Monroe v. Sarasota County School Bd.

• Decision Date: 10 December 1999
• Docket Number: No. 98-04049.,98-04049.
• Citation: 746 So.2d 530
• Parties: Ronald L. MONROE, Appellant, v. SARASOTA COUNTY SCHOOL BOARD, Appellee.
• Court: Florida District Court of Appeals

746 So.2d 530

Ronald L. MONROE, Appellant, v. SARASOTA COUNTY SCHOOL BOARD, Appellee.

No. 98-04049.

District Court of Appeal of Florida, Second District.

December 10, 1999.

Michael R. Karp of Karp & Karp, P.A., Sarasota, for Appellant.

Arthur S. Hardy of Matthews, Hutton & Eastmoore, Sarasota, for Appellee. ALTENBERND, Judge.

Ronald Monroe appeals the dismissal of his complaint against the Sarasota County School Board ("School Board"). The trial court dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice for failure to state a claim for relief. Notwithstanding the supreme court's recent decision in Moransais v. Heathman, 24 Fla. L. Weekly S308, 744 So.2d 973 (Fla. 1999), we affirm the dismissal.

In a nutshell, Mr. Monroe seeks monetary damages from the School Board because, for two months in 1995, the School Board's administrators negligently omitted his name from a list of eligible potential employees. Although the School Board eventually hired Mr. Monroe, he claims that he lost significant salary due to the negligence of the school administrators. We conclude that, even if these school administrators are licensed professionals, no duty exists within the law of negligence requiring them to protect Mr. Monroe from purely economic losses arising from delayed or denied employment with the School Board. Mr. Monroe has no professional/client relationship with these administrators. Moransais merely authorizes a client of a professional corporation to sue a specific professional employee of the corporation for economic damages arising from the employee's breach of his or her professional standard of care.

Despite dicta in Moransais that suggests a cause of action in negligence can be alleged without allegations of bodily injury or property damage,¹ we continue to hold, as a general rule, that bodily injury or property damage is an essential element of a cause of action in negligence. We will expand the common law tort of negligence, waiving that essential element only under extraordinary circumstances which clearly justify judicial interference to protect a plaintiff's economic expectations. This case does not require that a court expand the duties owed in negligence by professional personnel administrators to protect a job applicant's interest in employment with the administrator's employer.

I. THE FACTS AND THE PROCEEDINGS IN THE TRIAL COURT

According to his first amended complaint, Mr. Monroe was previously employed as a teacher by the Sarasota County School Board for a period ending in August 1993. Because of his experience and tenure, he had achieved an employment status described as "step fifteen, masters forty-five" before he left this employment.

On August 11, 1995, Mr. Monroe allegedly had a conversation with an administrator at Laurel Middle School concerning his desire to return to work for the School Board as a teacher of science and language arts. In order to qualify for employment, he completed an employment application and was interviewed by two administrators on August 15. Based on this interview, the School Board classified Mr. Monroe as a "3" based upon a possible range of 1 to 5, and thus "acceptable" for employment. As a result, he was eligible to have his name placed in the "teacher candidate pool."

Mr. Monroe's name should have been included on the list of approved applicants beginning no later than August 26, 1995. Unfortunately, apparently due to an error by one of the administrators, his name was not added to the list. Mr. Monroe did not know his name had been left off the list. In fact, when he received a mailing from the School Board addressed to "Donald Roe" on August 22, he called the personnel office to correct the error in his name and was assured by someone that his name was on the list.

From August 16 to October 12, 1995, Mr. Monroe checked the postings of available School Board jobs on a regular basis and submitted approximately twenty job applications for specific positions. In early September, a new language arts position opened at Riverview High School. Mr. Monroe interviewed for the position. When the administrators at that high school attempted to hire him, they were told initially that his name was not on the hiring list. The School Board then determined that the hiring list for the period between September 11 and September 15 contained an incorrect list of applicants. Apparently, the error omitting Mr. Monroe from the list was corrected by October 10, and he received another offer from Riverview High School. However, he was precluded from accepting this position due to "alleged certification problems."

