Amann v. Town of Stow ( 1993 )

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE FIRST CIRCUIT
No. 92-2157
RICHARD AMANN, ET AL.,
Plaintiffs, Appellants,
v.
TOWN OF STOW, ET AL.,
Defendants, Appellee.
APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS
[Hon. Edward F. Harrington, U.S. District Judge]
Before
Torruella, Cyr and Stahl,
Ciricut Judges.
Richard Amann on brief pro se.
Scott Harshbarger, Attorney General, and Beth D. Levi,
Assistant Attorney General, on brief for appellee Commonwealth of
Massachusetts.
Kevin Hensley and Needham and Warren on brief for appellee
Town of Stow.
Maynard M. Kirpalani, Christine Hasiotis and Parker,
Coulter, Daley & White on brief for appellee Stow School System.
April 29, 1993
Per Curiam. Appellant Christopher Amann is a child with
learning disabilities who lives in Stow, Massachusetts.
Appellant Richard Amann is Christopher's father. Christopher
began to attend public school in Stow in 1983. Because he
suffered from learning disabilities, the Town was obligated
under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA),
20 U.S.C. 1400 et seq., to produce an "individualized
education program" (IEP) for him, and to review and update
the IEP annually. See generally Amann v. Stow School System,
982 F.2d 644, 646-47 (1st Cir. 1992) (per curiam) (describing
Town's obligations under IDEA). The Town did so until 1987,
when Christopher's parents withdrew him from the Stow school
system and placed him in a private school.
In 1990, at the request of Christopher's parents, Stow
came up with a new IEP that called for Christopher to return
to the Stow public schools. The Amanns rejected this IEP and
challenged its adequacy in a hearing before the Massachusetts
Bureau of Special Education Appeals (BSEA). See 20 U.S.C.
1415(b)(2) (requiring administrative "due process hearing" of
complaints about IEPs). The BSEA hearing officer decided
that Stow's proposed IEP was legally adequate.
Section 1415(e)(2) of the IDEA authorizes parties
aggrieved by agency decisions concerning the adequacy of an
IEP to bring a civil action in either state or federal court,
seeking "such relief as the court determines is appropriate."
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The Amanns challenged the BSEA's procedures and findings in
the United States District Court for the District of
Massachusetts. The district court affirmed the validity of
the IEP, and we did the same on appeal. Amann v. Stow School
System, 982 F.2d at 649-53.
As was its duty under the IDEA, see 20 U.S.C.
1414(a)(5) (requiring annual review and, if appropriate,
revision of IEP), Stow prepared a new educational plan to
cover the period March 1991-March 1992. This IEP, like its
predecessor, called for Christopher to attend public schools
in Stow. The Amanns rejected this IEP, too, and again sought
review before the BSEA. In a decision dated September 9,
1991, the BSEA hearing officer ruled that Stow's 1991-1992
IEP was adequate. On May 21, 1992, the Amanns filed this
action in the district court. The district court dismissed
the complaint as untimely. This appeal followed. We affirm.
I
The IDEA, like many federal statutes, does not set a
time limit for lawsuits brought under its terms. "In such
situations we do not ordinarily assume that Congress intended
that there be no time limit on actions at all; rather, our
task is to 'borrow' the most suitable statute or other rule
of timeliness from some other source. We have generally
concluded that Congress intended that the courts apply the
most closely analogous statute of limitations under state
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law," DelCostello v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters,
462 U.S. 151, 158 (1983), provided that "it is not
inconsistent with federal law or policy to do so." Wilson v.
Garcia, 471 U.S. 261, 266-67 (1985).
The district court, relying on Judge Keeton's decision
in Gertel v. School Committee of Brookline School District,
783 F.Supp. 701 (D.Mass. 1992), "borrowed" the thirty-day
limitations period that governs civil actions seeking
judicial review of state agency decisions under the
Massachusetts Administrative Procedure Act, M.G.L. c. 30A,
14. Because the Amanns did not sue until eight months after
the BSEA decision, the district court properly dismissed
their claim unless the court's choice of the thirty-day
limitation period was somehow incorrect, or its application
of the time bar under the circumstances of this case was
somehow inappropriate.
II
Except to suggest that the Gertel decision "set an
improper precedent," the appellants do not seriously contest
the district court's choice of a limitations period. The
appropriate limitations period for IDEA actions, however, is
a question of first impression in this circuit, and the issue
has not elsewhere generated a harmonious judicial response.
