High Court Justice Rejects Student’s Bid to Block Removal Over Sexual
Harassment Claim
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan has denied relief to a California high
school student seeking to return to school after his district suspended him
indefinitely under an “emergency removal” provision in Title IX regulations on
sexual harassment.
The San Ramon Valley Unified School District removed the student identified in
court papers as John Doe this past April amid allegations that he had sexually
assaulted a female student on campus.
The district declared that Doe posed “an immediate threat to the physical
health or safety” of another student and thus could be removed from campus
under updated regulations adopted last year, during President Donald Trump’s
administration, for Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which bars
sex discrimination in federally funded schools.
Doe, a 15-year-old freshman this past spring, denies the allegations that he
had inappropriately kissed and groped his ex-girlfriend after their theater
class on a day last April. He says in court papers that he had broken up just
days earlier with the student identified as Jane Roe, via an exchange of text
messages in which Roe purportedly sought to keep the relationship going. Only
after the breakup did the female student make her allegations, Doe contends.
Doe argues that school officials did not have the evidence to support such a
harsh remedy.
The high school principal, who was also the school’s designated Title IX
coordinator, upheld her own emergency removal decision in May and confirmed
that the order would remain in place for the beginning of the 2021-22 school
year. Doe then sought judicial review and a stay of the district’s action in a
California state court. The stay was denied by a Superior Court judge and
state appellate court, and the California Supreme Court declined to take up
the case.
That led to student’s application, in Doe v. California Superior Court (No.
21A28) for a stay to Kagan, the circuit justice for the federal 9th Circuit,
which includes California.
Doe argues that the district lacked the evidentiary support for an emergency
removal, and that his removal from his educational program violates the
requirements set forth in a 1975 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Goss v. Lopez.
In Goss, the court held that students subject to suspensions of 10 days or
less must be given minimal due-process protections, and longer suspensions
have been interpreted to require even greater due process.
“This request for a stay involves the irreparable loss of the benefits and
experiences of high school,” Doe said in his application to Kagan. The filing
says that absent some form of speedy court review, school administrators will
be able impose an emergency removal any time an allegation of sexual
harassment is made, even in the absence of an actual threat to another
student.
Doe notes that the Superior Court judge denied his stay request but set a Jan.
7 date for a hearing on his emergency removal.
“Rather than an indefinite suspension under the guise of emergency removal,
the district can simply have [Doe] avoid contact with Jane Roe and make sure
they are not assigned to the same classes,” the male student says in his
filing.
Doe’s filing also says his case “appears to be one of first impression
challenging a public high school’s emergency removal of a student in reliance”
on the 2020 federal Title IX regulation.
Kagan did not call for a response from the San Ramon Valley district before
denying Doe’s application late on Sept. 3. But in an Aug. 6 filing in the
state trial court, the district said the Title IX regulations give school
officials flexibility to apply terms such as “individualized risk and safety
analysis” and “immediate threat.”
“The district was not required to follow any specific process in the emergency
removal so long as it made an individualized safety and risk analysis,” the
school district argued.
The district also argued that a judicial stay was unwarranted because its
emergency removal order was an interim decision pending a full investigation
of the allegations. Doe was offered the option of enrolling in the district’s
Virtual Academy or another independent study program for this fall.
“[Doe] will not be prejudiced in continuing in virtual instruction during the
pendency of the Title IX investigation pursuant to the emergency removal,” the
school district said in the state court filing.
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