Fraud Claim Over “No Blowback” Assurance by Private School to Complaining Parents, Followed by Children’s Expulsions, Can Go Forward

Some excerpts from the long Turpin v. Charlotte Latin Schools, Inc., decided today by the N.C. Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Richard Dietz, joined by Chief Justice Paul Newby and Justices Philip Berger Jr., Tamara Barringer, and Trey Allen:

According to the complaint in this case, Plaintiffs Doug and Nicole Turpin sent their children to a private school called Charlotte Latin School. Beginning in the summer of 2020, the school began to change its curriculum to focus on politicized issues of race and gender identity. At some point, the Turpins learned that the school was teaching their sixth-grade child various polarizing concepts such as “Republicans are white supremacists.” The school also required young students to read books on sexuality and gender identity that were not age appropriate.

The Turpins started organizing with other parents to voice their concerns about the school curriculum in 2021. Eventually, the Turpins scheduled a meeting with school leadership. At the meeting, the school was not interested in discussing the Turpins’ concerns. Instead, the school terminated the Turpins’ enrollment contracts and expelled their children with no advance warning….

The parents sued for, among other things, fraud, and the court let the claim go forward; here’s the majority’s analysis (the partial dissent doesn’t focus on the particular “no blowback” statement that the majority discusses here):

To bring a claim for fraud, a plaintiff must allege a “(1) false representation or concealment of a material fact, (2) reasonably calculated to deceive, (3) made with intent to deceive, (4) which does in fact deceive, (5) resulting in damage to the injured party.” …

Here, the complaint alleges that Charlotte Latin promised the Turpins there would be no “blowback” or “retaliation” against them or their children if they met with school leadership to discuss their concerns; that this promise was false and, from the beginning, Charlotte Latin intended to deceive the Turpins and lure them to the meeting in order to create a pretext for expelling the children; that the Turpins believed Charlotte Latin’s promise and spoke openly about their concerns because they believed the school would not use those discussions as the pretextual grounds to expel the children; that the school, in that same meeting, expelled the children, as they intended from the outset, despite promising the Turpins they would not do so; and that the school’s deceit caused significant damage to the Turpins.

Again, as with the contract claim, these allegations on their face satisfy the requirements of notice pleading….

The Court of Appeals held that facts disclosed in the emails necessarily defeated the fraud claim. The court explained that the allegedly fraudulent statement is contained in a series of emails where the Turpins asked to meet school leadership to discuss the curriculum for one of their children’s classes. The allegedly false statement is this sentence in a response email from Charlotte Latin to the Turpins: “Our teachers do not retaliate and there will be no blowback, I assure you.”

This statement, according to the Court of Appeals, only promised no “blowback from the teacher towards plaintiffs’ child.” That blowback from the teacher did not occur, the court reasoned, because the child’s “removal from the school was an ancillary effect of the termination of the enrollment contract between plaintiffs and defendants,” not a retaliatory action by “a teacher.”

This reasoning turns the standard of review on its head. “When reviewing a Rule 12(b)(6) motion, we treat the complaint’s factual allegations as true and view them in the light most favorable to the plaintiff.” Viewed in the light most favorable to the Turpins, the promise of no “blowback” contained in the email is not nearly as narrow as the Court of Appeals interpreted it. Instead, that promise of “no blowback” plainly included a promise not to terminate the Turpins’ enrollment contract and kick the child out of school.

This discussion began with the Turpins emailing school leadership about one of their children, a sixth grader taking a humanities class. The Turpins explained that the humanities teacher taught the students that “Republicans are white supremacists” and that “what Republicans stand for is racial suppression and white supremacy in action.” The Turpins also recounted many other “left wing progressive” topics in the course that they believed were wrongly politicized and inappropriate for a sixth grader. When asking to meet with school leadership to discuss their concerns, the Turpins emphasized that they did not want their child “to experience any possible blowback because of what we are bringing to your attention”:

I wanted to discuss with you a situation that is of serious concern to Nicole and I at your convenience. I would prefer that we discuss this situation on a call, before you address this with the teacher I am referencing in this email. We do not want [our child] to experience any possible blowback because of what we are bringing to your attention.

In response to this email, the school stated that its teachers “do not retaliate” and that “there will be no blowback, I assure you”:

Thank you for the email. You make some serious claims that I need to investigate with the teacher, which is only fair so she can provide context. Our teachers do not retaliate and there will be no blowback, I assure you. Please give me a day or two to look into it and will get back to you shortly.

It is entirely reasonable to view the meaning of the term “no blowback” in this context to mean more than just retaliation by the teacher in the classroom. After all, the school’s email expressly assured the Turpins both that there would be no retaliation from the teacher and that there would be no blowback, which a reasonable person certainly could interpret as being two separate things.

But even more fundamentally, in ordinary English usage, when parents want to discuss a sensitive topic with school administrators but caution that they do not want their child to “experience any possible blowback because of what we are bringing to your attention,” and the school administrator responds with “there will be no blowback, I assure you,” it is quite reasonable to understand the assurance of “no blowback” to include terminating the child’s enrollment at school. Thus, when we properly apply the standard of review and view this allegation and all its reasonable inferences in the Turpins’ favor, not the school’s, the assurance went beyond a promise of no blowback from the teacher alone….

The court also allowed a breach of contract claim to go forward, on different grounds.