Aerial view of Silverado High School, Victorville, California
RIVERSIDE, CALIFORNIA — A state appeals panel won’t let a school district end a lawsuit from a woman who said a teacher sexually assaulted her more than 25 years ago.
Victoria Magistrale sued Victor Valley Union High School District, accusing the school district of negligence in allegedly allowing her to be sexually abused during her time as a student at Silverado High School in Victorville from 1999 to 2001.
In response, the school district asked San Bernadino County Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Erickson to grant summary judgment in its favor, arguing the state Education Code provided immunity.
Ater Judge Erickson denied that request, the district asked the California Fourth District Appellate Court to vacate the judgment. Justice Douglas Miller wrote the panel’s opinion, filed July 13; Justices Richard Fields and Michael Raphael concurred. Raphael wrote a special concurrence
The panel recounted Magistrale’s history with Mark Lizama, a math teacher and ROTC leader, leading to his termination and June 2008 criminal conviction. Magistrale sued Lizama and the district in May 2023.
In opposing the district's bid for a judgment ending the case, Magistrale said the district wasn’t immune to litigation strictly because the sexual assaults happened off campus.
In the lower court ruling, Judge Erickson said whether the district was negligent was a factual dispute, noting a reasonable jury might find it improper for a teacher to leave school with a student in a personal vehicle. He also said the relevant legal question is not where an injury occurred, but the location of the alleged negligent acts. In support, the judge had cited the 1978 California Supreme Court opinion Hoyem v. Manhattan Beach City School District, which observed “no California decision suggests that when a school district fails to properly supervise a student on school premises, the district can automatically escape liability simply because the student’s ultimate injury occurs off school property.”
On appeal, the panel noted, the district “provided no evidence of what measures, if any, were in place to try to prevent employees from transporting teenage students off campus,” Miller wrote. “The evidence that a teacher openly escorted a student through campus, past another employee, into a parking lot, into his personal vehicle, and transported her off campus, without any measures in place to prevent such conduct” could allow for the conclusion of substandard care.
Miller further said the Fourth District Appellate Court had twice issued rulings in contrast to Hoyem, one in which the court didn’t focus on how a student came to be riding in an unsafe part of a school district vehicle, instead noting the student died in a public intersection, and another regarding a student who died by suicide, which the family attributed to on-campus bullying.
“Regrettably, we believe the court erred in the foregoing discussion of the law,” Miller wrote. “We presented the law as though the location of the injury is the relevant issue, which is incorrect.”
The panel denied the district’s request and awarded Magistrale her costs associated with appellate proceedings.
In his concurrence, Judge Raphael noted state law “eliminates a district’s vicarious liability for an employee’s off-campus conduct, even when performed within the scope of employment. But the reasonable-care clause preserves something narrower and different — liability for the district’s own negligence, for instance in its hiring, training, or ‘supervisory procedures.’ ”
He further said many state provisions offer immunity to public entities but make that conditional on a litigating showing negligence, while also noting Magistrale’s allegations specifically implicate a school employee for causing harm.
“Under the district’s view, if a district knows that a teacher or coach may be sexually assaulting a student, its liability turns on where the assault occurs,” Raphael wrote. “If the assault occurs in a classroom or the school’s athletic field, the school is liable, but if the assault happens at the teacher’s home after hours, the district is not liable.”
He concluded by saying the majority was correct to invoke Hoyem but also said the position is rooted in existing state law.
The school district is represented by attorneys with the firms of Horvitz & Levy, of Los Angeles; and Dolen, Tucker, Tierney & Abraham, of Redlands.
Magistrale is represented by attorneys Andrews & Higgins, of Newport Beach.
