Belcourt v. Fort Totten Public School District No. 30

454 N.W.2d 703, 1990 N.D. LEXIS 91, 1990 WL 42613
CourtNorth Dakota Supreme Court
DecidedApril 12, 1990
DocketCiv. 890122
StatusPublished
Cited by9 cases

This text of 454 N.W.2d 703 (Belcourt v. Fort Totten Public School District No. 30) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering North Dakota Supreme Court primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Belcourt v. Fort Totten Public School District No. 30, 454 N.W.2d 703, 1990 N.D. LEXIS 91, 1990 WL 42613 (N.D. 1990).

Opinions

MESCHKE, Justice.

Bonnie Belcourt, Newton Dick, and Stanley Kruger appealed from summary judgments dismissing their claims against Fort Totten Public School District No. 30 [Board] for wrongful nonrenewal of their teaching contracts. We affirm.

Belcourt, Dick, and Kruger were employed by the Board during the 1985-86 school year. Dick and Kruger had been employed by the Board as junior and senior high school mathematics teachers since the 1981-82 school year. Belcourt had been employed by the Board as a learning disabilities tutor-in-training since the 1984-85 school year. During spring 1986, the Board voted to not renew the teaching contracts of Dick and Kruger because of “[cjause due to incompetence.” Belcourt’s contract was not renewed because of “[l]ack of funds.”

Belcourt, Dick, Kruger, and two other teachers sued the Board, seeking damages for violation of civil rights, libel and slander, and wrongful nonrenewal. By a third-party action, the Board sought indemnity from its former superintendent, Leonard Bear King. The Board prevailed in its third-party action against Bear King. The Board then moved for partial summary judgments dismissing the wrongful nonre-newal claims of Belcourt, Dick, and Kruger. The trial court determined that the Board had not abused its discretion in the nonrenewal decisions and granted summary judgments. The remaining claims were eventually settled and a final judgment was entered dismissing all claims of the plaintiffs subject only to the rights of Bel-court, Dick, and Kruger to appeal the partial summary judgments dismissing their wrongful nonrenewal claims. This appeal followed.

The teachers’ major argument on appeal was that the trial court used an incorrect standard in reviewing the Board’s nonrenewal of their teaching contracts.

In Dobervich v. Central Cass Public School District, 302 N.W.2d 745, 751-752 (N.D.1981), we stated the standard for judi[705]*705cial review of a school board’s decisions to nonrenew teachers’ contracts:

Because there is no statute providing for an appeal from a decision of the board to not renew a teacher’s contract nor any statutory standard by which the evidence submitted at the nonrenewal hearing is to be measured, and because the trial court may not substitute its judgment for that of the board, we conclude that, except for procedural matters, the trial court’s review of the reasons given for nonrenewal of the teacher’s contract and the evidence submitted at the hearing pertaining thereto is limited to: (1) determining whether or not the reasons given are in accordance with the statutory provisions, i.e., they are not frivolous or arbitrary but, rather, are related to the ability, competence, or qualifications of the teacher as a teacher, or the necessities of the district such as lack of funds calling for a reduction in teaching staff; and (2) determining — if those reasons are legally sufficient — whether or not under the facts of the case the school board has abused its discretion in reaching the non-renewal decision. Such a review will, in our estimation, permit the teacher his day in court and, at the same time, will not unduly involve the courts in the administration of the school system. [Footnotes omitted].

The teachers did not propose that procedural requirements were not met or that “incompetence” and “lack of funds” were legally insufficient reasons for nonrenewal. Rather, they argued that the trial court erred in applying the abuse-of-discretion standard from Dobervich because 1983 legislative amendments to NDCC 15-47-38(5)1 now require the court to use a preponderance-of-the-evidence standard “as is the case in other administrative decisions.” We disagree.

The 1983 amendment to NDCC 15-47-38(5) replaced the language, “The school [706]*706board shall give an explanation and shall discuss and confirm at the meeting its reasons for the contemplated nonrenewal of the contract,” with the following:

The administrator shall substantiate the reasons with written or oral evidence presented at the meeting. All witnesses are subject to questioning for the purposes of clarification. At the meeting, the board shall discuss the reasons and determine whether or not the administrator has, in fact, substantiated the reasons. If the board finds that the reasons have not been substantiated, the nonre-newal proceedings will be dismissed.

1983 N.D.Sess.Laws Ch. 232, § 1. The school board function was somewhat altered.

The amendment now requires the school administrator to substantiate the reasons with evidence and the school board to discuss and determine whether the administrator has substantiated the reasons. However, it does not naturally flow from the Legislature’s redefinition of the duties of the board that the Legislature designated a different standard of judicial review. A comparison of the bill introduced in the 1983 legislative session with the eventual enactment contradicts the suggestion that the Legislature intended an expanded role for the judiciary in teacher nonrenewal proceedings. As introduced, the bill proposed major and extensive revisions to the teacher nonrenewal law, including extension of a teacher’s right to appeal a school board nonrenewal decision to the district court and to have the case “triable to a jury” unless a jury was waived. These proposed revisions were not enacted.

The Legislature is capable of unequivocally enacting its intention that the preponderance-of-the-evidence standard apply to proceedings involving teachers. For example, it has specifically incorporated parts of the Administrative Agencies Practices Act, NDCC 28-32, including the preponderance-of-the-evidence standard at NDCC 28-32-19, into the law on discharging teachers. See NDCC 15-47-38(2). It has not done so for nonrenewal of teachers. We decline to hold that the 1983 amendment to NDCC 15-47-38(5) implicitly incorporated the preponderance-of-the-evidence standard which is generally used for review of administrative agency decisions. We conclude that the 1983 amendment did not overrule Do-bervich and that the abuse-of-discretion standard remains applicable to review of nonrenewal of teachers’ contracts.

The teachers asserted that, for several reasons, genuine issues of material fact existed which made summary judgment inappropriate. First, they argued that the trial court did not have a complete record of the nonrenewal meetings before the Board. With its motion for summary judgment, the Board submitted the exhibits, the Board minutes, and the transcripts prepared from tape recordings of all three meetings. The transcript from the Dick hearing contained several blank spaces representing inaudible testimony. The transcript of the Kruger hearing also contained blank spaces and ended before the hearing did. The Belcourt hearing was set forth in narrative form and was presumably prepared by the Board’s secretary. The teachers did not contend that the materials submitted by the Board with the summary judgment motion were inaccurate. Instead, the teachers urged that summary judgment was improper because the Board made no allegation “that the exhibits or the fragmented transcripts constitute the entire body of evidence to show what was presented to the school board.”

The party seeking summary judgment has the burden of showing that there is no genuine issue of material fact.

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Belcourt v. Fort Totten Public School District No. 30
454 N.W.2d 703 (North Dakota Supreme Court, 1990)

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Bluebook (online)
454 N.W.2d 703, 1990 N.D. LEXIS 91, 1990 WL 42613, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/belcourt-v-fort-totten-public-school-district-no-30-nd-1990.