stating that “a person who acts as an agent of a county board of education shares in the State’s sovereign immunity if the act complained of was committed while that person was performing a discretionary act” and defining a “discretionary” act as one that “requires exercise in judgment and choice and involves what is just and proper under the circumstances”
How later courts described this case
- stating that “a person who acts as an agent of a county board of education shares in the State’s sovereign immunity if the act complained of was committed while that person was performing a discretionary act” and defining a “discretionary” act as one that “requires exercise in judgment and choice and involves what is just and proper under the circumstances”
- “It is well established that the supervision of students is a discretionary function.”
- “[A] person who acts as an agent of a county board of education shares in the State’s sovereign immunity if the act complained of was committed while that person was performing a discretionary act.”
- “County boards of education are deemed to be local agencies of the State for purposes of applying the State’s sovereign immunity under Art. I, § 14, of the Constitution of Alabama of 1901.”
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
I concur only in the result because I think the discretionary-function test for qualified immunity serves no valuable public policy and has proved itself unworkable in the absurdly disparate results it has produced over the years. The better rationale for the result reached in the case before us is that a state employee is protected by qualified immunity if the state employee's act or omission grounding the plaintiff's claim was entailed by a function of the state employment that inherently consists of deciding between or among conflicting or competing demands or interests of different people or groups of people. *Page 913