D.L. v. Unified School Dist. No. 497

• Citation: 392 F.3d 1223
• Decision Date: 27 December 2004
• Docket Number: No. 03-3268.,03-3268.
• Parties: D.L., individually and as next friend of J.L., a minor; Estate of R.L.; and P.P., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. The UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT NO. 497; Dr. Douglas Eicher, School Administrator, individually and in his official capacity, Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (10th Circuit)

392 F.3d 1223

D.L., individually and as next friend of J.L., a minor; Estate of R.L.; and P.P., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. The UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT NO. 497; Dr. Douglas Eicher, School Administrator, individually and in his official capacity, Defendants-Appellees.

No. 03-3268.

United States Court of Appeals, Tenth Circuit.

December 27, 2004.

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL OMITTED

Gregory P. Goheen of McAnany, Van Cleve & Phillips, P.A., Kansas City, KS, for Plaintiffs-Appellants.

W. Joseph Hatley of Lathrop & Gage, L.C., Overland Park, KS, for Defendants-Appellees.

Before KELLY, HENRY, and HARTZ, Circuit Judges.

HARTZ, Circuit Judge.

The suit before us on appeal arises out of a dispute concerning the eligibility of J.L. and R.L. (the children) for special-education services provided by Unified School District No. 497, Douglas County, Kansas (the District). Plaintiffs are J. L; the Estate of R.L., who died after the suit was filed; their mother D.L. (Mother); and her cohabiting boyfriend P.P. Defendants are the District and Dr. Douglas Eicher, its former director of special education.

Before this suit was filed, the District brought a state-court action (which is still pending) to require Mother and P.P. to pay for special-education services provided the children during a period when, according to the District, the children were not residents of the District and therefore were ineligible for those services. Plaintiffs then sued in federal district court, claiming that denial of the special-education services received by the children from the District would have violated the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), 20 U.S.C. § 1400 et seq.; the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), 42 U.S.C. § 12101 et seq.; the Rehabilitation Act, 29 U.S.C. § 794 et seq.; the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), 20 U.S.C. § 1232g; and the Fourteenth Amendment.

We exercise jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1291. We affirm the judgment in favor of Defendants on one part of the IDEA claim. As for the other claims before us, we hold that the district court should have stayed proceedings on the claims for damages and lacked jurisdiction to resolve the remaining claims because of the pending state action. See Younger v. Harris, 401 U.S. 37, 54, 91 S.Ct. 746, 27 L.Ed.2d 669 (1971).

I. Background

R.L. was autistic and his brother J.L. suffers from a milder learning disability. In August 1997 Mother enrolled the children in the District. During that school year an anonymous informant told the District that the children were nonresidents. When asked, Mother assured the District that she and the children were residents. In November 1999 an anonymous informant again told the District that the children were nonresidents. The District hired an investigator who discovered that they were being driven from Kansas City, Kansas, outside the District, to Lawrence, Kansas, inside the District, to attend school.

On January 4, 2000, the District wrote Mother saying that the children would not be permitted to return to school after January 13, 2000, the end of the semester. Plaintiffs requested a due-process hearing under the IDEA, but the District denied the request. On January 24, 2000, after negotiations between the District and counsel for Mother, Mother provided an affidavit of residency stating that R.L. was living with her within the District. The children were readmitted that day. In March 2000, however, the District again engaged an investigator who discovered that the children were commuting to school from Kansas City.

The District maintained a nonresident-admission policy under which nonresidents were admitted so long as there was space available in the District's schools. They were not admitted, however, if doing so would require the District to hire additional staff. Because each autistic student was assigned his own paraprofessional (and, apparently, the staff included no extra paraprofessionals for autistic students), autistic students were unable to obtain nonresident admission.

On April 18, 2000, the District sued Mother and P.P. in Kansas state court, seeking damages to compensate it for the cost of educating the children while they were nonresidents and an injunction prohibiting the children from attending District schools in the future. The crux of the suit is whether the children were entitled to the education they received from the District.

