The North Carolina Supreme Court has agreed to review a long-running back-and-forth court battle between the Alamance-Burlington school system and a former Broadview Middle School student who claims to have been brutally assaulted by her teacher in the fall of 2022.
The lawsuit was originally filed in Alamance County superior court on behalf of a juvenile female, who is referred to as “K.H.” and was 14 at the time of the alleged assault, and her now-deceased maternal grandmother, Deborah Clagett of Burlington.
Now referred to by the pseudonym “Katherine,” the former Broadview Middle School student contends that she has been deprived of her right to a “sound, basic education” by the school board’s decision to allow an unlicensed teacher, Danielle Dixon of Greensboro, to brutally assault her at the middle school November 2, 2022.
The plaintiffs are asking the justices to determine whether the assault and the school board’s handling of it violated Katherine’s state constitutional right to a sound, basic education.
A visiting special superior court judge, Michael L. Robinson, dismissed the suit following a hearing in Alamance County superior court in April 2023, concluding that ABSS hadn’t waived its immunity through the purchase of liability insurance.
Katherine and her guardian-ad-litem subsequently appealed Robinson’s dismissal of the suit to the N.C. Court of Appeals, which split 2-1 in siding with ABSS in an opinion issued in the fall of 2024.
N.C. Court of Appeals judge Hunter Murphy issued a dissenting opinion, countering that the suit against ABSS should be allowed to proceed under the alleged violation of Katherine’s constitutional right to a sound basic education.
Plaintiff, dissenting court of appeals court judge: ‘Deliberately indifferent’
In her brief for the state Supreme Court, Katherine alleges that, while she was forced to transfer to the alternative school for ABSS, Ray Street Academy in Graham, Dixon was not only allowed to continue teaching at Broadview, “she encountered no meaningful discipline.” The plaintiffs claim that the school board was “deliberately indifferent” to the plaintiff’s constitutional rights through its handling of the alleged assault and by allowing Dixon to continue teaching.
In their brief for the Supreme Court, the plaintiffs cite a 2021 ruling by the Supreme Court, Deminski v. State Board of Education, in which chief justice Paul Newby concluded that a claim could be brought under the N.C. Constitution over a school board’s “deliberate indifference” to harassment, or other harm, to a student.
The school board had approved hiring Dixon, who wasn’t licensed to teach in an N.C. public school, in September 2022 on a one-year contract to teach language arts at Broadview Middle School, according to the Alamance County court file. Her contract was terminated several weeks prior to its scheduled expiration, based on a semi-monthly personnel report that the school board approved on June 13, 2023.
In his dissent for the Court of Appeals, Murphy wrote, “Taken as true, [the defendant school board] was deliberately indifferent to the hostile environment it created when it placed an individual with no teaching license in a position of authority to instruct academic classes and to supervise children in its public school; failed to adequately staff that school; failed to investigate, train, assess, or ensure that Dixon had the requisite academic, emotional, and social qualifications to teach, supervise, and care for students in that school; and failed to take action when Dixon’s concerning behaviors first arose.”
Background on the case
In her Supreme Court brief, Katherine recounted the moments leading to the assault at Broadview Middle School in November 2022.
“Katherine forgot her bookbag in her middle school teacher’s classroom,” the factual background states. “When she went back inside to retrieve it, she accidentally bumped into her teacher’s arm. In response, her teacher grabbed Katherine by the hair and slammed her head into the ground five times. Still grasping Katherine’s hair, the teacher held Katherine against the ground, even as other students implored the teacher to let Katherine go. While Katherine was held against the ground by her hair, the teacher screamed at Katherine to leave the classroom. But Katherine could not move. Ultimately, two other teachers had to enter the classroom before Katherine was released.”
Katherine alleges in her N.C. Supreme Court brief that the assault by Dixon was part of a pattern – one of several “acts of misconduct with students in her classroom,” for which she had been disciplined by the principal and which had been reported to the school board – but was never disciplined “even after Dixon slammed Katherine’s head into the ground five times.”
ABSS, however, contends that the claims lack merit. “The complaint is entirely devoid of allegations regarding the adequacy of the alternative school and…is silent as to the nature, extent, and quality of educational opportunities made available to K.H. following her enrollment,” the school board asserts in its brief that was filed in the N.C. Supreme Court in April 2025.
The N.C. School Boards Association (NCSBA) also filed a 16-page friend-of-the-court brief in support of ABSS on April 21, 2025.
“The right to an opportunity for a sound basic education is not a right to a perfect or flawless education, free from bad actors or bad things,” the NCSBA asserted in its brief. “Yet that impossible qualitative standard is what [the] plaintiff asks the Court to impose on the state here.”
The state Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case earlier this month.
“The question is about the safety, the intimidating nature of the environment, and the nature, the extent, and the quality of the education,” attorney Morgan Reese of the Fox Rothschild law firm in Greensboro said during her oral argument. “Those have all been met here because Katherine, from this point on, has been assaulted by a teacher. How could any child go back to any educational setting and not have that weigh and impact their ability?”
“You would need more than just an incident and then a response to it,” countered attorney David B. Noland of the Tharrington Smith law firm in Raleigh, who is representing ABSS. “You need to have something that bears upon Katherine’s educational opportunities. The complaint is utterly silent before the incident and after the incident as to any of her academic experience.”
Noland also pointed out for the justices that the litigation against Dixon remains pending, though court files give no indication that the now-former Broadview Middle School teacher has filed a response to the suit.
An order filed Friday, September 19, in the state Supreme Court gives the parties 30 days to file their briefs in the case.