Several courts, like the district court here, have applied
the short (generally 30-day) limitations periods found in
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state administrative procedure acts, ruling both that state
administrative procedure laws are analogous to Section
1415(e)(2), and that their relatively brief limitations
periods are consistent with the IDEA's goal of prompt
resolution of disputes over the educational placement of
learning-disabled children. Spiegler v. District of
Columbia, 866 F.2d 461 (D.C.Cir. 1989); Adler v. Education
Department of New York, 760 F.2d 454 (2d Cir. 1985);
Department of Education v. Carl D., 695 F.2d 1154 (9th Cir.
1983); Gertel, supra; Bow School District v. Quentin W., 750
F.Supp. 546 (D.N.H. 1990). Other courts, though they by and
large concede that state administrative procedure laws
provide the closest available analogue to Section 1415(e)(2),
but see Tokarcik v. Forest Hills School District, 665 F.2d
443 (3d Cir. 1981), reason that short limitations periods are
nevertheless too inconsistent with the IDEA's "goal of
parental involvement" to allow their application to actions
under the IDEA. See Schimmel v. Spillane, 819 F.2d 477 (4th
Cir. 1987); Scokin v. Texas, 723 F.2d 432 (5th Cir. 1984).
These courts have instead borrowed less analogous, but longer
-- and in the courts' view, more compatible -- state
limitations periods, such as those applicable to tort claims,
see Scokin, 723 F.2d at 438 (two years); Tokarcik, 665 F.2d
at 454 (two years), or to actions for services rendered but
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not paid for. Janzen v. Knox County Board of Education, 790
F.2d 484, 489 (6th Cir. 1986) (three years).
We conclude that the district court correctly borrowed
Massachusetts' thirty-day limitations period for actions
under its Administrative Procedure Act. Since the arguments
on both sides have been well-rehearsed in the cases cited --
and since the appellants have offered only a perfunctory
challenge to the district court's choice -- we will attempt
to state our reasons briefly.
The Massachusetts Administrative Procedure Act (APA)
contains the "most analogous" state law cause of action to
the civil action authorized by Section 1415(e)(2). Like the
Massachusetts courts operating under M.G.L. c. 30A, 14,
courts reviewing agency decisions under the IDEA will rely
primarily on the administrative record, see Burlington v.
Department of Education, 736 F.2d 773, 790 (1st Cir. 1984)
("Burlington II"), and will scrutinize the agency action for
procedural regularity and substantive validity, but will not
"impos[e] their view of preferable . . . methods" on the
state agency. Board of Education v. Rowley, 458 U.S. 176,
206-207 (1982); cf. M.G.L. c. 30A 14(7)(g) (requiring court
to respect agency decision unless arbitrary or capricious, an
abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with
law). Thus, the "character of the hearing" under Section
1415(e)(2), like that of the hearing conducted under the
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Massachusetts statute, is essentially "one of review."
Burlington II, 736 F.2d at 791.
The short limitations period of the Massachusetts APA is
fully consistent with one goal of the IDEA: the quick
disposition of disputes about a handicapped child's
educational placement. "[S]peedy resolutions to the IEP and
placement disputes that characterize 1415(e)(2) actions are
necessary for such resolutions to serve any substantively
useful purposes," Bow School District v. Quentin W., 750
F.Supp. at 550, because "[c]hildren develop quickly and their
needs often change substantially from year to year." Id.See also Burlington II, 736 F.2d at 798 ("Delay in remedial
teaching is . . . likely to be highly injurious to [learning
disabled] children"). The legislative history, statutory
terms, and regulatory framework of the IDEA all emphasize
promptness as an indispensable element of the statutory
scheme. See generally Spiegler, 866 F.2d 461, 466-67
(D.C.Cir. 1989); Adler, 760 F.2d at 459-60; Bow School
District, 750 F.Supp. at 550-51.
It is true that the thirty-day limitations period may to
some extent frustrate a competing goal: parental involvement
in enforcing the IDEA's requirements. But the imposition of
any statute of limitations will to some extent favor
"policies of repose" over "substantive policies of
enforcement," Wilson v. Garcia, 471 U.S. at 271, and this
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fact alone is not a sufficient reason for rejecting the
shorter limitations period of a closely analogous statute.
"Were it otherwise, a federal court should always prefer a
longer statute of limitations over an alternative, but
shorter, period, a type of approach [the Supreme Court has]
rejected before." Burnett v. Grattan, 468 U.S. 42, 58 (1984)
(Rehnquist, J., dissenting).
The potentially harsh effects of a short limitations
period, moreover, are mitigated in this context by three
factors which, taken together, so narrow any "inconsistency"
with the goal of parental involvement as to permit
application of the most analogous state law. Cf. Occidental
Life Insurance Co. v. EEOC, 432 U.S. 355 (1977) (finding
preclusive inconsistency where application of state statute
of limitations would have clashed fundamentally with Equal
Employment Opportunity Act's requirement that EEOC, an agency
plagued by backlogs, engage in time-consuming process of
investigation and settlement exploration before filing suit).
