42 USC § 1983 action alleging school officials violated a student’s Fourth Amendment rights by searching for a weapon; "Search" of a student; Whether the officials' search “exceeded the scope of what the circumstances warranted”; “Seizure” of a student; New Jersey v TLO; Couture v Board of Educ of Albuquerque Pub Schs (10th Cir); Procedural due process; Substantive due process; Whether defendants were entitled to governmental immunity as to state-law tort claims

[This appeal was from the ED-MI.] The court held for the first time in a published opinion in this circuit that “a public-school official makes a Fourth Amendment seizure of a student when the official limits ‘the student’s freedom of movement’ in a manner that ‘significantly exceed[s] that inherent in everyday, compulsory attendance.’” It concluded that defendants did not violate the student’s constitutional rights and they were immune from liability for the state-law tort claims. Student-H.H. made a remark in class about either having a gun or intending to bring one to school. School officials questioned him and searched him, his backpack and his locker, finding nothing. Even so, the school expelled him for 180 days for “making a threat of violence.” Plaintiffs, his parents, sued the school and school officials under § 1983, arguing that he was unlawfully seized and searched, his due process rights were violated, and they also brought state-law tort claims. The district court granted defendants summary judgment. On appeal, the court first reviewed plaintiffs’ claim of an unconstitutional search. They claimed that the school officials “exceeded the scope of what the circumstances warranted.” The court disagreed, determining the search was not unreasonably intrusive considering the circumstances—a school shooting had taken place only a week earlier and only 60 miles away. Under these circumstances, “a light search of H.H.’s body” and “searches of his backpack and locker were ‘reasonably related’ to the circumstances.” Thus, the court held that the search was “reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.” As to the allegedly unconstitutional seizure, the court concluded that “requiring a limitation on movement beyond the typical restriction on students’ ability to move about, and outside of, school as they see fit before classifying such a restriction as a ‘seizure’ accounts for ‘schools’ custodial and tutelary responsibility for children.’” As to when a student’s seizure becomes unreasonable, it joined several other “circuits that have adopted the T.L.O. standard for analyzing unreasonable-seizure claims made by students in the public-school context.” Here, the court found that, assuming H.H. was seized, the seizure was not “unreasonable. The school officials had clear justification to hold H.H. to question him about his purported comments in class. And they held him only for 30 minutes—which was ‘no longer than necessary to’ investigate and ‘confirm that [he] had no gun on [his] person or in’ his belongings.” It added that the fact he “was not advised of a criminal investigation or read his rights does not alter this conclusion.” It also held that his procedural and substantive due process rights were not violated. Affirmed.