Court Opinion

ID: 9508354
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-06 21:31:00.036137+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:07:31.529199
License: Public Domain

MR. JUSTICE GULBRANDSON,
dissenting:
I respectfully dissent to that portion of the majority opinion affirming the monetary award of $71,247.00, plus entitlements in the form of fringe benefits.
In my view, the testimony of the plaintiff herself demonstrates that the finding of the Commission that plaintiff had met her burden on mitigation of damages should not be affirmed. The plaintiff testified that, in effect, she applied to no school district outside of Bozeman, even though one of the principals had approached plaintiff about an application, and unrefuted evidence showed there were many teaching vacancies within ten miles of Bozeman during the period in question, and that a high percentage of teachers in those schools lived in Bozeman.
To the plaintiff’s credit, she gave candid reasons for her failure to apply for a teaching position, including the reason that the rural schools paid about $2,000 to $4,000 less than the defendant school district. A most revealing reason given by the plaintiff for her failure to apply was the following:
“The other thing, too, is that definitely through all this, I was probably naive enough to think that all this was going to be resolved fairly quickly, and that within a year or so, [it] would be taken care of and I would be teaching in Bozeman, and, you know everything would be just fine.”
It is my opinion, based on the entire record, that the evidence shows that the plaintiff failed to exercise reasonable diligence in mitigating her damages and therefore the monetary award should be reduced by the amount she could have earned had she exercised reasonable diligence in applying for a teaching position.