Cite as: 512 U. S. 687 (1994)
Opinion of Souter, J.
reorganization,4 is likewise anomalous. Although the legislature has established some 20 existing school districts by special Act, all but one of these are districts in name only, having been designed to be run by private organizations serving institutionalized children. They have neither tax bases nor student populations of their own but serve children placed by other school districts or public agencies. See N. Y. Educ. Law § 3601-a (Statutory Notes), §§ 4001 and 4005 (Mc-Kinney Supp. 1994); Law Pamphlet, at 18 ("These districts are school districts only by way of a legal fiction"). The one school district petitioners point to that was formed by special Act of the legislature to serve a whole community, as this one was, is a district formed for a new town, much larger and more heterogeneous than this village, being built on land that straddled two existing districts. See 1972 N. Y. Laws, ch. 928 (authorizing Gananda School District). Thus the Kiryas Joel Village School District is exceptional to the point of singularity, as the only district coming to our notice that the legislature carved from a single existing district to serve local residents. Clearly this district "cannot be seen as the fulfillment of [a village's] destiny as an independent governmental entity," United States v. Scotland Neck City Bd. of Ed., 407 U. S. 484, 492 (1972) (Burger, C. J., concurring in result).5
4 State law allows consolidation on the initiative of a district superintendent, N. Y. Educ. Law § 1504 (McKinney 1988), local voters, §§ 1510- 1513, 1522-1524, 1902, or the Commissioner of Education, §§ 1526, 1801- 1803-a, depending on the circumstances. It also authorizes the district superintendent to "organize a new school district," § 1504, which may allow secession from an existing district, but this general law played no part in the creation of the Kiryas Joel Village School District.
5 Although not dispositive in this facial challenge, the pattern of interdistrict transfers, proposed and presently occurring, tends to confirm that religion rather than geography is the organizing principle for this district. Cf. United States v. Scotland Neck City Bd. of Ed., 407 U. S., at 490 (Burger, C. J., concurring in result). When Chapter 748 was passed, the
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