Background: Niagara Wheatfield High School (WGRZ). Inset: New York Attorney General Letitia James speaks to the media on Nov. 6, 2023, in New York (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey, File).
A federal appeals court resurrected a lawsuit by New York‘s attorney general against a school district that allegedly failed to protect its students from widespread sexual harassment.
In June 2021, New York Attorney General Letitia James brought a federal complaint for violations of Title IX against the Niagara Wheatfield Central School District (NWCSD) for “repeatedly and egregiously” failing to protect its students by “deliberately and callously ignor[ing] complaints by students of rape, assault, sexual harassment and gender-based bullying[.]”
James said in her complaint that in the preceding few years, there had been over 30 documented incidents of sex discrimination, sexual harassment, sexual assault, or gender-based bullying at NWCSD, and the district failed to create a single written safety plan or take any documented effort to keep students safe.
The complaint detailed the case of “T.G.,” a star cheerleader who was raped by a male student identified in the complaint only as “E.D.” Though the student was arrested, T.D. obtained a restraining order against him, and E.D. ultimately pleaded guilty to rape, school officials allegedly allowed E.D. to repeatedly harass T.D. When T.D. suffered a panic attack, the school principal refused to excuse her absence and said he believed she “had faked the panic attack for attention.” Likewise, the head coach of the cheerleading team told T.G. that “girls get assaulted all the time.”
It also detailed the case of student “C.C.,” who endured years of gender-based bullying, and that of “A.S.,” who was physically attacked during a school pep rally. In both cases, James said the school did nothing to protect the student victims.
U.S. District Judge John Leonard Sinatra, a Donald Trump appointee, dismissed the case on the pleadings on the basis that New York state lacked standing to bring the lawsuit. Sinatra said that James had not shown that the school district’s failure to act had been a sufficiently broad “policy or practice” of discrimination against student victims of gender-based violence and harassment.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed on Tuesday, concluding that the State of New York met its burden of pleading parens patriae standing at this stage of the litigation, and therefore could take on the role of “sovereign and guardian of persons under a legal disability to act for themselves” — in this case, the students — and continue the litigation.
The panel was made up of U.S. Circuit Judges Robert Sack and José Cabranes, both Bill Clinton appointees, and U.S. Circuit Judge Sarah Merriam, a Joe Biden appointee.
Sack penned the 32-page decision for the panel in which he said the district court had wrongly “added its own gloss” to the applicable legal test. Sack said there was no requirement that the school’s inaction needed to “amount to a policy or practice enforced against a target population” in order for the state to have standing as parens patriae. Rather, Sack explained, even a single challenged act could satisfy the legal requirements so long as that act caused “injury to an identifiable group of individual[s]” and “indirect effects of the injury” beyond that group.
The panel said that James’ lawsuit alleged that four students were subjected to their peers’ sexual assault and harassment, gender-based violence, and bullying without intervention from the school, and that dozens of other students with similar complaints were also ignored. The school’s alleged failure to act affected not only the students directly involved, but the entire student body as well as parents, the judges wrote.
The ruling is not a final conclusion; it means only that the case can now move forward.
You can read the ruling here.
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