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C.A. Upends $2.5 Million Retaliation Verdict Against LAUSD
Opinion Says Principal, Who Claims He Was Fired for Blowing Whistle on Improper Distribution of Federal Funds, Failed to Show Challenged Actions Were Illegal, as Required by Statute
By Kimber Cooley, associate editor
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JASON CAMP former LAUSD principal
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Div. Five of this district’s Court of Appeal has reversed a judgment awarding $2.5 million to a former principal who accused the Los Angeles Unified School District of violating a whistleblower retaliation statute by punishing him for raising concerns over how federal funds were distributed among schools.
In an unpublished opinion filed Tuesday, written by Justice Lamar Baker and joined in by Presiding Justice Brian M. Hoffstadt and Justice Carl H. Moor, the court found that the plaintiff had failed to establish that he had reasonable cause to believe that officials’ actions violated the law, an essential element of his claim.
At issue is Labor Code §1102.5(b), which provides:
“An employer…shall not retaliate against an employee for disclosing information…to a person with authority over the employee…if the employee has reasonable cause to believe that the information discloses a violation of state or federal statute, or a violation of or noncompliance with a local, state, or federal rule or regulation….”
The dispute arose after Jason Camp, a former principal of the Canoga Park-area Owensmouth Continuation High School, filed a complaint against the district in 2017. He asserted a claim under §1102(b) and alleged that he was fired for complaining to his supervisors about the alleged misuse of funding received under Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, found at 20 U.S.C. § 6301 et seq.
Apportioning Funds
Camp contends that he raised concerns to supervisors in 2015 and 2016 over the district’s use of a “norming day” early in the school year to assess a specific facility’s population and financial needs for purposes of apportioning Title I funds. He asserts that traditional schools will wait until the allocation is determined before they transfer students to continuation schools like Owensmouth.
He says the district’s claim that he was terminated for falsifying students’ grades in the summer of 2016, in order to make them eligible to play football in the fall, was pretextual, pointing to a later determination by the Office of Administrative Hearings that the accusations against him were not supported by a preponderance of the evidence. Camp refused an offer to return to his position following the administrative hearing.
After a jury returned a $2.5 million verdict in Camp’s favor on the whistleblower claim, judgment was entered in favor of the plaintiff in January 2022.
The district filed a motion for judgment notwithstanding the verdict (“JNOV”), arguing that there was insufficient evidence to establish that the plaintiff had reasonable cause to believe that his challenges to funding decisions disclosed a violation of law. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Maurice A. Leiter denied the motion, saying the jury “could find that believing the misuse of government funds is illegal is reasonable.”
Yesterday’s opinion reversed the judgment and directed the trial court to grant the JNOV motion and enter judgment in favor of the defendant.
Reasonable Cause
On appeal, Camp argued that he had reasonable cause to believe that his complaints over the federal funds failing to follow students disclosed a violation of Title I, suggesting that the district’s system of allocating the money conflicts with the act’s purpose of providing all children with high-quality education and closing achievement gaps.
Rejecting this framing, Baker said:
“It is not reasonable…to derive the narrow rules plaintiff contemplates from these general principles….And framing the question as the trial court did…assumes, without any basis, that plaintiff showed defendant’s allocation of Title I funds was improper as opposed to (arguably) unwise.”
Saying that “plaintiff still does not cite any rule, regulation, or statute proscribing the use of a norming day to allocate funds, specifying when the norming day must occur, requiring revision of allocations when students change schools, or requiring live credit recovery programs,” the jurist concluded that Camp had failed to meet his burden.
He remarked that “[p]laintiff’s discussion of an apparent conflict between rising graduation rates and declining college matriculation…is even weaker” and opined that “i]t demonstrates, at most, that different approaches to allocating Title I funds might better serve some of Congress’s goals.”
Disagreement Over Policy
Baker declared:
“Even taking plaintiff’s argument on its own terms, his broad appeal to Title I’s purpose unreasonably assumes Congress left no room for discretion in addressing issues like students changing schools in the middle of the school year. Plaintiff’s argument, like his testimony, amounts to an assertion about what he believes Title I ought to require as opposed to what it actually requires. This is precisely the sort of ‘disagreement[] over…policy choices’ that section 1102.5, subdivision (b) excludes from whistleblower protection.”
The case is Camp v. Los Angeles Unified School District, B318925.
Camp was represented by West Los Angeles attorney Renuka V. Jain and by Westlake Village practitioner Janet R. Gusdorff. Acting for the district were Melinda Lee Cantrall and Thomas Charles Hurrell of the downtown Los Angeles firm of Hurrell Cantrall LLP, Michele Marla Goldsmith of Bergman Dacey Goldsmith in Westwood, and Angela M. Jones and Nazli Alimi of the LAUSD’s Office of General Counsel.
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