First, the IDEA instructs school authorities to give
parents notice "of all procedures available pursuant to this
section." 20 U.S.C. 1415(b)(1)(D). Several courts have
interpreted this provision to require notice of any
applicable limitations period, in order to ensure that
parents who go through the administrative proceedings without
the aid of a lawyer do not lose their right to judicial
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review merely out of ignorance of the law. See Spiegler, 866
F.2d at 467; Scokin, 723 F.2d at 438; Gertel, 783 F.Supp. at
707; Bow School District, 750 F.Supp. at 551; cf. Carl D.,
695 F.2d at 1158 (declining to reach issue).
Second, the parents' only obligation during the thirty-
day period is to decide whether to sue under Section
1415(e)(2), a decision they need make only after the issues
have been defined, the dispute has been heard, and a record
has been created in the administrative forum. Thus, parents
contemplating action under the IDEA -- like parties
considering action under the Massachusetts APA -- do not bear
the same pre-litigation burdens of factual investigation and
legal research that face, say, a party who has just suffered
or discovered an injury and is thinking about filing a
lawsuit. Cf. Burnett v. Grattan, 468 U.S. at 50-51(rejecting use, in federal civil rights actions, of state
limitations periods for filing administrative employment
discrimination claims, where "practical difficulties facing
an aggrieved person who invokes administrative remedies are
strikingly different" from preparation needed to initiate a
civil rights lawsuit).
Finally, the IDEA requires that IEPs be reviewed and
revised at least annually, 20 U.S.C. 1414(a)(5), and, as
the Amanns' own experience shows, allows parents to begin
litigating afresh over the merits of each new IEP. Parents
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who, despite notice of the limitations period, "sleep on
their rights," therefore, will lose no more than the
educational placement for a single school year, and will not
have to wait long for a new opportunity to participate in the
development, implementation -- and if needed, administrative
and judicial review -- of their child's educational plan.
See Spiegler, 866 F.2d at 468.
III
The Amanns contend that, even if thirty days is the
right limitations period for IDEA actions in Massachusetts,
the time bar should not have operated to deny them a lawsuit
here. They give three reasons for this conclusion.
First, the Amanns argue that they received inadequate
notice of the thirty-day limit. As we have already
described, the IDEA directs the states to "fully inform the
parents . . . of all procedures available," 20 U.S.C.
1415(b)(1)(D), and some courts have held "that this
requirement imposes a duty . . . to give, at the time a final
administrative decision is rendered, clear notice of the
availability of judicial review and of the 30-day limitations
period." Spiegler, 866 F.2d at 467. In Spiegler, the agency
gave no notice of any time limit, and the court of appeals
therefore refused to invoke the limitations bar in the case
under consideration. Id. at 469.
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The Amanns concede that the BSEA gave them notice of the
thirty-day limitations period at the time it rendered a
decision. Attached to the September 9, 1991 decision was a
document entitled "Effect of Decision and Rights of Appeal,"
which stated:
Any party aggrieved by the Bureau decision may file a
complaint in the Superior Court of competent
jurisdiction or in the District Court of the United
States for Massachusetts for review of the Bureau
decision. 20 U.S.C. s. 1415(e)(2). Under Massachusetts
General Laws Chapter 30A, Section 14(1), appeal of a
final Bureau decision must be filed within 30 days of
receipt of the decision.
We agree with the district court in Gertel that the
notice given here, though "not a model of careful drafting .
. . was sufficient." Gertel, 783 F.Supp. at 708 (assessing
identical notice). We do not see how the appellants' pro se
status affected the adequacy of the notice. If the Amanns
were, because of their pro se status, ignorant of the law,
then the only message they could reasonably have derived from
the document attached to the decision was: You have thirty
days in which to challenge this ruling in court. And if the
Amanns were, despite their lack of counsel, knowledgeable
enough about the workings of limitations rules to be "aware
that 1415(e)(2) provides no statute of limitation and that
therefore one must be borrowed from state law, [then] the
notice is clear that the position of the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts is that the appropriate limitations period is
30 days." 783 F.Supp. at 708. Either way, the notice should
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have caused the appellants to understand that they took a
risk if they did not exercise their right to sue within
thirty days of receiving the BSEA decision.
