What the Maryland Supreme Court’s Decision in Board of Education for Wicomico County v. Sturm Means for Survivors of Abuse in Public Schools
On June 23, 2026, the Supreme Court of Maryland issued a unanimous decision, written by Chief Justice Fader, in Board of Education for Wicomico County v. Sturm. This was an important test case for survivors who, like many of our clients, have claims against public school boards. The result went against the survivor’s side, and we want to explain plainly what the case was about, why the court ruled the way it did, and what Maryland’s lawmakers can do to fix the injustice it leaves behind.
The case involved a woman who said she was sexually abused by a teacher at a public elementary school in Wicomico County when she was a student between 1967 and 1971. After Maryland passed the Child Victims Act in 2023 — the law that removed the old deadlines for filing child sexual abuse lawsuits — she sued the county school board. The board asked the court to dismiss the case, arguing that it was protected by “sovereign immunity.”
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Sovereign immunity is a long-standing legal doctrine that generally bars the government and its agencies from being sued unless the state legislature has expressly authorized suits. County school boards are treated as state agencies, so they are covered by this protection. The central question was whether the Child Victims Act gave survivors permission to sue a public school board for abuse that happened a long time ago.
To answer that, the court explained that suing a government agency requires two conditions to be met. First, the legislature must explicitly allow the lawsuit. Second — and this is the part that decided the case — the legislature must also make money available to pay any judgment, either by setting funds aside or by giving the agency a way to raise the money on its own. If there is no source of money to pay a judgment, then the agency’s immunity has not truly been lifted, no matter what else the law says.
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The most important thing to understand about this decision is that it treats two time periods very differently, and the dividing line is the date the abuse occurred: July 1, 1971. That is the date the Maryland legislature first allowed and required county school boards to buy liability insurance — the only way the legislature has ever given school boards to pay these kinds of claims. Therefore, because of the doctrine of sovereign immunity, any suit against a public school board alleging abuse before July 1, 1971, is barred and cannot proceed in Maryland. During that earlier time, no insurance existed, and the legislature never created any other means of paying a judgment. Because there was never any source of funds to cover these older claims, the court ruled that the board retained its full and complete immunity for that period. That was true even assuming the legislature meant to allow these lawsuits when it passed the Child Victims Act; with no funding in place, the immunity was never effectively lifted. For that reason, the court dismissed Ms. Sturm’s case because her allegations involved abuse before that date.
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For abuse that happened on or after July 1, 1971, the school board’s immunity is only partial. Starting that date, the law required boards to carry insurance for these claims, and the legislature waived the board’s immunity up to the amount of that coverage. This creates a dollar limit on what the board can be made to pay. A board can be sued for abuse during this period, but a survivor can recover only up to that limit — the board keeps its immunity for any amount above it, no matter how large the harm. In short, in this later period, the board is not immune from being sued; it simply has a ceiling on how much it can be made to pay.
As hard as this result is, it is important to understand that the dismissal was ordered “without prejudice.” That means the door is not closed forever. The court was clear that if the Maryland legislature passes a new law in the future that sets aside money to pay these judgments, or gives school boards a way to raise the money, claims like this one could be brought back.
It is also important to understand exactly how far this decision reaches. The complete bar applies only to claims against public school boards for abuse that happened before July 1, 1971. It does not bar claims against public school boards for abuse on or after that date, and it does not apply at all to claims against private organizations, which lack sovereign immunity to begin with.
A Call to the Maryland General Assembly
This decision leaves an arbitrary and painful line running through a generation of survivors. A child abused in a Maryland public school in 1972 may seek justice; a child abused in the very same school, by the very same kind of trusted authority figure, in 1970 may not — not because their suffering was any less real, but because of a funding gap in a decades-old statute the child had no part in writing. The Child Victims Act was passed precisely to recognize that survivors of childhood sexual abuse often come forward only after many years, and to give them their day in court regardless of how long ago the abuse occurred. The promise of that law should not stop at an accident of timing.
This was not a close call for the Court. The Court ruled unanimously, and it leaned heavily on a precedent more than 120 years old that it chose not to revisit, pointing to the settled expectations that had grown up around it. Throughout its opinion, the court emphasized that under Maryland law only the General Assembly — not the courts — may waive the State’s immunity or provide the funding that a waiver requires. The judiciary has now said, as plainly as it can, that this is not a problem the courts will solve. The remedy rests squarely with the legislature. Lawmakers can fix this by appropriating funds to pay judgments in these cases, or by giving county boards of education a mechanism to raise the funds, for claims arising before July 1, 1971. Doing so would complete the work the Child Victims Act began and ensure that the oldest survivors — those who have waited the longest for any measure of accountability — are not the only ones turned away at the courthouse door.
We urge the members of the Maryland General Assembly to take up this issue in the next legislative session and to enact a funding provision that gives these survivors the same access to justice the law already extends to others. The court has told us exactly what is missing. It is now within the legislature’s power, and we believe its responsibility to provide it.
If you have questions about how this ruling affects your own case, or if you would like to learn how to make your voice heard with your representatives, please reach out to our office. We will be glad to walk through it with you.