Doss v. Hayward Unified School District

Background

Stephanie Doss brought the action on behalf of her son, J.D., a student at Mt. Eden High School. J.D. alleged that his math teacher, Gary Cao, accused him of cheating after J.D. used a method learned from a tutor on an exam. Cao allegedly withdrew a recommendation for J.D.’s application to Moreau Catholic High School and told Moreau that J.D. had cheated and plagiarized. Moreau then rescinded J.D.’s admission offer. J.D. alleged that the school district did not resolve his complaints and that the defendants’ conduct harmed his academic and professional prospects and mental well-being.

Claims and motion

The amended complaint asserted four categories of claims:

The defendants moved to dismiss the amended complaint for failure to state a claim under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6). The court accepted the complaint’s factual allegations as true for purposes of the motion but required enough facts to make the claims legally plausible.

Federal due-process claims

The court dismissed the Fifth Amendment claims because the Fifth Amendment’s due-process provision applies only to the federal government, while the defendants were not federal government actors.

The court also dismissed the Fourteenth Amendment claims. A procedural due-process claim requires a protected liberty or property interest, a deprivation by the government, and inadequate process.

As to the alleged property interest, the court held that the complaint did not adequately allege a property right in admission to or attendance at a private school. The court explained that a constitutional right to choose private schooling does not create a property interest in admission to a particular private school. The court further concluded that, even assuming such an interest existed, the complaint did not adequately allege that Moreau’s revocation of admission was state action. The complaint alleged that Cao made damaging statements and Moreau reacted, but it did not allege facts showing that Moreau performed an exclusively governmental function, acted jointly with the defendants, was compelled or coerced by the government, or had a sufficiently close connection with the government.

The court rejected the alleged privacy interest in information about the cheating accusation. It concluded that an accusation of cheating on a math test was not comparable to the highly intimate personal information protected by the constitutional right to privacy. Because J.D. alleged that the accusation was false, the court analyzed the claim as involving reputational harm. Under the “stigma-plus” test, a plaintiff must allege both public disclosure of a contested stigmatizing statement by the government and the denial of a separate, more tangible interest or alteration of a state-law right or status. The court found that the complaint did not allege the required government deprivation in addition to reputational harm.

At the hearing, plaintiff argued for the first time that disclosure of the cheating allegations violated the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. The court noted that the amended complaint did not plead a claim under that statute, so the alleged violation could not serve as the basis for a claim in the amended complaint.

State-law claims

After dismissing the federal claims, the court declined to exercise supplemental jurisdiction—the federal court’s authority to hear related state-law claims—over the negligence and tortious-interference claims. The court therefore declined to rule on the defendants’ motion as to those state-law causes of action.

Disposition

The court granted the motion to dismiss with leave to amend. It dismissed the first and second causes of action without prejudice and ordered plaintiff to file a second amended complaint by October 10, 2022. The court stated that failure to do so would result in dismissal of the complaint with prejudice. The order did not rule on the state-law causes of action.