A federal appeals court has upheld a Michigan school district’s investigation and expulsion of an 8th grader who allegedly made comments about bringing a gun to school less than a week after a fatal mass shooting at a nearby Michigan high school.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, in Cincinnati, ruled unanimously that the 1,000-student Cass City school district did not violate the student’s constitutional rights when the superintendent and two police officers questioned and searched him. The panel also upheld the temporary expulsion of the student identified as H.H., even though no firearm was found on him or his belongings.
“Here, the offense was H.H. making a remark about having a firearm at school, and the punishment was a 180-day expulsion,” the 6th Circuit said in its Dec. 18 decision in Halasz v. Cass City Public Schools. “There was a rational relationship between the two, especially given the heightened sensitivity to such comments at the time.”
Comments in science class raised concerns
The events involving H.H. occurred on Dec. 6, 2021, after the principal of Cass City Jr./Sr. High School gave a presentation about school safety. Just days before, on Nov. 30, a high school sophomore committed the fatal mass shooting that killed four students at Oxford High School in Oxford, Mich., about 60 miles away from Cass City.
Court papers say that after the principal’s safety presentation, H.H. was in his science class when he told classmates about possibly bringing a gun to school. One student recalled him saying, “that he had guns and that if he brought them to the school, nobody would do anything about it.” Another student perceived H.H. as saying he had a gun in his bag.
One student expressed concerns to her mother, who was a school board member, and she contacted administrators. The Cass City superintendent, the school’s behavioral police officer, and a state police lieutenant confronted H.H. in a school office. They searched his body, his bag, and locker and found no guns.
The state police that evening carried out a search of the family’s home, finding a gun safe but no guns. They advised the district that H.H. may have been misunderstood and did not pose any immediate danger to the school.
District proceeds with discipline anyway
Despite that assessment, school officials assigned H.H. eight misbehavior points for his comments, which combined with other misbehavior on his record put him over the threshold to trigger an expulsion hearing. After the hearing, the school board voted to expel H.H. for 180 days.
The student’s parents, Charity and Thomas Halasz, sued on behalf of their son, alleging that officials violated his Fourth Amendment rights to be free of unreasonable search and seizure and his 14th Amendment right to due process of law.
They lost in both a federal district court and before the 6th Circuit. As to the search, the parents did not argue that it was unjustified, but that the scope of it was unreasonable. They were not contacted, as district policy called for, and their son was not read his Miranda rights, the parents said.
The court held that it was not unreasonable for officials receiving a report of a student possibly having a gun to conduct a “light” search in which the student was asked to remove his shoes and sweatshirt, lift his shirt, and pull open his waistband. The fact that the officials did not contact his parents or read H.H. his Miranda rights did not bear on the reasonableness of the search, the court concluded.
The court went on to hold that officials did conduct a “seizure” of H.H. under the Fourth Amendment, but that the seizure was not unreasonable.
“The school officials had clear justification to hold H.H. to question him about his purported comments in class,” the court said. “And they held him only for 30 minutes—which was no longer than necessary to investigate and confirm that he had no gun on his person or in his belongings.”
As for the 14th Amendment due-process claim, the court noted that H.H. had a disciplinary hearing before the school board where he was represented by a lawyer.
The parents objected to the fact that the superintendent had withheld from the board the state police’s determination that H.H. posed no threat of danger.
“But whether he posed a real physical danger to his fellow students is independent of whether he made a comment that sounded like a threat,” the court said, noting that the school board based its expulsion decision on the comments.
“That the board and the state police may have reached different conclusions does not mean that H.H. suffered a procedural-due-process violation,” the court said.