Arline v. School Bd. of Nassau County, s. 83-3754
| Citation | 772 F.2d 759 |
| Decision Date | 30 September 1985 |
| Docket Number | 84-3307,Nos. 83-3754,s. 83-3754 |
| Parties | 39 Fair Empl.Prac.Cas. 9, 38 Empl. Prac. Dec. P 35,612, 54 USLW 2212, 27 Ed. Law Rep. 675 Gene H. ARLINE, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. The SCHOOL BOARD OF NASSAU COUNTY; and Craig Marsh, Individually and as Superintendent of Schools of Nassau County, FL, Defendants-Appellees. Gene H. ARLINE, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. The SCHOOL BOARD OF NASSAU COUNTY; and Craig Marsh, Individually and as Superintendent of Schools of Nassau County, EL, Defendants-Appellants. |
| Court | United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (11th Circuit) |
Steven H. Malone, St. Petersburg, Fla., for Gene H. Arline.
Brian T. Hayes, Monticello, Fla., for School Bd. of Nassau County et al.
Appeals from the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida.
Before VANCE and ANDERSON, Circuit Judges, and HENLEY *, Senior Circuit Judge.
In enacting the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Congress designed a comprehensive federal program aimed at integrating the handicapped into this society and affording them greater access to its benefits. One of the enforcement mechanisms of that Act is the private right of action 1 which arises out of its antidiscrimination provision. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, 29 U.S.C. Sec. 794, provides that:
No otherwise qualified handicapped individual ... shall, solely by reason of his handicap, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance....
In the appeal before us the plaintiff, a third grade teacher who was fired from her job solely because of her susceptibility to tuberculosis, alleges that her dismissal violated section 504. Our consideration of her claim requires us to construe the meaning of three essential terms in section 504, namely, "handicapped individual," "otherwise qualified" 2 and "federal financial assistance."
Mrs. Gene Arline first contracted tuberculosis in 1957 at the age of fourteen, after which the disease went into remission. In 1966 she was hired as an elementary school teacher in Nassau County, Florida, and did her job competently for thirteen years. Arline then suffered three relapses of tuberculosis, one in 1977 and two in 1978. After her third relapse, the School Board dismissed Arline from her job.
After being denied relief in state administrative proceedings, Arline brought suit in federal court alleging that her dismissal constituted a violation of section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. 3 She contended that her susceptibility to tuberculosis made her a "handicapped individual" within the meaning of the Rehabilitation Act, and that the school board therefore violated section 504 because it had fired her even though she was "otherwise qualified if given reasonable accommodation." Arline's first theory was that her handicap created no barrier at all to her continued employment because the risk that she would infect her students was so minimal. The decision to dismiss her because of it was thus unreasonable and discriminatory. In the alternative, she claimed that even if nonsusceptibility to tuberculosis was a necessary physical qualification for teaching small children, the school district should have offered her "reasonable accommodation" in the form of an administrative job or a temporary position teaching less susceptible persons such as older students or adults until she could obtain certification in areas outside elementary education. 4
Along with medical evidence to support her claims, Arline introduced evidence that the school system received two forms of federal assistance. The first source of federal funds was Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, 20 U.S.C. Secs. 2701-2854, 5 which provided monies to schools attended by significant numbers of children from low-income families. Although those funds were segregated from the general budget and used to pay only Title I teachers' salaries and purchase only Title I program supplies, she pointed out that her job entailed significant involvement with the Title I program in the form of day-to-day conferrals with Title I teachers about those of her students who were involved in the program. The second form of federal funding was "impact aid," which is provided to school systems whose populations have been substantially enlarged by the attendance of federal employees' children, but which have reduced tax revenues due to the presence of federally-owned property in the district. 20 U.S.C. Sec. 237. Although such funds constituted only a small portion of the school system's budget, 6 the defendants conceded that it was added to the school system's general education fund, from which teachers' salaries were paid.
