School district may be negligent in off-campus suicide

The Supreme Court of Delaware has ruled that a school district isn’t liable for a student’s suicide that occurred off-campus, under the court’s interpretation of the state’s Wrongful Death Statute, but the guardians have a valid negligence per se claim against the district because officials failed to notify them of the student’s crisis situation, according to the court decision written last month.

In the case of Rogers v Christina School Dist., No. 45, 2012 (Del. Jul. 16, 2013), a friend of Roger L “Mac” Ellerbe Jr, a student at Newark High School in the Christina School District, told an intervention specialist at the high school that Mr Ellerbe was expressing suicidal thoughts. Margette Finney, the intervention specialist, met with Mr Ellerbe for four hours one day after the friend told her about Mr Ellerbe’s attempt to suffocate himself the previous weekend. During the interview, she confirmed Mr Ellerbe’s suicide attempt but concluded he was no longer a threat to himself.

So, she sent him back to class and sent an email to the principal and other counselors at the school summarizing her conclusions. When Mr Ellerbe got home after school that afternoon, he committed suicide, USA Today reported.

School officials never told Linda Rogers, Mr Ellerbe’s grandmother and legal guardian, that they had confirmed his crisis situation the previous weekend. However, they did say they left a message at her listed place of employment, General Motors. Mrs Rogers said she never knew about his intentions, though, since she had lost that job. She therefore never got her grandson the help he needed.

But both the Delaware Department of Education and the Christina School District have fairly specific regulations in place saying schools must notify a child’s legal guardian of any crisis situation. Because of phone tag, whether or not that notification took place is in dispute.

Mrs Rogers and her husband sued the school district and Ms Finney in state court, claiming the school had wrongfully caused their grandson’s death. The trial court granted summary judgment in favor of the district and Ms Finney, saying the school had no “duty of care” in this case. (A wrongful death claim usually requires some affirmative action on the part of the defendant, which didn’t happen here: nothing Ms Finney did increased the likelihood that Mr Ellerbe would commit suicide.)

On appeal, the Supreme Court agreed the wrongful death claim was without merit. It also rejected claims made that the in loco parentis statutes gave the school a common law duty of care. “There is no Delaware precedent suggesting that in loco parentis should be applied to an injury sustained by a high school student not inflicted by another student, or, as the [plaintiffs] urge, instances where a school administrator fails to alert medical professionals or the student’s guardians,” the court found. “Rather, much of the case law involves instances where the school administrator conducts a search of a student’s property or disciplines a student.”

However, at the urging of the supreme court, Mr and Mrs Rogers amended their claim to charge the school with negligence per se. This is different, and the court found for the Rogerses on this count. Their claim that the school had negligently failed to follow the district’s and state’s regulation about notifying guardians had merit, and it needed looking into. The lower court’s decision was therefore reversed:

The basic concept of negligence per se is to ease the requirements of proving negligence if a party inflicts harm that the General Assembly attempted to alleviate by legislative enactment. … It has been long settled in this State that the violation of a statute or ordinance enacted for the safety of others is negligence in law or negligence per se. … The Protocols, mandated by DDE and promulgated pursuant to its statutory authority delegated by the General Assembly, have the force and effect of law.

Now, the Delaware Supreme Court didn’t say the school district was negligent; it just sent the case back to the lower court, saying the facts had to be considered in a negligence per se claim. The lower court couldn’t just grant summary judgment without hearing the facts. In other words, the district’s actions, if proved, “establish negligence per se.”

This has some ties to a case in Maryland, Eisel v Board of Education of Montgomery County, 597 A.2d 447 (Md. 1991), in which Maryland’s highest court ruled that schools have to use reasonable means to attempt to prevent suicide when they are made aware of a student’s suicidal intent. That decision also hinged on the existence of regulations issued by the state’s education department.