By By BETTY MITCHELL GRAY
Staff Writer
The N.C. Court of Appeals has ruled that two Beaufort County high-school students suspended from Southside High School nearly two years ago for fighting were not denied due process by local school officials in the appeal of their suspensions.
In an unanimous ruling issued Nov. 19, a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal in Beaufort County Superior Court of a claim that the suspension proceedings — regarding students Jessica Hardy and Viktoria King — conducted by Beaufort County School administrators and the Board of Education denied the students their right to due process.
“The trial court property dismissed petitioners’ declaratory judgment claims and properly affirmed the decision of the Board,” wrote Judge Anne Marie Calabria in the 10-page ruling. Judges James A. Wynn Jr. and Rick Elmore concurred.
Because of the unanimous ruling, the students do not have an automatic right of appeal to the N.C. Supreme Court based on dissent by a jurist who heard the case, but lawyers for the students could file a petition for a discretionary hearing to the high court.
Jane Wettach, a lawyer with the Children’s Law Clinic at the Duke University School of Law and who is one of the lawyers representing the students, said in an interview Thursday that she had not decided whether to appeal the ruling.
But some people involved in the case said an appeal to the high court is not likely.
The case is one of two lawsuits filed by Hardy and King against the school board that have recently been decided by the Court of Appeals.
At issue in the other case is the right of students who receive long-term suspension to receive an alternative education during their suspensions. In a split decision in October, the Court of Appeals ruled that the long-term suspension of the two students did not deny them that right.
That ruling has been appealed to the N.C. Supreme Court.
Hardy and King were 10th-grade students at Southside High School when a fight broke out Jan. 18, 2008, at the school. As a result of the fight, they were suspended from school for 10 days beginning Jan. 24, 2008. Subsequently, then-Superintendent Jeffrey Moss followed a recommendation from then-Principal Todd Blumenreich that the students be suspended for the remainder of the 2007-2008 school year.