Litigation Roundup: School Districts Lacking Notice

In several recent cases, courts rejected claims that school districts were liable for sexual misconduct by employees or students due to lack of notice.  Here are case summaries:

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a district court's judgment in favor of a plaintiff who sued the South San Antonio Independent School District after having been molested by the vice principal, later principal, of the elementary school he attended.  After the jury awarded the plaintiff $4.5 million, the school district moved to dismiss the case as a matter of law and appealed an adverse ruling on this motion to the appellate court.  A school district is liable for sexual misconduct of its employees if someone with authority to take corrective action has notice of the misconduct and responds with deliberate indifference. In this case, the plaintiff argued that because the perpetrator was the vice principal  -- someone with authority to take corrective action -- then the notice requirement was satisfied.  However, the Fifth Circuit disagreed, concluding that the perpetrator's knowledge of his own misconduct does not qualify. The notice requirement is meant to limit school district liability to only those cases where those in authority ignore sexual misconduct that they know is going on, and one does not "ignore" one's own misconduct. Put another way, the court reasoned that implicit in the notice requirement is a requirement that the person to whom notice is given is a person who does not already know that the misconduct is going on.  Otherwise, there is potential automatic liability every time someone with authority is the perpetrator.
Decision: Salazar v. South San Antonio Indep. Sch. Dist., 2017 WL 2590511 (5th Cir. June 15, 2017).

The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court's decision to dismiss Title IX claims filed against Bibb County (Georgia) school district stemming from the rape of a female special education student, the plaintiff in the case. The facts are terrible: A male student walked into the plaintiff's classroom and told the teacher that another teacher wanted to see the plaintiff. The teacher let her go with him, and he brought her to the bathroom where she was gang-raped by seven male students, none of whom had ever been reported for any kind of sexual misconduct.  For the district to be liable for the rape, however, there must be some prior misconduct that put school officials on notice that the plaintiff was at risk for what happened.  Considering the appeal, the Eleventh Circuit affirmed that it is not necessary for a plaintiff to show that she herself had reported prior incidents, nor that the perpetrators themselves had been the subject of such reports.  Still, however, there must be a reasonable enough similarity between the prior incidents and the plaintiff's rape to put school officials on notice, and the appellate court agreed with the district court that such similarity was lacking here.  There had been prior incidents of sexual assault in the high school; one of which did not involve students in the special education program and so could not serve as notice that students participating in that program were at an elevated risk.  The other did involve special education students, but the circumstances were different as the students involved had been left alone unsupervised in a classroom, whereas here, the perpetrators used deceit to extract the victim from her classroom.  Therefore, there was nothing on which to base a claim that the school district should have acted to prevent the rape that occurred here.
Decision: Jane Doe v. Bibb County Sch. Dist., 2017 WL 2240825 (11th Cir. May 22, 2017).

The parents of an eighth grader can not pursue their lawsuit against the Independent School District of Delaware County (Oklahoma) that stems from a romantic and sexual relationship that occurred between their ninth-grade daughter and her basketball coach, an employee of the district. The federal district court in Oklahoma granted summary judgment to the district on the parents' Title IX claim because their were no allegations that the school district was indifferent to the coach's sexual misconduct that was known to appropriate school officials. Once the principal learned of a rumor that the coach and the student had been locked in a room together, he and the superintendent investigated and quickly got corroboration by the student. The coach was suspended immediately and eventually terminated. The parents argued that school officials actually had notice that this coach posed a threat of sexual misconduct to his players based on prior complaints that a couple of parents had made against the coach.  However, these complaints, which were investigated, did not involve conduct that was predictive of the sexual misconduct that occurred in this case. There had been a complaint that the coach sometimes texted individual players, and sometimes talked about butts in practice. But the investigation revealed that the texts and the comments were related to basketball and reasonably handled by an order to the coach not to text individual players any more. In the absence of deliberate indifference to sexual misconduct that was known or foreseeable to school officials the school district was not liable for damages arising from the the coach's sexual misconduct with the plaintiffs' daughter.
Decision: Callihan v. Indep. Sch. Dist. No. 1., 2017 WL 2783990 (N.D. Okla. June 27, 2017).