant to the school directors is contained in a 
broad phrase, the control of instruction. In elaborating it the first 
Colorado legislature gave to all school boards the ‘power to make such 
by-laws for their own government and for the government of the public 
schools under their charge as they may deem expedient,” and again, in 
subsequent sections of the same first legislative act, this control of 
instruction becomes diffusive and flows through many channels. It 
is unnecessary to mention them all. But among the enumerated powers 
we find the following: 
Every school board, unless otherwise especially provided by law, shall have 
power, and it shall be their duty . . . . to suspend or expel pupils from school, 
who refuse to obey the rules thereof.? 
That is the law of Colorado, and has been the law since territorial days. 
There are no other general or special statutory provisions that I can 
discover upon the subjects of suspension or expulsion from school; 
t Mills Ann. Stat., chap. 109. 
2 Mills Ann. Stat., §§ 4012, 4015. 