The Amanns' second argument is that the defendants are
estopped from raising a limitations defense to this action,
which challenges the 1991-92 IEP, by virtue of their failure
to assert the limitations bar as a defense to the Amanns'
previous IDEA action, which challenged the adequacy of the
1990-91 IEP. The simple response is that the defendants to
the previous action could not have made a limitations
defense. M.G.L. c. 30A, 14(1) starts the limitations clock
running upon "receipt of notice of the final decision of the
agency or if a petition for rehearing has been timely filed
with the agency, within thirty days after receipt of notice
of agency denial of such petition for rehearing." The Amanns
filed a motion for a rehearing of the BSEA's 1990 decision.
Amann v. Stow School System, 982 F.2d at 648. The BSEA
denied the motion on October 15, 1990. The Amanns filed
their first IDEA complaint on November 13, 1990, twenty-nine
days after the BSEA denied their motion for a rehearing, and
therefore within the thirty-day limitations period. We
cannot fault the defendants for failing to make a defense
they did not have.
Finally, the Amanns say that the new limitations period
should not be "retroactively applied" to their case. But the
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practice of making judicial decisions "fully retroactive,
applying both to the parties before the court and to all
others by and against whom claims may be pressed . . . is
overwhelmingly the norm, and is in keeping with the
traditional function of the courts to decide cases before
them based upon their best current understanding of the law."
James B. Beam Distilling Co. v. Georgia, 111 S.Ct. 2439, 2443
(1991).
The Supreme Court has, on occasion, made an exception to
the rule of retroactivity. Under Chevron Oil Co. v. Huson,
404 U.S. 97, 106-107 (1971), the Court "has accepted
prospectivity . . . where a decision displaces a principle of
law on which reliance may reasonably have been placed, and
where prospectivity is on balance warranted by its effect on
the operation of the new rule and by the inequities that
might otherwise result from retroactive application." James
B. Beam Distilling Co. v. Georgia, 111 S.Ct. at 2445.
This is not such a case. The Supreme Court has declined
to apply new limitations rules retroactively where to do so
would be "to bar an action that was timely under binding
Circuit precedent." Lampf, Pleva, Lipkind, Prupis & Petigrow
v. Gilbertson, 111 S.Ct. 2773, 2786 (1991) (O'Connor, J.,
dissenting). For example, in Saint Francis College v. Al-
Khazraji, 481 U.S. 604, 608-609 (1987), the Court affirmed
the prospective application of a new limitations period that
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"overruled clearly established Circuit precedent" on which
the plaintiff had relied in filing suit. See also Chevron
Oil Co. v. Huson, 404 U.S. at 107 (prospectively applying
limitations rule that "effectively overruled a long line of
decisions by the Court of Appeals").
But the Court has applied new limitations rules
retroactively where to do so would not "overturn[] the
reasonable expectations of a party." Rowlett v. Anheuser-
Busch, Inc., 832 F.2d 194, 198 (1st Cir. 1987). Thus, in
Goodman v. Lukens Steel Co., 482 U.S. 656, 662-63 (1987), the
Court affirmed the retroactive application of a new
limitations period where there had previously been "no
authoritative specification of which statute of limitations
applied" to plaintiffs' claim, "and hence no clear precedent
on which [plaintiffs] could have relied when they filed their
complaint."
Here, as in Goodman, there was "no clear precedent"
favoring a longer limitations period on which the appellants
can claim to have relied while deciding whether to file suit
under the IDEA between September 1991 and May 1992. This
court had not then decided the limitations issue, the
circuits that had done so were split, and the only existing
decisional law among the district courts in this circuit
pointed to a thirty-day limitations period.
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As to the remaining Chevron factors, the appellants have
not identified, and we do not see, how retroactive
application would hinder the operation of the thirty-day
limitations rule or the administration of the IDEA. This is
not a case like Linkletter v. Walker, 381 U.S. 618, 636-38
(1965), in which the Court decided to apply the then-new
exclusionary rule only prospectively since the purpose of
rule, to deter illegal police action, would not have been
furthered by retroactive application to cases in which
illegal conduct had already occurred, and since retroactive
operation would have "tax[ed] the administration of justice
to the utmost." Nor will retroactive application of the new
limitations rule "result in inequity to the [appellants] who
are charged with knowledge that [the limitations period for
IDEA actions] was an unsettled question," Goodman, 482 U.S.
at 663, and who received a notice telling them that they only
had thirty days in which to sue.
Because we affirm the dismissal on the merits, we again
need not decide whether Mr. Amann, a non-lawyer acting "pro
se," was capable of representing his son on appeal. See
Amann v. Stow School District, 982 F.2d at 648 n.2. See also
Norton v. Mathews, 427 U.S. 524, 532 (1976); Narragansett
Indian Tribe v. Guilbert, 934 F.2d 4, 8 n.5 (1st Cir. 1991).
Affirmed.
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