D. S. W. v. Fairbanks North Star Borough School Dist., s. 4938

• Citation: 628 P.2d 554
• Decision Date: 22 May 1981
• Docket Number: Nos. 4938,4959,s. 4938
• Parties: D. S. W., by his next of friends, R. M. W. and J. K. W., Appellants, v. FAIRBANKS NORTH STAR BOROUGH SCHOOL DISTRICT, Appellee. L. A. H., by his next of friends, L. H. and V. H., Appellants, v. FAIRBANKS NORTH STAR BOROUGH SCHOOL DISTRICT, Appellee.
• Court: Supreme Court of Alaska (US)

Page 554

628 P.2d 554

D. S. W., by his next of friends, R. M. W. and J. K. W., Appellants, v. FAIRBANKS NORTH STAR BOROUGH SCHOOL DISTRICT, Appellee.

L. A. H., by his next of friends, L. H. and V. H., Appellants, v. FAIRBANKS NORTH STAR BOROUGH SCHOOL DISTRICT, Appellee.

Nos. 4938, 4959.

Supreme Court of Alaska.

May 22, 1981.

Joseph W. Sheehan, Fairbanks, for appellants.

Patrick B. Cole, Staff Atty., J. D. Nordale, Borough Atty., Fairbanks, for appellee.

Before CONNOR, BURKE, and MATTHEWS, JJ., DIMOND, Senior Justice, and BRYNER, Chief Judge, Court of Appeals.

OPINION

MATTHEWS, Justice.

These cases present the question of whether an action for damages may be maintained against a school district for the negligent classification, placement, or teaching of a student. The superior court concluded that such an action may not be maintained and granted the school district's motions to dismiss. We agree, and affirm.

Because these cases are before us on appeal from orders granting motions to dismiss, we take as true the allegations of the complaints. In essence, they allege the following. L. A. H. is seventeen years old and suffers from a learning disability, commonly known as dyslexia. L. A. H. attended Borough School District schools from kindergarten through the sixth grade during which time the District negligently failed to ascertain that he was suffering from dyslexia. On the last day of L. A. H's second year in the sixth grade the District determined that he was dyslexic. Thereafter, for a time, the District gave him special education courses to assist in overcoming the effects of this disability. These courses were then negligently terminated, despite the District's awareness that L. A. H. had not overcome his dyslexia, and were never resumed. The complaint alleges that L. A. H. has suffered damage caused by the negligent acts and omissions of the District including loss of education, loss of opportunity for employment, loss of opportunity to attend college or post high school studies, past and future mental anguish and loss of income and income earning ability.

D. S. W.'s claim is similar. He too is dyslexic. The School District discovered this condition in the first grade but did not assist him in overcoming it until the fifth grade. The School District gave D. S. W. a special education program during the fifth and sixth grade but negligently discontinued it in the seventh grade knowing that he had not been adequately trained to compensate for dyslexia at that point. Beginning with the seventh grade and continuing to the present the defendant has failed to provide proper education to assist D. S. W. in overcoming his dyslexia. D. S. W. claims money damages against the School District for the same injuries claimed by L. A. H.

Although this is a claim of first impression in Alaska, two other jurisdictions have considered the question whether a claim may be maintained against a school for failing to discover learning disabilities or failing to provide an appropriate educational program once learning disabilities are discovered. In neither of these jurisdictions has a claim for damages been permitted.

The earliest case is Peter W. v. San Francisco Unified School District, 131 Cal.Rptr. 854 (Cal.App.1976). There the plaintiff alleged, among other claims, that he suffered from reading disabilities and that the School District was negligent both by failing to discover the disabilities and by placing him in inappropriate classes. The court defined the problem as whether an actionable duty of care existed, which is essentially a public policy question involving the following considerations:

The foreseeability of harm to the plaintiff, the degree of certainty that the plaintiff suffered injury, the closeness of the connection between the defendant's conduct and the injury suffered, the moral blame attached to the defendant's conduct, the policy of preventing future harm, the extent of the burden to the defendant and consequences to the community of imposing a duty to exercise care with resulting liability for breach, and the availability, cost and prevalence of insurance for the risk involved.

131 Cal.Rptr. at 859-60. ¹ The court noted that the defendant's conduct, the degree of certainty that the plaintiff suffered injury, and the establishment of a causal link between conduct and injury were all highly problematical in educational malpractice claims:

Unlike the activity of the highway or the marketplace, classroom methodology affords no readily acceptable standards of care, or cause, or injury. The science of pedagogy itself is fraught with different and conflicting theories of how or what a child should be taught, and any layman might and commonly does have his own emphatic views on the subject. The "injury" claimed here is plaintiff's inability to read and write. Substantial professional authority attests that the achievement of literacy in the schools, or its failure, are influenced by a host of factors which affect the pupil subjectively, from outside the formal teaching process, and beyond the control of its ministers. They may be physical, neurological, emotional, cultural, environmental; they may be present but not perceived, recognized but not identified.

We find in this situation no conceivable "workability of a rule of care" against which defendants' alleged conduct may be measured, no reasonable "degree of certainty that ... plaintiff suffered injury" within the meaning of the law of negligence, and no such perceptible "connection between the defendant's conduct and the injury suffered" as alleged which would establish a causal link between them within the same meaning. (Citations & footnotes omitted).

Id. at 860-61. The court also believed that much burdensome and expensive litigation would be generated if such lawsuits were allowed, stating:

Few of our institutions, if any, have aroused the controversies, or incurred the public dissatisfaction, which have attended the operation of the public schools during the last few decades. Rightly or wrongly, but widely, they are charged with outright failure in the achievement of their educational objectives; according to some critics, they bear responsibility for many of the social and moral problems of our society at large. Their public plight in these respects is attested in the daily media, in bitter governing board elections, in wholesale rejections of school bond proposals, and in survey upon survey. To hold them to an actionable "duty of care," in the discharge of their academic functions, would expose them to the tort claims real or imagined of disaffected students and parents in countless numbers. They are already beset by social and financial problems which have gone to major litigation, but for which no permanent solution has yet appeared. The ultimate consequences, in terms of public time and money, would burden them and society beyond calculation. (Citations omitted).

Id. at 861.

In Donohue v. Copiague Union Free School District, 47 N.Y.2d 440, 418 N.Y.S.2d 375, 391 N.E.2d 1352 (1979), the New York Court of Appeals was faced with a claim similar to...