NYU student Avram Wisnia was “horsing around a kiddie pool filled with gelatin” at a dorm party in 2004 when he was pushed and broke his hip. A judge has now ruled he cannot sue the university for allowing the event and having the school food service furnish the gelatin, the risks of such a recreation being obvious enough to put him on notice. (“No Go In Jell-o Wrestling Lawsuit Against NYU”, AP/WNBC, Jan. 29).
Posts Tagged ‘schools’
Big teaching-hospital cuts after Oregon high court ruling
But they told us the malpractice crisis was just a myth dept. (Associated Press):
Oregon Health & Science University plans to cut at least 200 jobs and raise tuition by at least 10 percent to free the money needed for higher insurance costs following an Oregon Supreme Court ruling.
The December ruling cleared the way for the family of a brain-damaged child to pursue malpractice damages from the university. It effectively eliminated a liability cap of $200,000 designed to protect state agencies from major damage awards.
The cutbacks, expected to be announced Friday, were first reported by The Oregonian newspaper. Besides trimming jobs and hiking tuition, OHSU expects to restructure or close clinical, research and education programs, and scale back construction on Portland’s South Waterfront.
OHSU said the court ruling will add $30 million a year in insurance and administrative expenses. Though that’s only 2 percent of OHSU’s annual operating budget of about $1.5 billion, it amounts to more than 60 percent of its annual support from the state’s general fund. …
OHSU is Portland’s largest private employer with about 12,000 staff.
More: Victoria Taft (cross-posted from Point of Law).
CCALA: California schools “ripped off by litigation”
A report from California Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse tells us: “In fiscal year 2005, three of California’s five largest school districts (listed above) paid $32.8 million in litigation costs – $8.0 million in verdicts and settlements and $24.8 million to outside counsel.”
I wish the report could have been more persuasive on the costs of litigation: when the unwritten math is done, Los Angeles Unified School District spent less than $40/student on legal costs in FY 2005, which is just under 1% of their budget. (Between 2002 and 2005, the average was $70/student/year, and a little less than 2% of the budget.) Is that too much? Relatively little? I’m hard-pressed to say (school officials do do actionable things that get themselves legitimately sued), and the report does not give us a baseline. Did something change to cause costs to go down by over 60% between 2002 and 2005, or was 2002 (or 2005) an outlier? The report does not indicate. Why does Elk Grove’s number include insurance costs and LAUSD’s doesn’t? (Is the report understating liability expense?)
Other data in the report are more interesting and troubling: “A 2004 study by Harris Interactive revealed that more than half of educators are concerned about the risks of legal challenges in their jobs and most educators feel the current legal climate has resulted in ‘defensive teaching,’” and a sizable majority feel that their own ability to do the job has been adversely affected by liability fears. And there is an extensive report of a lawsuit against a Napa school district dress code that led the school district to change the policy rather than spend a small fortune defending it in court—though that is a consequence more of federal courts’ meddling in school administration on purportedly constitutional grounds (Nov. 2003) than of anything state legislative action can do, if a reminder that presidential judicial appointments really matter.
The evils of food
Kim Severson of the New York Times has this article on the growing interest among parents of food allergies:
Record numbers of parents are heading to doctors concerned that their children are allergic to a long list of foods. States are passing laws requiring schools to have policies protecting children with food allergies. But no one knows why the number of allergies seems to be on the rise, or even if they are rising as fast as some believe.
Ms. O’Brien and leading allergy researchers agree that few reliable studies on food allergies exist. The best estimates suggest that 4 to 8 percent of young children suffer from them, though the reactions tend to grow less serious and less frequent as children grow older.
Even though the science is weak, new laws and policies are enacted under the banner of child safety. Yet as David Bernstein points out, we’ve been down this road before.
