Potentially hundreds of families who paid $50,000 per year to send their children to a Santa Rosa private school can't sue the school for allegedly failing to disclose for years that alleged sexual predators had taught at the school in the past, a California state appeals panel has ruled.
On March 21, a three-justice panel of the California First District Court of Appeal sided with private college prep high school Sonoma Academy and agreed a lower court had been right to dismiss a class action fraud and deception lawsuit lodged by parents of current and former students at the school.
In the ruling, the appeals court justices said they did not believe the parents could show they were actually harmed by Sonoma Academy's alleged decision not to tell its roster of current and prospective student families that the school had "employed three people who engaged in sexually abusive or inappropriate behavior with other students" in the past.
The decision was authored by Justice Alison M. Tucher. Justices Carin T. Fujisaki and Victor Rodriguez concurred in the ruling.
"... There is no allegation that the value of the education for which plaintiffs paid was reduced by the alleged improprieties of three of the school's employees toward other students," wrote Tucher in the ruling.
"At most, the complaint's allegations show that the students were at risk of abuse due to the undisclosed presence of abusive faculty and staff, a risk that never materialized for the students whose tuition the named plaintiffs paid.
"These students got the education for which they and their parents had paid. Any injury to them remains at most conjectural and hypothetical."
The decision comes as the latest step in a legal fight begun in 2022, when named plaintiffs David and Jody Suchard filed suit in Sonoma County Superior Court.
That lawsuit had followed the school's release in 2021 of a report prepared for the school's board of trustees by the law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton. The Debevoise report had included findings that Sonoma Academy leadership had known of "numerous acts of sexual misconduct by faculty and staff from 2004 to 2020," but had allegedly not disclosed that information to the families of students enrolled at the school.
According to court documents, these included:
- A soccer coach who "used her position as coach to 'groom'" a female student and "subsequently sexually abused the student multiple times;"
-"A teacher who used his position to abuse two female students sexually;" and
- Another teacher who allegedly "assaulted, sexually abused or harassed numerous young students, for example by selecting favorite female students for extra attention and praise, making sexually charged comments to them, seeking opportunities for private, personal conversations with them, hiring them as babysitters, and driving them alone; by encouraging students to write about sexual topics in class exercises; by assigning readings of sexually explicit texts; by touching students in an inappropriately intimate manner; by abruptly withdrawing attention from favorite students; and by physically assaulting male students under the guise of teaching martial arts classes."
However, according to court documents, while some of those educators were fired, none of those alleged incidents were "ever reported to authorities or disclosed to the school community."
According to court documents, the plaintiffs never asserted their children were ever actually abused, "groomed" or otherwise mistreated by Sonoma Academy staff or teachers.
However, the lawsuit asserted the failures to disclose the alleged abuse of students amounted to violations of California's consumer protection and anti-fraud laws.
They claimed they would never have sent their children to the school if they had known, essentially memaning the school had misled them into spending $50,000 annually in tuition.
The plaintiffs sought to expand the action to include all "parents, family members, guardians, or students who paid tuition from 2003 to 2020" at Sonoma Academy. The school has an enrollment of about 300 students.
In Sonoma County Superior Court, Judge Oscar Pardo tossed the lawsuit, saying the parents had no claim against the school under California law, because neither they nor their children suffered any harm from the school's non-disclosure.
And on appeal, the First District appellate justices agreed with Pardo, also finding the parents couldn't bring a claim under California law against the school.
"... Plaintiffs allege they stand in such a relationship to defendant, creating a duty of disclosure, because they entrusted to the school’s care the children for whom they paid tuition, the plaintiffs were vulnerable because they relied on the school to protect their children, and the school accepted their confidence by undertaking to act on their behalf in exchange for tuition," the justices wrote, rejecting the plaintiffs' fraud claims.
"... Even assuming the youth of any students who contributed to their own tuition ... rendered them vulnerable, that vulnerability does not extend to the parents and other adults who chose to pay an expensive private school’s tuition rather than send their children to another private school or to a public school."
The plaintiffs are represented in the case by attorneys Alexander M. Schack, Natasha N. Serino and Shannon F. Nocon, of Schack Law Group; and Jack W. Weaver and Rachael M. McFarren, of Welty Weaver & Currie.
Sonoma Academy has been represented by attorneys Paul E. Caspari, Ryan E. Abernethy and Brendan J. Begley, of the firm of Weintraub Tobin Chediak Coleman Grodin.