A Belleville family is suing Belleville School District 118 for allegedly failing to protect a junior high school student from a bully, the Belleville News-Democrat reports.
The suit filed in St Clair County Court charges a male student at West Junior High School in Belleville with picking on a girl on the bus one day over her weight. She asked him to stop, and she says that’s when he punched her in the face five times. She claims she was injured—broken nose, facial scarring, and nosebleeds—and suffered mental pain and anguish from the bullying.
The lawsuit, filed against the school district, claims the girl had been bullied for several months by the boy involved in this incident. Despite the bus driver’s knowledge of the bullying, school officials are accused of doing nothing to stop it.
And the district’s failure to stop the bullying isn’t the only thing the girl’s lawyers are saying the school did wrong. She also says the district’s own policy provides for an aide to be present on the bus and monitor student behavior during the ride. If the aide had been present, the girl’s lawyers claim the bullying would not have occurred.
Neither the school district nor the family’s attorney was quoted as having anything to say about the current lawsuit.
Hard to prove this one
The story reports a few charges that form the basis of this lawsuit:
- There was no aide on the bus, a violation of the district’s policy.
- The bus driver knew about the bullying but did nothing to stop it.
The problem with the first argument is that it is hypothetical, and hypothetical scenarios are hard, if not impossible, to prove. The whole thing hinges on what would have happened—a bullying-free bus ride is the current hypothesis—if an aide had been present on the bus, as the district’s policy provides. Nobody knows whether that would be what actually happened, and no jury or judge is going to award damages based on a theory of what might have been.
There’s perhaps a greater chance of winning the case on the second basis above. Let’s look at a few similar cases from around the country.
First, consider the workload of average middle school bus drivers. They have to get kids from the bus stop to school safely, probably about 70 of them at a time, and they have to drive, which means they have to look out the front windshield occasionally.
A bullying incident aboard a school bus in LaCrosse, Wis., in February forced the local school board to revamp some of its bus policies. The bus driver maintained that watching traffic, pedestrians, and about 70 kids made it easy and even likely for him to miss a struggle or bullying incident behind him in the seats. Coverage on WKBT-TV is here.
This is not to say that bus drivers aren’t legally responsible for the behavior of kids on their buses, just that it can be very difficult to watch all the kids every second of the journey. But according to Stephen Kirk Sugarman, a personal injury lawyer in Massachusetts, school bus drivers can’t neglect bullying on the bus in Massachusetts, or they can be sued. Laws in other states vary, but as a general rule, school bus drivers have the duties and responsibilities of “common carriers” for the students they transport.
This position gives the bus driver certain responsibilities, which also carry over to the school district. They can all be liable for damages that occur in bullying incidents on the bus. For example, one Virginia school district is now being sued for failing to stop a bus bullying incident. The bus driver in that case was also charged in a criminal case with felony child neglect, but a jury found her not guilty of felony neglect.
Still, an $8 million civil lawsuit is moving forward in the case. The plaintiffs in Illinois are seeking only $150,000 in damages, but the same sort of laws would seem to apply. What do you think?