After trial, the district court issued an oral opinion which found for the defendants on all counts. First, the court found that a contagious disease such as tuberculosis is not a "handicap" within the meaning of the Rehabilitation Act. As to her contention that she should have been given another position, the court concluded that Arline lacked the qualifications to teach outside of elementary education. In any case, the court held, the school board had no obligation to afford Arline alternative positions because it had an overriding duty to protect the public from contagious diseases. 7 Finally, the court concluded that neither the Title I funding nor the impact aid met the "federal financial assistance" requirement of section 504. With regard to the Title I money, the court stated that Arline was not a beneficiary of the funds because she was "not employed for purposes of Title I or in the Title I program...." As for the impact aid, the court concluded that it did not constitute "federal financial assistance" within the meaning of section 504.
Because of its jurisdictional implications, we first consider whether the defendant received any "federal financial assistance" within the meaning of section 504. We need not address the effect of the Title I funding, for we find that the impact aid given to the defendants qualifies as "federal financial assistance" under section 504.
As this court noted in Jones v. Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, 681 F.2d 1376, 1379 (11th Cir.1982), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 104 S.Ct. 1591, 80 L.Ed.2d 123 (1984), "[o]n its face ... [section 504] applies to programs receiving federal financial aid of any kind " (emphasis supplied). 8 See also Consolidated Rail Corp. v. Darrone, 465 U.S. 624, ---, 104 S.Ct. 1248, 1253, 79 L.Ed.2d 568 (1984). Where the language of a statute is not ambiguous and does not lead to absurd results, the job of the courts is to apply it as written.
The court below concluded and the defendants now contend, however, that the application of the statute is not so straightforward as its language would suggest. First, they find ambiguity in the term "federal financial assistance," and argue that the nature of federal impact aid is such that it could not have been within Congress' contemplation as a means of triggering the enforcement provision in section 504. Defendants' rationale is that impact aid is, as a matter of definition, not "assistance." They posit that it is more analogous to land taxes than to federal assistance since it is calculated on the basis of federal ownership of land and serves as a substitute for tax payments that the school system would receive had the land in its area been privately owned. We agree that when the federal government makes payments for obligations incurred as a market participant such payments do not constitute "federal assistance." See, e.g., Hingson v. Pacific Southwest Airlines, 743 F.2d 1408, 1414 (9th Cir.1984) (); Jacobson v. Delta Airlines, 742 F.2d 1202, 1209 (9th Cir.1984) (same), cert. dismissed, --- U.S. ----, 105 S.Ct. 2129, 85 L.Ed.2d 493 (1985). See also Darrone, 465 U.S. at ----, 104 S.Ct. at 1256 n. 19. We must, however, reject the defendants' analogies to obligatory tax payments as fatally flawed. The indisputable fact is that the federal government's exemption from local taxes left it with no legal obligation to give impact aid. Its choice to assist local entities that happen to bear particularly heavy burdens because of this exemption renders its assistance no less a subsidy than any other form of aid that it dispenses. As such, it is federal financial assistance within the broad meaning that Congress intentionally gave the term in section 504. 9
We also find no merit in defendants' argument that the plaintiff failed to show that the impact aid funded a "program or activity" in which she was employed. Under their theory, it was not sufficient for plaintiff to show that the impact funds were non-earmarked monies which were deposited into the school board's general revenue fund to be used as it saw fit and that her salary was paid out of that fund. They argue that she must also show that the impact monies were actually used to fund her salary, since "the School Board might have elected to use those funds to pay for a program which would have had to be eliminated if the impact funds had been cut off." This argument strains credulity. Such a theory would impose on the plaintiff the impossible burden of tracing money that is virtually untraceable under accounting procedures which commingle funds in a general account before outlays are made. It also misconceives the relevant "program" in this case. We hold that the relevant "program" with regard to these non-earmarked general revenue funds is the entire school system. Once the federal money was deposited into its general fund, all activities paid for out of that fund became subject to section 504.
We must next determine whether tuberculosis constitutes a "handicap" within the meaning of the Rehabilitation Act. The district court concluded that it did not, explaining that "it's difficult for...
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