CHARLESTON — The West Virginia Supreme Court has ruled the Fayette County Board of Education deserved qualified immunity in a lawsuit where a high school student injured his arm.
The Supreme Court agreed with the circuit court's ruling that the respondents were entitled to qualified immunity, according to the Nov. 12 majority opinion.
Justice John Hutchison authored the majority opinion. Justice Margaret Workman dissented and authored her own opinion.
Austin Joseph Goodwin was a junior at Oak Hill High School in 2014 when he left the high school building without authorization and went with Katherine Deel to the soccer field, where they met up with Zach McCarthy and Levi Blevins, the opinion states.
Goodwin watched McCarthy and Blevins wrestle and then decided to wrestle with McCarthy and, in doing so, he severely injured his arm, which ended up causing him to incur approximately $200,000 in medical expenses.
Goodwin filed the lawsuit against the school board in 2016, alleging that it was negligent in allowing students to leave school premises and "engage in horseplay and roughhousing" unsupervised. Summary judgment was awarded in January 2018 to the school board and the case was dismissed. Goodwin then appealed.
"In light of the unique facts of this case, we need not go into a detailed analysis of the duty to supervise public school students," Hutchison wrote. "This is because we agree with the circuit court that, under the narrow facts of this case, the Respondents did not owe a duty of supervision to the Petitioner once he left the school building without authorization."
Insofar as the petitioner chose to skip a class and leave the school without authorization, the duty to supervise the petitioner terminated pursuant to W.Va. Code § 18A-5-1(g)(1) the moment he left the school building, Hutchison wrote.
The Supreme Court affirmed the state court's order awarding summary judgment to the school board.
In her dissenting opinion, Workman wrote that the majority's ruling effectively blankets all local boards of education under any degree of state intervention with absolute immunity from suit.
After summarily declaring the Fayette County school board to be a state actor and therefore entitled to assert qualified immunity, "the majority then makes a sharp left turn (providing no further immunity analysis), and reaches the clearly inaccurate conclusion that local school boards owe no duties to 18-year-old students injured on school property, but outside of the four walls of the school building."
Workman wrote that the majority’s holding encourages local boards of education and their employees to act with complete impunity when under state intervention.
"It further decimates any semblance of duty owed to adult students who happen to turn eighteen before graduating in contravention of clear statutory law," she wrote. "This case should have been reversed and remanded for factual development of the areas of control the State Board exercised over the BOE and a determination as to whether that control rendered the BOE an arm of the State for purposes of these allegations."
West Virginia Supreme Court Case number: 18-0211