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…
Many of the cases for which I provide consultation to attorneys (both plaintiff and defense) involve the question of whether the school, through its employees, provided appropriate supervision to students when someone was injured or even killed.
In defense of the school, it should be noted that lack of supervision or inadequate supervision may not necessarily create liability; it must be shown that the lack of supervision is the proximate cause of the injury. Further, for the plaintiff to recover there must be a duty to supervise the plaintiff on the part of the school. Read more…
September – the smell of a freshly waxed floor in your school. This is something that teachers and school administrators are only too familiar with. Along with the clean school, the textbooks piled up on the student desks and the neatly stacked library books always comes some anxiety. When I was a teacher I remember the first-day-of-school nightmares. In my dream was I was not able to control my class. The students were running out the classroom door and I was not able to shout at them to “Come back to the room.” When I became a principal I still had dreams before the opening of school. These were different. I couldn’t get the teachers to supervise their kids. I don’t have those dreams any more but I’m still concerned about supervision of children and keeping them from harm. Read more…
Inadequate supervision, or lack of supervision, is the most common allegation of negligence involving children in schools and other organizations. It is estimated that 80% of plaintiffs’ allegations involve supervision.
That being said, inadequate supervision, or lack of supervision, may not necessarily create liability – it must be shown that the lack of supervision is actually the proximate cause of the injury. Further, for the plaintiff to recover there must first have been a duty to supervise the plaintiff on the part of the defendant. A key element is the distinction between a duty to render “specific” supervision and a duty to provide “general” supervision. Other issues deal with the competence of the person who is supervising, the location of the supervisor at the time of the injury and the number of supervisors on duty. 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…