On September 29, 2000, Mother, P.P., and the children countered by filing suit in the United States District Court for the District of Kansas against the District, Dr. Eicher, and the members of the District's school board. They alleged that (1) the District violated the IDEA by denying the requested due-process hearing and by expelling the children from January 13 until January 24, 2000, when Mother provided the affidavit of residency; (2) the District violated the ADA, the Rehabilitation Act, and the Fourteenth Amendment by discriminating against Plaintiffs because of the children's residence and disabilities; (3) the District violated the FERPA by disclosing the disabilities of the children in the state-court suit; and (4) the District violated Plaintiffs' common-law right to privacy by placing them under surveillance and making public statements about, among other things, their residency outside the district. Plaintiffs sought a variety of forms of relief: declaratory judgments (on their IDEA, ADA, Rehabilitation Act, and Fourteenth Amendment claims); "compensatory education" for wrongful expulsion of the children (on their IDEA claim); compensatory and punitive damages (on their Rehabilitation Act, ADA, FERPA, and common-law right-to-privacy claims); attorney and expert-witness fees (on their Rehabilitation Act, ADA, and Fourteenth Amendment claims); an injunction requiring the District to permit J.L. to attend school (on their Rehabilitation Act, ADA, and Fourteenth Amendment claims); an injunction requiring the District to adopt nondiscriminatory policies (on their Rehabilitation Act and ADA claims); and an injunction requiring Defendants "to abide by the statutory requirements of IDEA, specifically including the Procedural Safeguards which protect families from the abuses perpetrated by defendants." Aplt.App. at 6.

The district court dismissed all of P.P.'s claims for lack of standing, dismissed the claims against the school-board members as redundant because of the District's presence as a defendant, held that Plaintiffs had failed to state a claim under the FERPA, see Gonzaga Univ. v. Doe, 536 U.S. 273, 287, 122 S.Ct. 2268, 153 L.Ed.2d 309 (2002), and granted summary judgment in favor of Defendants on the ADA, Rehabilitation Act, Fourteenth Amendment, and invasion-of-privacy claims. The court also held that Dr. Eicher enjoyed qualified immunity and granted summary judgment in his favor on all claims. The court tried the IDEA claims on deposition testimony and documentary evidence. It decided that even if there had been a procedural violation, there had been no loss of substantive educational benefits, and held that Plaintiffs hence had no right to recovery.

Plaintiffs appeal the district court's judgment in favor of Defendants on the IDEA claims; the court's grant of summary judgment on the ADA, Rehabilitation Act, and constitutional claims; the court's grant of summary judgment as to Dr. Eicher; and the court's ruling that P.P. lacked standing.

II. Younger Abstention

Even when a federal court would otherwise have jurisdiction to hear a claim, the court may be obliged to abstain when a federal-court judgment on the claim would interfere with an ongoing state proceeding implicating important state interests. The classic example of this proposition, generally referred to as the Younger doctrine, is a federal suit to enjoin a pending state criminal proceeding. See Younger; J.B. ex rel. Hart v. Valdez, 186 F.3d 1280 (10th Cir.1999) (applying Younger). But the Younger doctrine also can apply to a state-court civil proceeding, see Trainor v. Hernandez, 431 U.S. 434, 444, 97 S.Ct. 1911, 52 L.Ed.2d 486 (1977) (civil suit by state administrative agency to collect fraudulently obtained welfare benefits), including state-court suits between two private parties, see Pennzoil Co. v. Texaco, Inc., 481 U.S. 1, 10, 107 S.Ct. 1519, 95 L.Ed.2d 1 (1987).

Moreover, although Younger involved a request for injunctive relief against the ongoing state proceeding, such relief need not be explicitly sought in federal court. In an opinion issued concurrently with Younger, the Supreme Court held that "the same equitable principles relevant to the propriety of an injunction [apply] to ... a declaratory judgment.... [W]here an injunction would be impermissible under these principles, declaratory relief should ordinarily be denied as well." Samuels v. Mackell, 401 U.S. 66, 73, 91 S.Ct. 764, 27 L.Ed.2d 688 (1971). The Court expressed two reasons for treating declaratory relief essentially the same as injunctive relief. First, even though a party seeks only declaratory relief, once a declaratory judgment is obtained, the party may obtain an injunction to enforce the declaratory judgment. Id. at 72, 91 S.Ct. 764. If, for example, the court's declaratory judgment states that a statute is unconstitutional, the court may then enjoin a prosecution of the federal plaintiff under the statute. Second, a federal-court declaratory judgment would ordinarily have preclusive effect in the state-court proceeding. Id. Once the declaratory judgment is entered, the victorious party could insist in state court that the legal proposition declared in federal court cannot be disputed in the state proceeding. Thus, a state-court prosecution of the federal plaintiff may not be able to proceed under a statute declared unconstitutional in the federal-court proceeding.

These same two reasons apply, of course, regardless of the relief initially sought in the federal-court suit. For example, a plaintiff...