Stories that shouldn’t get away, part II
Three cases of catastrophic injury to children, three defendants asked to pay:
- Freak accident in school parking lot “foreseeable”. According to a Los Angeles jury, it was reasonably foreseeable that an ailing parent driving a disability-converted van with hand-controlled accelerator and brakes would lose control of her vehicle and jump the curb at full speed, killing first-grader Jordan Sandels in the company of her father at Encino’s Lanai Road Elementary School in 2005. Aside from the many and baffling supposed lessons of the resulting $10 million verdict for school grounds planners (always build lots big enough that parents won’t have to park off-site?), a highlight was the jury’s finding that the parent behind the wheel was only 20 percent to blame and shouldn’t have to pay anything [LA Times via Handel on the Law]
- Destroy evidence, then win $41 million from second defendant. Joseph Provenza, 13, was catastrophically burned in 2001 when he “jumped a 15-year-old Yamaha motorcycle resulting in a crash and post-crash fire” [Bowman & Brooke summary] The plaintiff’s father, himself a plaintiff in the suit, later admitted that he willfully removed and discarded a bypass wire from the motorcycle before Yamaha’s investigators could see it because he thought the evidence of modification might interfere with his son’s lawsuit, and either he or members of the legal team removed or modified other relevant equipment on the vehicle. A judge dismissed the claims against Yamaha, citing willful and pervasive spoliation of evidence as well as lack of candor in discovery responses on the issue. The family then proceeded to trial against a Wisconsin clothing manufacturer which it argued should have made its garments flame-retardant because they were promoted for use with motorcycles, although federal law did not and does not require flame retardance in such garments. The jury awarded $41 million; a defense lawyer says the jurors were never allowed to learn about the hot-wire modification, though it was the cause of the accident, or the subsequent spoliation. [Las Vegas Review-Journal, Janesville (Wis.) Gazette; Carcione law firm (also of Romo v. Ford Motor fame)]. More: BrooklynWolf.
- Schools sometimes responsible for injuries after school hours.The South Main Street Elementary School in Pleasantville, N.J. had long preannounced a 1:30 p.m. early dismissal on a certain day in 2001. Third-grader Joseph Jerkins was allowed to leave, in accord with school policy for youngsters whose families had not requested that they be released only into adult custody. Two hours and twenty minutes later, while playing with a friend, Joseph ran into the street and was struck by a car and horribly injured. The family said it had not been adequately informed of the early dismissal. A trial court dismissed the suit, but the New Jersey Supreme Court, announcing a new duty of care for school districts, ruled that the family could sue on the grounds that the school’s policies should have restrained the boy from leaving. The district settled for $6 million. [AP/Philly.com; NJ Principals and Supervisors Association]
Web accessibility: Sylvan’s surrender
The Department of Justice regards online tutoring services as “public accommodations” subject to the Americans with Disabilities Act, and in September entered into a consent decree with Sylvan Learning Centers, which agreed to provide aids such as written materials and “videotext displays” (as well as free sign-language interpreters) for the assistance of deaf persons who might wish to use its services. As TechLaw Journal notes (Sept. 26-30), and as we have often noted before in our ongoing coverage, there is reason to expect the legal pressure for web accessibility to extend to online businesses more generally.
Fifth grader brings steak knife with brown-bag lunch
Along with the piece of steak she’d brought to eat:
“She did not use it inappropriately. She did not threaten anyone with it. She didn’t pull it out and brandish it. Nothing of that nature,” explained Marion County [Ocala, Fla.] School Spokesman Kevin Christian.
The girl is now facing felony charges. (“Knife At Lunch Gets 10-Year-Old Girl Arrested At School”, WFTV, Dec. 14; Never Yet Melted, Dec. 18).
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t files: “Cyber-bullying”
School districts have learned that they cannot discipline students for abusive Internet postings they make off-campus. Layshack v. Hermitage Area School District, No. 074465 (pending 3d Cir.); Dwyer v. OceanPort School District No. 03-6005 (D. N.J.) ($117,500 settlement to student suspended over web site). “Lawyers say school districts are in a legal quandary: If they punish a student for something they did off school grounds, they could get hit with a freedom of speech claim. If they do nothing, they could get hit with failure to act litigation.” (Tresa Baldas, “As ‘cyber-bullying’ grows, so do lawsuits”, National Law Journal, Dec. 10).
Stick figure shooting stick figure with water gun
If the Cape May, N.J. school district was really going to punish a 7-year-old just for making a drawing of such a thing, with no actual water gun in sight, shouldn’t maybe the punishment have been to make him draw a stick figure of a little boy getting an overly-harsh suspension? (Zincavage, Oct. 21; Charles Sykes, “I Have Zero Tolerance for Zero Tolerance Policies”, American Thinker, Oct. 30).
Butter knife expulsion
“Amber Dauge was by all accounts a good student at Goose Creek High School” in South Carolina, until the fateful toast-assistive implement got her busted under the school’s zero-tolerance-for-weapons policy. (Chris Francescani, “Expelled for Possession of a Butter Knife”, ABCNews.com, Oct. 22). See Oct. 23-24, 1999 (knife to cut cake), Aug. 25, 2003 (bread knife). Related: May 2, 2005.