BROOKINGS – The Brookings School Board approved on Monday a confidential settlement with a former student who sued the district for depriving her of proper due process rights.
The dollar amount for the settlement is confidential, but it was approved by four of the board members, with school board member Roger DeGroot abstaining.
The plaintiff in the case is only identified as E.S. in court documents, along with her parents. Brookings School District then-superintendent Roger DeGroot and Brookings High School Principal Paul von Fischer are listed as the defendants.
At issue in the case is the process by which E.S. was withheld from attending the high school and, later, alternative school, with no written notices provided to E.S. or her parents, and whether the district provided her with adequate opportunities to continue her education. They also argued that the defendants failed to provide the plaintiffs a due process hearing to appeal their decisions.
Brookings School District Superintendent Klint Willert provided this statement Tuesday regarding the settlement: “On Jan. 14, 2019, the Brookings School Board approved to the terms of a mediated settlement in Federal Court. The confidential nature of the settlement precludes the district or its officials from commenting further on the specific details related to the settlement. In approving the settlement, the case, dating back to actions in 2013, has been dismissed by the Federal Court. The Brookings School Board and the Brookings School District (are) pleased to report that this matter is resolved without further litigation.”
The events related to the lawsuit date back to February 2013, when the student, an eighth-grader who lived with her father in Brookings, was suspended for 10 days for threatening and harassing a teacher. After that, the student moved in with her mother in Sioux Falls, where she then attended school for the remainder of the school year.
E.S. then moved back to Brookings to attend high school at the start of the 2013-2014 school year. About two days into the school year, a school resource officer reported seeing her in the high school to school administrators. Von Fischer told her that she may not attend the high school and contacted her father to have her brought home, according to the complaint.
The complaint says that the defendants provided no written notice of the removal and no notice of intent to suspend E.S. under South Dakota laws.
About a week later, school authorities told the father that E.S. may begin attending the district’s alternative school, which she began attending in September 2013.
But on Oct. 31, 2013, a teacher at the alternative school interpreted comments made by E.S. as a threat, reporting that to school authorities, the complaint says. Von Fischer contacted the father again and told him that E.S. may not return to the alternative school.
Court documents again alleged that the student’s father and mother were not provided written notice of this removal or a long-term suspension or that she had a right to any kind of hearing to contest her removal.
The civil complaint says E.S. was prohibited from attending BHS or the alternative school for the remainder of the 2013-2014 school year. She was further barred from BHS and the alternative school at the start of the 2014-2015 school year.
She had access to online classes and a tutor provided by the district from January 2014 to January 2015.
E.S. filed a student grievance on Aug. 24, 2014, alleging that she had “been unfairly held out of school for nearly a year,” according to court documents. She requested to be heard by the Brookings School Board or an impartial hearing officer. The district responded by informing her that she had filed the grievance at the wrong level, and that it was appropriate for the high school rather than the district to hear this. E.S. and her parents declined meeting with von Fischer given that he’d repeatedly told them E.S. may not return to the high school or alternative school, according to the complaint.
The school district later found that E.S. was eligible for special education services, and she began receiving them on Jan. 15, 2015, in the form of a residential program at Volunteers of America in Sioux Falls.
When she finished the program on April 15, 2015, she started attending BHS for half days, with home instruction half days for the remainder of the 2014-2015 school year. She then chose to move to Sioux Falls to live with her mother and graduated from high school in 2017.
Judge Karen Schreier last spring ruled that the Brookings School District had deprived E.S. of her due process rights protected by the 14th Amendment, during a six-week absence from school when she was only allowed to take an online geography class while barred from school property.
Shreier said the district failed to make its grievance policy available and failed to follow its own written policies on long-term suspensions, which require a written report to the school board and a student’s parents, according to a Sioux Falls Argus Leader report.
Schreier’s ruling last May did not determine whether the district provided E.S. with an education inferior to what she would have received had she been in school attending classes.
Contact Eric Sandbulte at esandbulte@brookingsregister.com.
