Coronado v. Valleyview Pub. Sch. Dist.365-U, No. 08-1850 (7th Cir. Aug. 12, 2008)
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit (IL, IN, WI) has ruled that a student facing a two-semester expulsion was not entitled to more due process rights than notice of the charges against him, notice of date and time of the hearing, and a full opportunity to be heard. Roger Coronado, Jr., a student at Bollingbrook High School (BHS), was suspended and later expelled for participating in a lunchroom confrontation between two rival street gangs. The confrontation involved no physical violence, consisting merely of a verbal exchange and flashing gang signals. Roger was notified of the date and time of the expulsion hearing and charged with violating BHS’s “Subversive Organizations” regulation. However, at the time of the hearing Roger was informed that he also was being charged with violating BHS’s “Fighting/Mob Action” regulation. He was provided with the opportunity to present evidence and testimony on his behalf, but was denied the opportunity to cross-examine witnesses. In addition, no transcript of the hearing proceedings was kept, only the hearing officer’s written summary, and a Spanish-language interpreter was not provided for Roger’s parents. Valleyview Pub. Sch. Dist.365-U’s (VPSD) school board adopted the hearing officer’s recommendation and suspended Roger for two semesters.
Roger sued VPSD and several BHS officials in federal court, alleging that VPSD’s failure to provide a Spanish language interpreter, allow Roger to cross-examine witnesses, or create a contemporaneous record of the hearing violated his Fourteenth Amendment right to procedural due process. The district court denied Roger’s motion for a preliminary injunction blocking the expulsion, concluding that he had failed to demonstrate a reasonable likelihood of success on the merits of his lawsuit and that the proposed injunction would be contrary to the public interest. The court found VPSD had satisfied the requirements of due process by providing Roger with “notice of the charges against him, notice of the time of the hearing, and a full opportunity to be heard.” Moreover, it is in the public interest that school officials have the authority to punish conduct like Roger’s in order to maintain a safe school environment, and such authority would be compromised and threaten student safety if VPSD were ordered to readmit Roger.
In a per curiam opinion (i.e., one issued by the court as a whole without any judge taking authorship), the Seventh Circuit affirmed. The appeals court rejected Roger’s argument that he was entitled was entitled to far more due process than he had received given the severity of the punishment. The due process Roger was afforded was in keeping with the standards established by the U.S. Supreme Court in Goss v. Lopez, 419 U.S. 565 (1975), the court determined. While acknowledging that Goss had dealt only with a short-term suspension, reserving for another day the question of whether longer suspensions or expulsions might require more formal procedures, the Seventh Circuit read its own earlier decision in Remer v. Burlington Area School District, 286 F.3d 1007, 1010-11 (7th Cir. 2002), as standing for the proposition that expulsion “does not require a more elaborate hearing in order to comport with due process so long as the student receives the ‘fundamentally fair procedures’ set out in Goss.” Conceding that the Third, Sixth, and Tenth Circuits have employed a balancing test in the expulsion context to determine if any process is required beyond that in Goss, the Seventh Circuit found that none of those courts has required any of the accommodations that Roger asserted were required in this case. Noting that Roger had failed to ask for the opportunity to cross-examine or ask for a verbatim record of hearing at the time it was conducted, the court found that he failed to present any federal authority to support his position that those processes were required. Nor could the court identify any authority supporting his argument for that an interpreter was required. The court went on to reject as “nebulous” a variety of arguments Roger raised asserting that the district court had erred in disposing of his motion.
Coronado v. Valleyview Pub. Sch. Dist. 365-U, No. 08-1850 (7th Cir. Aug. 12, 2008)