An Arizona appeals court issued a ruling last month in the case of a fifth-grade girl who was struck by a truck as she rode her bike home from school in 2003.
After the accident, Jennifer Monroe was in a coma for two weeks and was permanently injured. The accident happened at a busy intersection, with marked crosswalks but no crossing guards, located one block from her school.
When she turned 18, Ms Monroe sued the school, called BASIS, a public charter school under Arizona law, claiming the school was negligent because:
- No crossing guard was posted at the intersection
- The school was built in close proximity to a dangerous intersection
The trial court granted summary judgment in favor of the BASIS school, holding the school owed no common law or statutory duty of care to Ms Monroe. She appealed to a higher state court, and the Appellate Court for Division Two affirmed the summary judgment:
The relationship between a school and its students parallels aspects of several other special relationships—it is a custodian of students, it is a land possessor who opens the premises to a significant public population, and it acts partially in the place of parents. Where a duty arises from a special relationship, the duty is tied to expected activities within the relationship. Therefore, in the student-school relationship, the duty of care is bounded by geography and time, encompassing risks such as those that occur while the student is at school or otherwise under the school’s control.
The court supported its ruling with a 1995 New York case (Norton v Canandaigua City Sch. Dist) in which the court ruled that a school’s duty to its students is strictly limited by time and space and that the special student-school relationship “exists only so long as a student is in its care and custody during school hours.” That duty of care ends when a child has departed from the school’s custody.
The court also cited a 2002 Utah case (Young v Salt Lake City Sch. Dist), in which the court ruled that the extent of the student-school relationship was limited to the school’s custody over that student.
In the current case, the court considered whether laws that “allow” schools to punish students for off-campus activity related to school made schools “responsible” for the care of students while they’re not in the custody of the school. The court said it did not, as the Arizona legislature specifically chose not to write such a responsibility into the statutes.