School bullies will take notice if their peers are convicted in criminal court.
Phoebe Prince, the first-year student at West Hadley High School in Massachusetts committed suicide after relentless bullying. This story has been covered by media around the country for the past several weeks.
This truly is a tragedy that has the ingredients to fashion a major advance in student rights.
Elizabeth D. Scheible, a district attorney in Massachusetts is taking on Phoebe’s bullies through the criminal justice system. At least nine teenagers identified in the bullying tragedy are facing criminal charges, including criminal harassment which carries with it a two and one-half-year jail sentence a fine, or both.
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Liability with respect to schools and school employees is generally based on the legal theory of negligence. Negligence has been defined as: the omission to do something which a reasonable person would do or the doing of something which a prudent and reasonable person would not do; the failure to exercise ordinary care under the circumstances; conduct that a reasonably prudent person should realize involves an unreasonable risk of causing invasion of another’s interest; or, a failure to do an act that is necessary for the protection or assistance of another.
For a plaintiff to prove negligence, generally, four elements must be proven: Read more…
More and more news broadcasts focus on critical problems proliferating in schools around the country-bullying, teachers having sex with students, sexual harassment, student accidents, and students getting killed on class on class trips.
As a school safety expert and education consultant to attorneys, I’ve faced an endless variety of challenges. The only common thread is that when standards of supervision in school are lax, children get hurt. Read more…
More and more news broadcasts focus on critical problems proliferating in schools around the country-bullying, teachers having sex with students, sexual harassment, student accidents, and students getting killed on class on class trips.
As a school safety expert and education consultant to attorneys, I’ve faced an endless variety of challenges. The only common thread is that when standards of supervision in school are lax, children get hurt. Read more…
Recently, the Prescott Unified School District in Arizona announced that it planned to dismantle a padded isolation room at one of its elementary schools that was used to isolate students with disabilities as punishment. This was a six-foot by six-foot room in a public school!
Last month, when I conducted an on-site review of a private school as part of my legal consultation as an education expert with an attorney on a school shooting matter, I came upon two isolation rooms that were padded with black padding and lit by a 40-watt florescent bulb. The principal told me that these are used as “incentives for the kids to follow the rules.” Read more…
