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Court of Appeal:
Lack of Standing Bars UCL Action Against School for Abuse
Opinion Says Claim Based on Assertion by Unharmed Child, Parents of Another Student, That They Would Not Have Paid Private Tuition Had Sexual Misconduct by Staff Been Disclosed, Fails for Absence of Injury
By a MetNews Staff Writer
Div. Three of the First District Court of Appeal has held that two parents of a student and a former pupil lack standing to assert an unfair competition claim based on allegations that they would not have paid premium tuition prices to an elite Santa Rosa-area private school had the academy disclosed that three of its staff members had been accused of sexual misconduct against enrollees, finding that the plaintiffs could not establish a concrete injury.
In an opinion, filed Friday and written by Presiding Justice Alison M. Tucher, the court affirmed a judgment of dismissal that followed an order by Sonoma Superior Court Judge Oscar Pardo sustaining the school’s demurrer to the complaint without leave to amend. Tucher pointed out that neither the student nor the child of the parents suffered abuse.
The plaintiffs lack standing to assert a claim under the Unfair Competition Law (”UCL”), Tucher wrote, because their students received the education for which plaintiffs paid, unaffected by the alleged misconduct directed at others.”
Justice Carin T. Fujisaki and Justice Victor Rodríguez joined in the opinion.
The dispute arose after plaintiffs David and Jody Suchard, and a former student identified only as Jane Doe, filed a complaint against Sonoma Academy in June 2022. They allege that the school is charged with the education of approximately 300 students and charged nearly $50,000 per year in tuition for the 2020-21 school year.
Doe paid for her own tuition to attend the school from 2018 to 2021, and the Suchards paid for their child to attend the preparatory school from 2015-18. According to the plaintiffs, the school employed three people who engaged in the sexual abuse of students but failed to inform the purported class members or the public of the misconduct.
Inappropriate Relationships
The plaintiffs aver that they learned of the sexual abuse after a report was publicly released in 2021 by Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, a law firm hired by the school’s board of trustees to investigate student and alumni complaints. The report found that the academy’s administrators knew of numerous acts of sexual misconduct committed by staff members between 2004 and 2020.
In their operative complaint, the plaintiffs seek to bring their claims on behalf of a class of “[a]ll parents, family members, guardians or students” who paid tuition to the school from “2003 to 2020 for students who graduated before July 2020.”
They assert that the class members would not have paid the premium tuition rates charged by the school had they known of the allegations and assert a cause of action under the UCL, codified at Business and Professions Code §17200 et seq., as well as constructive fraud and fraud by concealment claims.
The plaintiffs contend that “[n]o parent would knowingly place their child in such an environment,” so “the full amount of tuition paid by class members during the concealment period qualifies as Defendant’s ill-gotten gains.” However, the pleading acknowledges that the damages must be offset by any value received in exchange and proposes to calculate such an amount by “comparison to similarly situated high schools” that do not charge premium rates.
According to tax records filed in 2021, the school had net assets of $104 million.
Unfair Competition
Tucher said that the scope of the UCL is broad and permits “independent liability for unfair competition to be based on violations of other laws or on practices that, though not specifically proscribed by another law, are unfair or deceptive.”
However, she pointed out that in order to have standing under the statute, a person must have suffered a concrete injury and lost money or property as a result of unfair competition. Applying the standard, she wrote:
“We are unpersuaded that the complaint adequately alleges these plaintiffs suffered an injury in fact….Whether or not the families of students who were sexually harassed or abused suffered such an injury—a question we are not called upon to decide—there is no allegation that the named plaintiffs or the students for whom they paid tuition suffered sexual abuse or harassment, were aware of such behavior, or experienced any detriment from the misconduct that allegedly occurred.”
Addressing the plaintiffs’ assertion that they suffered injury by overpaying for tuition due to the defendant’s failure to disclose the abuse, Tucher remarked:
“[P]laintiffs do not allege that the education they or their children received was altered in any way by the school’s alleged failure to disclose its employees’ improper behavior.”
Citing case law holding that any presumption for which a plaintiff seeks to hold the defendant liable must be part of the agreed-upon deal between the parties, she said:
“[P]laintiffs may have presumed the school was providing a learning environment free of sexual harassment and abuse or reporting and disclosing incidents that fell short of this standard. But the named plaintiffs do not allege they discussed with defendant, when they were transacting over tuition, their assumption that the school would disclose such incidents, so we fail to see how they did not receive the benefit of their bargain.”
Under those circumstances, the jurist declared:
“The complaint does not allege the school inflicted any economic injury on named plaintiffs because there is no allegation it provided their students with anything but the education for which plaintiffs had bargained. The trial court thus properly sustained the demurrer to this cause of action.”
No Duty to Disclose
In an unpublished portion of the opinion, the court found that the plaintiffs failed to establish that the academy owed them a duty to disclose.
Tucher said that the plaintiffs allege that there is such a duty, even absent a fiduciary or confidential relationship between the parties, where the facts are known only to the defendant and are not reasonably discoverable by others.
Rejecting this view, she wrote:
“A crucial difference between the cases upon which plaintiffs rely and the one before us is that the complaint alleges there were continuing rumors, as well as complaints from parents and students,…raising substantial questions about whether individual class members relied upon (or were deceived by) the school’s alleged failure to disclose these events. These questions would necessarily require separate adjudication of facts distinct to each absent class member, an inquiry that could be expected to swamp the common questions of what, and when, the school learned of its employees’ alleged behavior, and what it did in response.”
The case is Suchard v. Sonoma Academy, 2025 S.O.S. 770.
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