Saez v. City of Springfield , 387 F. App'x 6 ( 2010 )

Not for Publication in West's Federal Reporter
United States Court of Appeals
For the First Circuit
No. 09-2134
ANA SAEZ, ET AL.,
Plaintiffs, Appellants,
v.
CITY OF SPRINGFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS, ET AL.,
Defendants, Appellees.
APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS
[Hon. Kenneth P. Neiman, U.S. Magistrate Judge]
Before
Boudin, Circuit Judge,
Souter, Associate Justice,* and Howard, Circuit Judge.
Bryan K. Clauson for appellants.
Edward M. Pikula, City Solicitor, City of Springfield Law
Department, with whom John T. Liebel, Chief of Litigation, was on
brief, for appellees.
July 22, 2010
*
The Hon. David H. Souter, Associate Justice (Ret.) of the
Supreme Court of the United States, sitting by designation.
SOUTER, Associate Justice. The named plaintiffs-
appellants are mothers of teenagers who were not physically
restrained by school officials of the defendant-appellee city from
leaving their schools during instructional hours. The defendant-
appellee Martha Dodge1 had the job of directing the school system
in complying with relevant law. The mothers brought action under
state law (not before us) as well as 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and § 1988
seeking monetary and injunctive relief for violating Fourteenth
Amendment due process: the mothers’ right to preserve family
integrity and the children’s right to enjoy freedom from abuse and
neglect. The defendants responded to the legal issues raised by
moving to dismiss on the ground that the complaint stated no
federal claim on which relief could be granted, see Fed. R. Civ. P.
12(b)(6), and explained their policy of permissiveness by referring
to a State education regulation limiting use of lawful physical
restraint to instances in which children’s unfettered behavior
would raise a risk of “assault or imminent, serious, physical harm”
to themselves or others, see 603 Code Mass. Regs. § 46.04 (2);
absent such danger, the prevention of truancy would not be worth
the burden of defending the liability claims that would doubtless
eventuate.
1
The surname is actually Von Merring; the case caption was
never corrected.
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As constitutional claims, those stated here do not rise
to a substantial level, and the magistrate judge granted the
motions to dismiss. But he also recognized the frustration the
mothers quite naturally experienced when the schools’ refusal to
confine children to school premises during school hours effectively
converted the State’s compulsory attendance law into the children’s
option to wander off into trouble that the parents could not
effectively prevent. He therefore went on to suggest that the
mothers consider the possibility of relief from the general
regulation through Individual Educational Plans for their children
as special education students. In the meantime, appellant Ruiz has
dropped her claim for injunctive relief because her son is beyond
the age of compulsory education.
In any event, the appeals are without merit for reasons
well explained in the magistrate judge’s carefully prepared order.
The mothers’ claims that inadequate supervision in schools
infringes their rights to maintain the integrity of their families
are said to rest principally on Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390(1923), and Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925),
cases that held it to be beyond the power of states to limit a
parent’s choice to provide foreign language instruction in
elementary schools or to resort to private education. But these
cases recognized a parent’s liberty to be free from state
interference with certain education choices, not a right to require
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state or local government to run public schools in a way a parent
might think they ought to be administered. Hence the rule in this
circuit, that any actionable interference with family integrity
must be “directly aimed at the parent-child relationship.”
Manarite v. Springfield, 957 F.2d 953, 960 (1st Cir. 1992).
As for the claimed violation of the children’s right to
be free from abuse and neglect, the Supreme Court’s discussion in
DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, 489
U.S. 189, 199-200 (1989), is on point: “[W]hen the State takes a
person into its custody and holds him there against his will, the
Constitution imposes upon it a corresponding duty to assume some
responsibility for his safety and general well-being” (citing
Youngberg v. Romeo, 457 U.S. 307, 317 (1982)). The situation of
the children in this case is not even close to facts that would
thus raise a state obligation. There is neither restraint of the
child (that indeed is the very complaint), nor any practice or
circumstance rendering the child unable to care for himself, nor
failure to provide basic human needs of food, clothing, shelter,
medical care or reasonable safety. As the Court later observed in
Vernonia School District 47J v. Acton, 515 U.S. 646, 655 (1995),
“we do not, of course, suggest that public schools as a general
matter have such a degree of control over children as to give rise
to a constitutional ‘duty to protect’” (citing DeShaney, 489 U.S.
at 200). Whatever the scope of a school’s responsibility towards
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its students, then, there is no apparent constitutional obligation
to impose physical restraint upon teenagers not at immediate risk
of harm to themselves or others.
Because the complaint was correctly dismissed, there is
no reason to consider the subsidiary issues of qualified immunity
and standards for injunctive relief.
Affirmed.
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