The Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the Newport News School Board has broad immunity from personal injury lawsuits — a ruling expected to have implications on litigation against school boards across the state.

In a unanimous decision May 8, the court said the school board is immune from a $15 million lawsuit brought by the family of a 9-year-old autistic student who alleges he was assaulted and mistreated on a school bus in September 2022.

That case will proceed against two other named defendants — a school bus driver and bus monitor — and the School Board will still be on the hook for paying their lawyer fees and any resulting judgments.

But the high court made clear that Virginia school boards hold “sovereign immunity” from litigation — even from allegations that the board was “grossly negligent.”

“Although government employees are not immune from claims of gross negligence … the School Board itself benefits from immunity from suit, whether the claims involve simple negligence, gross negligence, or even intentional torts,” the court wrote in the 7-0 decision.

In recent years, attorneys have increasingly filed lawsuits against school boards, with many judges allowing the cases to proceed. But this ruling is likely to put a stop to that.

“We think it’s a really big deal,” said Annie Lahren, an attorney with Pender & Coward who represents the Newport News School Board. “The Supreme Court took the opportunity with our case to clarify and say school boards have absolute immunity. And it’s very clear, no wiggle room.”

The ruling doesn’t mean school boards, elected bodies that oversee school divisions, can never be sued. They can still be sued over school bus accidents, for example. They can still be sued in federal courts for Title IX violations, such as discrimination on the basis of race, sex or disabilities.

And school division personnel can still be sued individually for negligence. The school boards or their insurance firms still must pay those employees’ attorney fees in most cases, and the boards are generally responsible to pay any verdicts or judgements against them.

Still, Lahren said removing school boards as defendants in many personal injury cases across the state has the potential to significantly reduce litigation expenses.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers, she said, often make “burdensome” discovery requests involving such items as individual board members’ emails and financial documents going back many years — or “every single training policy you’ve given to staff across every school for every subject.”

The recent ruling, she said, “creates the clear precedent for dismissing school boards at the very beginning of lawsuits, thereby preserving taxpayer money from protracted litigation and extensive discovery expenses in defending school boards across the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

It could also save money another way: Jurors — who aren’t told where the payments come from — could be more reluctant to hand down a large verdict against an employee than a board seen as having deep pockets.

But Jacob Murov — the attorney representing the autistic boy’s family — said the Supreme Court’s ruling will not make a difference in the pending case.

While the board will be removed as a defendant, he said, two other defendants remain. The evidence will stay the same, to include witnesses, bus surveillance video, internal emails among school personnel, and hard-hitting letters of reprimand from the school division to the bus driver and monitor.

“The decision has absolutely no practical impact on our case,” Murov said. “As much as we would have liked to get a favorable ruling, the good thing is obviously it didn’t dispose of the whole case. And it’s really not going to have much effect at all on our claims or our theories in the case.”

Murov also disagreed that removing school boards as defendants in cases across the state would save expenses on sharing documents.

“I’m just not following that argument,” he said. “Even if we had not sued the school board, we would still be able to get the same discovery. We still would get personnel files. We would still have gotten all of the incriminating documents that we got.”

Board transportation policy handbooks, for example, would still be relevant “to determine whether or not the employees complied with the internal polices,” Murov said. “I’m having a hard time thinking what would not be discoverable.”

Murov added that the Virginia Supreme Court’s 6-page decision provided no rationale for treating the School Board differently.

“They need to be held accountable, especially when they are grossly negligent,” he said. “The whole reason for immunity is to protect the public purse. They don’t want taxpayers having to pay big judgments. Well that obviously isn’t the case when the government entity has liability insurance.”

But as a result of the court’s decision, the Newport News School Board also is expected to be removed as a defendant in the pending $40 million lawsuit brought by former Richneck Elementary School teacher Abigail Zwerner in the case of a 6-year-old student who shot her during class in early 2023.

Attorneys for Zwerner said the school board’s failures “will have to be addressed by the legislature” — by removing some of the broad immunity the state grants to the boards.

“No one in our community would expect the school board to be protected from their negligence because of an outdated law that should’ve been corrected decades ago,” Zwerner’s attorneys, Diane Toscano and Jeffrey Breit, said in a joint statement Friday.

They said Zwerner’s case against former school administrators would proceed.

The lawsuit involving the autistic Newport News student began when Matthew Harvey went to pick up his 9-year-old son at a bus stop on Sept. 30, 2022, on the way home from the Center for Autism at Kiln Creek Elementary School.

When the boy walked off the bus, he was naked from the waist down. The lawsuit said Harvey later learned his son was struck in the face by a bus monitor on the way home.

A school division letter of reprimand to the monitor, written by Newport News Public Schools transportation supervisor Susan Moore, said the boy had no shoes and “wet sock feet” when he boarded the bus.

He removed his socks and began chewing on one of them. When it fell out of his mouth, the monitor picked it up. “You appear to strike him in the face with the wet sock,” Moore wrote in the Dec. 6, 2022, letter to the monitor.

While on the bus, the boy removed his pants and diaper, and the monitor twice “told the student you wished you could ‘whip his tail,’ which is a direct threat,” Moore said. Then the monitor then let the boy off the bus with no pants.

The previous day, Moore added, “you and the driver were having a conversation about the student, while he was on the bus, in which you referred to him as acting like an ‘animal’ and a ‘monkey.’”

“This type of callous behavior towards students is a direct violation” of school board policy, Moore wrote, terming the letter a final warning.

Lahren and co-counsel Richard Matthews contended at a pre-trial hearing in August 2024 that the Newport News School Board should be removed as a defendant because it holds “sovereign immunity.”

That legal doctrine, which dates back to colonial times, stems from the premise that “the King can do no wrong.” The recent Supreme Court said the doctrine is designed “to protect the state from burdensome interference with the performance of its governmental functions.”

Murov contended at the Circuit Court hearing that the School Board was not entitled to sovereign immunity for the bus incident. He asserted that what happened on the bus broadly constituted an “accident” — making it an exception to immunity under state law.

Circuit Court Judge Bryant Sugg sided with Murov — keeping the board as a defendant.

The board asked for a trial delay to appeal to the Supreme Court. Since the school bus was not “a vehicle involved in an accident,'” the high court ruled, it retains sovereign immunity.

Lahren said that in recent years, there’s been “a whole flood of litigation” filed against school boards in Virginia. “There’s been confusion lately among some of the lower courts and some of the trial judges,” she said.

This case, Lahren said, provided the Virginia Supreme Court with “a perfect opportunity” to make clear that “sovereign immunity is alive and well” for school boards statewide.

“And that’s why this opinion was so important — because it clarified everything.”