Hunter v. Board of Educ. of Montgomery County

• Decision Date: 07 January 1982
• Docket Number: No. 32,32
• Parties: , 2 Ed. Law Rep. 114 Ross J. HUNTER et al., v. BOARD OF EDUCATION OF MONTGOMERY COUNTY et al.
• Court: Maryland Court of Appeals

Page 481

292 Md. 481

439 A.2d 582, 2 Ed. Law Rep. 114

Ross J. HUNTER et al., v. BOARD OF EDUCATION OF MONTGOMERY COUNTY et al.

No. 32.

Court of Appeals of Maryland.

Jan. 7, 1982.

Browne L. Kooken, Landover (Charles A. Dukes, Jr. and Dukes & Kooken, Landover, on the brief), for appellants.

Leonard S. Jacobson, County Sol. and Arnold Jablon, Asst. County Sol., Towson, William B. Somerville, Smith, Somerville & Case, John H. Mudd, H. Thomas Howell, Susan T. Preston, Nora Winay and Semmes, Bowen & Semmes, Baltimore, on the brief, for amicus curiae Bd. of Ed. of Baltimore County.

Paul V. McCormick, Rockville (McCormick, Sullivan & Talbott, Rockville, on the brief), for appellees.

Argued before MURPHY, C. J., and SMITH, DIGGES, ELDRIDGE, COLE, DAVIDSON and RODOWSKY, JJ.

DIGGES, Judge.

This case primarily presents the troubling but nevertheless important question, which has not been previously addressed by this Court, of whether an action can be successfully asserted against a school board and various individual employees for improperly evaluating, placing or teaching a student. The Circuit Court for Montgomery County (Shearin, J.) and the Court of Special Appeals ¹ concluded that an educational negligence action could not be maintained. We agree with this determination and will affirm that portion of the judgment, but will reverse with respect to petitioners' allegations concerning the commission of an intentional tort by certain individual employees of the board.

As this case is before us on appeal from an order sustaining a demurrer without leave to amend, in accord with familiar principles, we take as true all well pleaded material facts as well as all inferences reasonably based upon them. ² The Hunters filed this six count declaration on behalf of their child, Ross, naming as defendants the Montgomery County School Board as a corporate body, the principal of Hungerford Elementary School where young Hunter received his primary education, a board employee who engaged in diagnostic testing of the student in second grade, and the boy's sixth grade teacher at Hungerford. The action was instituted in October, 1977, shortly after Ross' sixteenth birthday. As best we can gather from the declaration, the parents (petitioners here) complain that the school system negligently evaluated the child's learning abilities and caused him to repeat first grade materials while being physically placed in the second grade. It is alleged that this misplacement, which continued at least through grade school, generally caused the student to feel "embarrassment," to develop "learning deficiencies," and to experience "depletion of ego strength." The petitioners further claim that the individual educators, acting intentionally and maliciously, furnished false information to them concerning the student's learning disability, altered school records to cover up their actions, and demeaned the child.

It is clear, however, that the gravamen of petitioners' claim in this case sounds in negligence, asserting damages for the alleged failure of the school system to properly educate young Hunter, and we first focus our attention on this aspect of it. In so doing, we note that these so-called "educational malpractice" claims have been unanimously rejected by those few jurisdictions considering the topic. See D. S. W. v. Fairbanks No. Star Bor. Sch. Dist., 628 P.2d 554 (Alaska 1981); Smith v. Alameda Cty. Soc. Serv. Agency, 90 Cal.App.3d 929, 153 Cal.Rptr. 712 (1979); Peter W. v. San Francisco Unified School District, 60 Cal.App.3d 814, 131 Cal.Rptr. 854 (1976); Hoffman v. Board of Ed. of City of N. Y., 49 N.Y.2d 121, 424 N.Y.S.2d 376, 400 N.E.2d 317 (1979); Donohue v. Copiague Union Free School Dist., 47 N.Y.2d 440, 418 N.Y.S.2d 375, 391 N.E.2d 1352 (1979). These decisions generally hold that a cause of action seeking damages for acts of negligence in the educational process is precluded by considerations of public policy, among them being the absence of a workable rule of care against which the defendant's conduct may be measured, the inherent uncertainty in determining the cause and nature of any damages, and the extreme burden which would be imposed on the already strained resources of the public school system to say nothing of those of the judiciary. Thus, in Peter W., supra, where a high school graduate sought recovery in tort for a claimed inadequate education, the California court, viewing the problem as whether an actionable duty of care existed, noted that the "wrongful conduct and injuries allegedly involved in educational malfeasance" were neither comprehensible nor assessable within the judicial framework and explained as follows:

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, is 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. (60 Cal.App.3d at 824-25, 131 Cal.Rptr. at 860-61 (citations omitted).)

Although the just-articulated policy considerations alone sufficed to negate a legal duty of care in Peter W., the court aptly identified additional, practical consequences of imposing such a duty upon the persons and agencies who administer our public educational system:

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 litigations, 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. (60 Cal.App.3d at 825, 131 Cal.Rptr. at 861 (citation omitted).)

In Donohue v. Copiague Union Free School Dist., supra, the New York Court of Appeals addressed the identical proposition as that presented in Peter W., but viewed the issue as presenting solely a question of public policy:

The fact that a complaint alleging "educational malpractice" might on the pleadings state a cause of action within traditional notions of tort law does not, however, require that it be sustained. The heart of the matter is whether, assuming that such a cause of action may be stated, the courts should, as a matter of public policy, entertain such claims. We believe they should not. (418 N.Y.S.2d at 377, 391 N.E.2d at 1354.)

The New York court concluded that the action should not be permitted because to do so would "constitute blatant interference with the responsibility for the administration of the public school system lodged by (State) Constitution and statute in school administrative agencies." 418 N.Y.S.2d at 378, 391 N.E.2d at 1354.

Two subsequent cases, presenting somewhat more appealing circumstances, provided the respective New York and California courts the opportunity to revisit and strengthen the Donohue and Peter W. decisions. In Hoffman v. Board of Ed. of City of N. Y., 49 N.Y.2d 121, 424 N.Y.S.2d 376, 400 N.E.2d 317 (1979), the plaintiff, who was of normal intelligence, was negligently placed in special classes for the mentally retarded where he remained for over ten years. The New York Court of Appeals reversed the Appellate Division, which had allowed recovery, and declared that "(t)he policy considerations which prompted our decision in Donohue apply with equal force to 'educational malpractice' actions based upon allegations of educational misfeasance and nonfeasance." 424 N.Y.S.2d at 379, 400 N.E.2d at 320. ³ Likewise, in Smith v. Alameda Cty. Soc. Serv. Agency, 90 Cal.App.3d 929, 153 Cal.Rptr. 712 (1979), the plaintiff alleged that the school district negligently placed him in classes for the mentally handicapped under circumstances where the district either knew of should have known that he was not retarded. Declaring that the duty sought to be imposed in Smith was basically "indistinguishable from the one argued for in Peter W.," the court held that no cause of action was stated against the school district. 153 Cal.Rptr. at 719. See also D. S. W. v. Fairbanks No. Star Bor. Sch. Dist., 628 P.2d 554 (Alaska 1981) (following the California and New York decisions, the court held that there exists no cause of action for negligent failure to diagnose...