Ultimately, Mr. Monroe did obtain a job with the School Board a year later and is still employed by the School Board. He was hired in August 1996 with a status of "step six." Mr. Monroe alleges that between August 26 and September 19, 1995, the School Board's contract with the teachers' union would have allowed him to be hired at his former, higher status level. Thus, in his lawsuit, he first claims that, had his name not been omitted from the list between August 26 and September 19, he would have obtained a job in 1995 at a higher salary level. In the alternative, he claims he would have obtained a job in 1995 rather than 1996. He seeks monetary damages to compensate him for these salary losses.

Mr. Monroe's first complaint alleged both negligence and implied contract. The School Board attacked the complaint, arguing that an economic loss doctrine barred the negligence theory and that sovereign immunity barred the implied contract theory. The trial court granted a motion for judgment on the pleadings as to the theory of implied contract, relying on County of Brevard v. Miorelli Engineering, Inc., 703 So.2d 1049 (Fla.1997) (holding that sovereign immunity is not waived for actions based upon implied contract). Mr. Monroe does not challenge that ruling on appeal.

After the trial court granted the School Board's motion for judgment on the pleadings, Mr. Monroe filed his first amended complaint alleging only a negligence theory. He claimed the administrators negligently processed his employment application. The trial court dismissed this amended complaint with prejudice because it contained no allegations of bodily injury or property damage and did not otherwise allege actionable damages. Mr. Monroe appealed that dismissal.

II. MORANSAIS DOES NOT ELIMINATE BODILY INJURY OR PROPERTY DAMAGE AS AN ESSENTIAL ELEMENT WITHIN MOST NEGLIGENCE ACTIONS

Prior to the supreme court's decision in Moransais, there was little question that the negligence count in this complaint failed to state a claim for relief in the Second District because Mr. Monroe had suffered only a loss of salary, unrelated to bodily injury or property damage. See Moransais v. Heathman, 702 So.2d 601 (Fla. 2d DCA 1997)

; Sandarac Ass'n v. W.R. Frizzell Architects, Inc., 609 So.2d 1349 (Fla. 2d DCA 1992). However, in Moransais v. Heathman, 744 So.2d 973 (Fla.1999), the supreme court authorized a claim for professional malpractice seeking purely economic losses against two engineers with whom the plaintiff did not have a direct contract. The engineers were employees of a company the plaintiff had retained to inspect a home that he planned to purchase. The supreme court permitted the plaintiff to bring this lawsuit, notwithstanding the infamous economic loss doctrine. Apparently, the plaintiff in Moransais chose to file a professional negligence claim against the engineers because his contract claim with the engineers' employer contained a limitation of liability clause that might have restricted his recovery of damages from the company. Thus, he sued the professionals with whom he had no direct contract and to whom he had paid no direct consideration.²

The primary question for this appeal is whether Moransais now provides Mr. Monroe with a cause of action in negligence against the School Board. The trial court did not have the benefit of Moransais because the complaint was dismissed prior to the supreme court's decision. Thus, we assume for purposes of this opinion that the administrators who erred in failing to properly process Mr. Monroe's application were professionals because they were licensed teachers whose vocation requires a minimum of a four-year college degree. See Moransais, 744 So.2d at 976

. We further assume that the processing of Mr. Monroe's application fell within their duties as school administrators, and that the School Board would be vicariously liable for their negligence under a theory of respondent superior.³ Nevertheless, we conclude that Mr. Monroe has not alleged a cause of action against the School Board.

We emphasize that this result is not based on any "bar" created by some modern economic loss doctrine that serves as an affirmative defense in negligence cases. See Sandarac Ass'n, 609 So.2d 1349, 1355. Instead, by longstanding precedent, the relationship created when these teachers/administrators assisted Mr. Monroe in the application process does not support the imposition of a general standard of care upon these teachers to protect his economic interests in future potential employment with the School Board. The risk that he might sustain these intangible economic damages is not a type of risk from which the licensed teachers were required, as a matter of traditional common law, to protect Mr. Monroe. Stated in an alternative fashion, the loss of salary was not an "injury" that these teachers were required to guard against under traditional common law negligence.⁴

We recognize that, in Moransais, the supreme court states: "Under Florida's common law a person who is injured by another's negligence may maintain an action against the other person based on that other person's violation of a duty of due care to the injured person." 744 So.2d at 975.⁵ Although this broad statement is an adequate description of black letter law, it does not reflect the difficulties that common law judges have...