Whether defendants-social workers were entitled to qualified immunity on plaintiffs’ Fourth Amendment claim; Kovacic v. Cuyahoga Cnty. Dep’t of Children & Family Servs.; Pearson v. Callahan; White v. Pauly; City & Cnty. of San Francisco v. Sheehan; Ashcroft v. al-Kidd; Kisela v. Hughes; Plumhoff v. Rickard; Guertin v. State; Hope v. Pelzer; Warrantless in-school interviews; Barber v. Miller; Andrews v. Hickman Cnty.; Safford Unified Sch. Dist. No. 1 v. Redding; Doe v. Heck (7th Cir.); A seizure; O’Malley v. City of Flint; United States v. Mendenhall; Jones v. Hunt (10th Cir.); The “special needs” exception to the warrant requirement; Griffin v. Wisconsin; New Jersey v. T.L.O.; Snell v. Tunnell (10th Cir.); Whether the law governing in-school interviews by social workers was clearly established at the time of defendants’ conduct; Camreta v. Greene; Fourteenth Amendment procedural & substantive due process claims; County of Sacramento v. Lewis; Bartell v. Lohiser; Kottmyer v. Maas; Mathews v. Eldridge; Quilloin v. Walcott; Lassiter v. Department of Soc. Servs.; Stanley v. Illinois; Cleveland Bd. of Educ. v. LaFleur; Troxel v. Granville; Prince v. Massachusetts; Smith v. Williams-Ash; Dupuy v. Samuels (7th Cir.); The Parratt-Hudson doctrine; Hudson v. Palmer; Parratt v. Taylor; Zinermon v. Burch

While the court held that the Fourth Amendment governs a social worker’s in-school interview of a child pursuant to a child abuse investigation, and that defendants-social workers violated the Constitution by questioning the children without a “reasonable suspicion” of child abuse, it reversed the denial of qualified immunity on plaintiffs’ Fourth Amendment claims. Defendants were still entitled to qualified immunity because the law governing warrantless, in-school interviews by social workers was not clearly established at the time of their conduct. But the court affirmed the denial of qualified immunity on plaintiffs’ Fourteenth Amendment procedural and substantive due process claims. Plaintiffs alleged that social workers who worked for the Kentucky Health and Family Services “violated their Fourth Amendment rights by subjecting four of the children to warrantless in-school interrogations without reasonable suspicion of child abuse.” The district court denied defendants qualified immunity on this issue. The court held that they violated the Fourth Amendment where they lacked “‘some definite and articulable evidence giving rise to a reasonable suspicion that a child has been abused or is in imminent danger of abuse’ before seizing a child from his or her school classroom without a warrant and when no other exception to the warrant requirement applies.” Additionally, there was “a genuine factual dispute as to whether a reasonable child in Plaintiffs’ position would have felt free to leave the interview.” The court concluded that “viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to Plaintiffs, a reasonable jury could find that Defendants’ seizure of Plaintiffs was not ‘justified at its inception[]’” where the social workers had no “plausible suspicion” of child abuse or neglect. However, defendants were still entitled to qualified immunity where the “Fourth Amendment right to be free from the in-school interviews that occurred” was not clearly established at the time the interviews took place. The court affirmed the district court’s ruling that defendants were not entitled to qualified immunity on plaintiffs’ Fourteenth Amendment due process claims for preventing plaintiff-mother from being alone with her children for two months without procedural protections such as a hearing, and for violating their rights to “family integrity and association without interference from the state[.]” Remanded.