Myles v. West Contra Costa Unified School District

Background

Breana Myles alleged that Michael Day, a fellow student at Pinole Valley High School, sexually assaulted her in December 2021 and attempted to sexually assault her in January 2022. She alleged that she reported the incidents to school health-center staff and principal Kibby Kleiman, and told Kleiman that Day had sexually harassed or assaulted other female students. She also alleged that school personnel knew of earlier reports about Day, allowed him unsupervised access to female students, and failed to take sufficient protective or corrective action.

Myles alleged that she later experienced retaliation, taunting, and bullying by other students, had to change her class schedule, suffered a significant decline in her grades, and needed psychological care. Her complaint asserted federal civil-rights claims, sex-discrimination claims under Title IX and California Education Code section 220, disability-discrimination claims under the Americans with Disabilities Act and section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, and California claims for negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and violations based on the Child Abuse and Neglect Reporting Act. The District and administrators Kleiman and Ryan Kolb moved to dismiss. Bay Area Community Resources, Inc. had answered the complaint.

Rulings on the District’s Motion

The court denied the District’s motion to dismiss the Title IX and California Education Code section 220 sex-discrimination claims. At the pleading stage, the court found that Myles sufficiently alleged that the District controlled the school setting and Day, that the alleged sexual assault, harassment, retaliation, and bullying were severe enough to undermine her educational experience, and that she suffered concrete negative educational effects. The court also found plausible allegations that District personnel had actual knowledge of earlier sexual harassment and assaults involving Day and that the District’s response may have been deliberately indifferent—meaning clearly unreasonable in light of known circumstances—before and after Myles’s incidents.

The court denied the District’s motion to dismiss the negligence claim on immunity grounds. It found that school personnel have a duty to supervise students during school hours and that Myles’s allegations concerned operational or ministerial acts—actions implementing policy—rather than protected high-level policy decisions. The court stated that the District could raise discretionary-act immunity again after discovery.

The court granted the District’s motion to dismiss the Americans with Disabilities Act claim without leave to amend. It granted the motion to dismiss the Rehabilitation Act claim with leave to amend because Myles did not plausibly connect the alleged mistreatment to her disability or allege deliberate indifference to disability discrimination. The court also granted the District’s motion to dismiss the intentional-infliction-of-emotional-distress claim without leave to amend. Finally, it granted the motion to dismiss the District’s CANRA-based claim with leave to amend, explaining that CANRA does not itself provide a private right of action and that any amended claim would need to rely on a theory that does provide one.

Rulings on the Administrators’ Motion

Myles sued Kleiman and Kolb personally under 42 U.S.C. section 1983, a statute allowing claims against state actors for violations of federal rights. The court granted their motion to dismiss the separate theory that they violated Title IX through section 1983, without leave to amend, because individuals cannot be sued under Title IX and Title IX could not serve as the basis for this section 1983 theory.

The court granted the motion to dismiss the failure-to-train theory with leave to amend because Myles did not allege enough specific facts about the administrators’ authority and responsibility to train, the training policies, or how inadequate training caused the constitutional harm. The court also granted the motion to dismiss the ratification theory with leave to amend. Although the court found that Day’s conduct itself could not support ratification, it held that Myles had not identified other public employees who committed a constitutional violation or alleged a specific violation that Kleiman or Kolb knowingly failed to prevent.

Because the administrators did not move to dismiss Myles’s section 1983 theory based on the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, that theory moved beyond the pleading stage. The court also granted the administrators’ motion to dismiss the CANRA-based claim with leave to amend.

Other Orders and Disposition

The court denied Kleiman and Kolb’s motion to strike without prejudice as premature. It granted the District’s request for judicial notice of 14 materials, including publicly available District policies and regulations, but not of disputed facts contained in those materials.

Judge Alex G. Tse therefore granted the District’s motion to dismiss in part and denied it in part. He granted the administrators’ motion to dismiss the specified section 1983 and CANRA theories, with the leave-to-amend limits stated above. Any amended complaint was due April 11, 2024.