Local News in Brief : Santa Ana : Boy With Antibodies to AIDS Loses Court Suit

A $2-million lawsuit claiming a youngster with AIDS antibodies was illegally banned from classes by the Saddleback Valley Unified School District was dismissed by a federal court judge.

U.S. District Judge J. Spencer Letts on Monday threw out Channon Phipps’ civil rights lawsuit on grounds Saddleback Valley was a governmental agency legally immune from prosecution.

Letts also noted that Orange County Superior Court and the state appellate court already had concluded that Channon and his aunt and guardian, Deborha Phipps of El Toro, didn’t have grounds on which to sue for damages.

“This is the end. We have exhausted all our avenues on this,” said attorney Merwin Auslander, who filed the lawsuit May 15.

“We’re glad to know it’s dismissed,” district Supt. Peter Hartman said Tuesday.

The suit said the district discriminated against Channon when it banned him from a fifth-grade class at Rancho Canada Elementary School for five months in 1985.

The district had decided the boy, a hemophiliac infected from a transfusion of tainted blood products, might endanger students and should be barred until the district adopted an AIDS policy.

Phipps then began a home-tutoring program. When Deborha Phipps later complained that she believed that home study was inadequate and that the boy should be back in class, the district refused to permit him back in school, and she filed suit in Superior Court--but not, initially, for damages.

Superior Court Judge Harmon G. Scoville then ordered the district to allow the boy to return to school.