Opinion ID: 4561258
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Defendant Sheryl Bacon

Text: In her complaint, Plaintiff alleges that Bacon received reports that Duvall had slammed multiple students into tables and yanked students out of their seats in November 2003; that Duvall had slapped a student in April 2005; that he had pushed a child to the floor and scratched the child’s face in March 2007; and that since 2004, he had slapped students, grabbed students by the neck, dragged students around the room, and squeezed students’ faces. Beyond these specific reports, Plaintiff alleges that in 2010, Bacon received three to four additional reports that Duvall had been overly physical with students. Together, these reports represented approximately ten individual alleged instances of abuse, making them sufficiently consistent and numerous to plausibly allege that Bacon possessed information showing Duvall’s strong likelihood of re-offense. Confronted with this information, Plaintiff alleges, Bacon took no action to report or investigate allegations of abuse. She further complained that Bacon shredded her notes detailing reports against Duvall and actually threatened one individual with termination if she continued to make reports, thereby actively concealing Duvall’s history. These allegations plausibly allege that, knowing about Duvall’s history, Bacon failed to take adequate precautions to address the possibility of future abuse, Roseville, 296 F.3d at 439, and thus approved or acquiesced in this conduct, Bellamy, 729 F.2d at 241. No. 19-1645 Garza v. Lansing Sch. District, et al. Page 17 Defendants argue that Plaintiff’s claims against Bacon are similar to those that this Court dealt within in Doe ex rel. Doe v. City of Roseville and Doe v. Claiborne County, and we should therefore affirm. But as we explained in Howard v. Knox County, In Claiborne County, we explicitly held that three supervisor-defendants carried out their statutory duty to supervise and report acts of misconduct, including by reporting allegations of sexual abuse to the appropriate child-welfare agency, removing the accused teacher from student contact during the pendency of the investigation, supervising later contact with students, and determining that the teacher in question had been “exonerated” of all previous charges. In Doe v. City of Roseville, we found that one of the supervisors filed a report with the childwelfare agency and believed that the abuse might be occurring at home, whereas the other supervisor did not become aware of a teacher’s history of sexual misconduct until after the police launched an investigation. 695 F. App’x at 116 (citations omitted) (citing Claiborne County, 103 F.3d at 513; Roseville, 296 F.3d at 441). Unlike the defendants in Claiborne County and Roseville, Bacon allegedly took no action at all, despite receiving multiple complaints that made her aware of Duvall’s misconduct—a clear failure to adequately respond, as her position required her to do. Moreover, for the purposes of a motion to dismiss, these allegations suffice to suggest that Bacon’s conduct caused C.G.’s injuries. Considering foreseeability, it is clearly foreseeable that if a teacher’s ongoing physical abuse of students is not responded to, that teacher will continue to physically abuse students. Regarding directness, had Bacon reported and investigated the allegations against Duvall, some might have been found substantiated and sufficiently serious to warrant disciplinary action or termination. Alternatively, a response from Bacon might have discouraged Duvall from continuing to use physical force against students. Beyond Duvall’s own decision to abuse students, there is apparently no intervening act in this chain of causation, and the causation is thus sufficiently direct. To be sure, the length of time between Defendant Bacon’s alleged failures and C.G.’s abuse suggests that Defendants may be able to defeat Plaintiff’s allegations in the end. For instance, Defendants may identify an intervening cause that terminated the chain of direct causation between Bacon’s conduct and Duvall’s abuse or that made it impossible for Defendant Bacon to foresee Duvall’s continued abuse. See, e.g., Claiborne County, 103 F.3d at 502, 513 (affirming the dismissal of a supervisory liability claim against a superintendent who participated in a decision to remove an No. 19-1645 Garza v. Lansing Sch. District, et al. Page 18 allegedly abusive teacher from student contact, as the school board subsequently decided to rehire the teacher after the superintendent left his position). But, especially since Defendants have not argued that point, this question is best left to the court on summary judgment or to the ultimate factfinders. Thus, at this stage, Plaintiff’s claim against Bacon stands, and the district court’s dismissal of it is reversed. The partial dissent suggests that Plaintiff’s complaint describes only three specific instances of alleged misconduct that were reported to Bacon. But reading the complaint in the light most favorable to Plaintiff and making all reasonable inferences in her favor, as we must, Cahoo, 912 F.3d at 897, it alleges far more than that. The reports it contends that Bacon received in November 2003, April 2005, and March 2007 together identified instances in which Duvall yanked students out of their seats, force-fed students, slammed multiple students into tables, slapped a student, and pushed a student to the floor to force candy out of his mouth. (First Am. Compl., R. 15 at Page ID ##188–89.) Construing the complaint in Plaintiff’s favor, these each constitute separate instances of abuse, even if they were reported together. Moreover, the complaint additionally alleges that beginning in 2004, a paraprofessional “timely reported to Bacon” instances of abuse including “slapping and squeezing students[,] grabbing students by the neck, dragging students around the room, [and] squeezing students’ faces.” (Id. at #191.) Again, viewed in Plaintiff’s favor, this constitutes several more instances of abuse. Finally, the complaint says that in early 2010, “another teacher reported to Principal Bacon on three to four occasions that Duvall was overly physical with students.” (Id. at #189.) While this allegation may be insufficiently specific on its own, it also bolsters Plaintiff’s allegations against Duvall. Altogether, viewed in the light most favorable to Plaintiff, we think these allegations detail sufficiently specific and sufficiently numerous instances of Duvall’s abuse to put Bacon on notice of the likelihood that Duvall would abuse students in the future. To be sure, there are some overlapping details in the reports the complaint discusses, suggesting that they may in fact describe the same instances of misconduct. However, assuming as much at this stage would run counter to our duty to view the facts alleged in the light most favorable to Plaintiff and to make all reasonable inferences in her favor. No. 19-1645 Garza v. Lansing Sch. District, et al. Page 19 The partial dissent goes on to consider documents in the record which it suggests “do not always support . . . that these instances were reported to Bacon.” But the documents that it discusses were not before the district court at the time that it considered Bacon’s motion to dismiss, and so we cannot consider them in reviewing that dismissal. While those documents may be considered at the motion for summary judgment or trial phases, they do not provide reason to affirm the district court’s dismissal.