Friday, February 14, 2014
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Dr. Shaw's Speech at Columbine Commemoration Ceremonies
Why Are We Here, Or: If not Now…When?
Dr. James E. Shaw
Address for the “Day of Commemoration and Change” Ceremony for Columbine High School, April 20, 2000
Littleton, Colorado
Good evening: My remarks are dedicated to all the victims of adolescentcide: children slain in acts of homicide committed by other children. We are a poorer nation bereft of: the leadership they might have provided; the cures they might have discovered; the books they might have written; the verses they might have penned; the songs they might have sung; the journeys they might have taken; and the voices they might have raised. May they rest in peace, for we, the living, must not.
We mourn the horrific deaths of 12 students and a teacher in Littleton, Colorado, and the two teen-aged student shooters who killed them before committing suicide themselves. But in our hours, days weeks, and years of mourning, we must require of ourselves that we do more than grieve over the tragic losses of Littleton’s “bright promises” and the other fallen children in the nation whose young lives and gleaming promise were extinguished when they fell victim to children-terrorists. Columbine High School is regarded by some as the Pearl Harbor of school violence. Yet, there are countless isolated, alienated, confused, depressed and angry children throughout the country who, in the last year, have tried, in their own words, to “out-columbine Columbine.”
Although it is only the second quarter of the new millennium, it is awfully late in the day, to use a figure of speech. We must act with a sense of urgency that gives us a truer perspective of “national security” when seen from the point of view of children so viciously and abruptly denied it. For when our children are not safe, neither, then, are we. Guns killed 75,640 children between 1979 and 1996 and injured over 340,000 more. These statistics mean there were more children who suffered gun injuries than Vietnam war veterans injured in combat.
The Centers for Disease Control estimates that since the Columbine High School tragedy last April 20, guns have killed 4,745 children. Death’s clock continues ticking and, at the rate of 0.54 deaths per hour—as we are comfortably ensconced here in the Hilton Hotel—I must inform you that 10 children will not be safely tucked into their beds tonight or any night hereafter. By midnight, tonight, three more will have joined them in death, too.
What kind of inspiration, motivation, or direction do we need to make us protect our children against violence at home, in school, and in their communities? For the past nine years, since 1991, I have been studying what I call “adolescentcide,” a word I coined and mentioned earlier, meaning the phenomenon of children killing children. I spent four of those nine years inside the prison cells of boys and girls incarcerated for murder and homicide. And during those four years, 103 children tracked the trail for me as they graphically described their odysseys from life at home to life in prison. Despite their wide diversity of ethnicity, economic status, and social standing, all of these children were “united” in one respect: They had shown a dominant preference for violent behavior. They had all chosen to “solve” their problem by pointing a gun at “it”—usually another kid.
I figured that by talking to these kids, over and over, they might tell me the ways parents and teachers could have made a difference in their lives. You see, in 1991, when I began my research, in the country’s 75 largest counties, 370,424 juvenile defendants were formally processed through the juvenile courts; 22% of them were murder defendants, and 1,638 of these were prosecuted as adults! As a former teacher who had been threatened, attacked, whose classroom exterior had been strafed by gunfire, and who had to command my elementary school charges, playing outside, to take duck-and-cover maneuvers whenever screeching tires and gunshots were heard, I saw, with my own eyes, school yards being turned into grave yards.
A number of the incarcerated children I interviewed had been cradled in a culture of violence. Resorting to it was as natural as watching their mother, sister, aunt, or grandmother getting smacked around and brutalized by some insecure, ignorant barbarian, otherwise known as husband, lover or boyfriend. Six of “my” kids—as I came to view the 103 children over the years—had killed an immediate blood-relative.
Other children who talked to me from their prison cells and from their hearts, claimed to have grown up in “good” homes where they neither witnessed nor personally experienced violence or brutality. Yet they told stories of verbal and emotional abuse, and lives so bleak, that they desperately wished they could have lived away from their families or, simply, not lived at all.
Still, other children had been physically beaten and tortured, on a regular basis, almost from the time they cut their first teeth. Years of such child abuse conditioned them to be chronically angry, depressed, and waiting for an opportunity to avenge themselves. One of these admitted that, even today, she feels relaxed only “when I see the sight of my own blood.” That had always been her personal signal that whoever was beating her, would finally stop. Today, she regularly injures herself to the point of bleeding.
Still, others of my incarcerated children population stated the coldness, isolation, and indifference that passed for “parenting” in their homes “freaked” them out, drove them “up the wall,” “filled me with hate,” and used other expressions to mean they had been going insane because of the lack of love, warmth, and caring from adults responsible for their care and maintenance: their own parents.
These 103 children told me they killed because they felt alienated, isolated, unloved, unlovable, depressed. They also had experienced verbal, emotional, physical, or sexual abuse by an adult, or some other form of adult betrayal. And they had ready access to alcohol, drugs, and…guns! In 1995 4,236,942 firearms were manufactured. These included pistols, revolvers, rifles, shotguns, and other miscellaneous firepower. Most of these weapons have nothing whatsoever to do with hunting animals. On the contrary, it is people, including children, whose lives have been snuffed out by this tonnage of firearms.
Gunfire killed 4,643 infants, children, and teens in 1996—134 murdered before their 10th birthday. More children under 10 years of age are killed each year by guns than police are killed in the line of duty or U.S. soldiers killed by hostile action. The Centers for Disease Control reports that American children under 15 are 12 times more likely to die from gun violence than their peers in 25 other industrialized nations combined.
As a nation, we have expended Herculean amounts of time, money and effort preparing to meet the twenty-first century by immunizing our ubiquitous computerized-technology systems against the notorious “Y2K Bug.” However necessary that crusade might have been, the larger issue is: How much time, money and effort are we prepared to continue to pour into the real “Y2K’s—Years 2000 Kids—who possess the power to change the course of American history forever? As the Honorable William Bennett, former White House Cabinet member stated, it is only young twenty-first century America that can legitimately be called “history’s most violent ‘civilized’ nation.”
How much longer are we going to put up with the constant magnification and glorification of violence and guns on our movie, television, Internet, and video game screens? Who was asleep at the switch when guns became the only unregulated consumer product in America? Why do we regulate toy guns, but not the real guns that kill a child every two hours? Why are real guns so easy for children to find…in many cases, as easy as toy guns? How much more child carnage and future “Day of Commemorations…” will occur before we decide enough is enough?
Will today be the day when parents across the nation demand changes in the public education format so that mental detectors become as important as metal detectors? If not now, when? Tests for depression, specialized counseling, and behavior monitoring might prove to be positive interventions for those students who are emotionally armed and dangerous.
Is this the day we realize and accept that security cameras take fine external pictures but fail to photograph what is in a student’s heart or what is lacking in his character? If not today, when?
A 1993 report published by the American Psychological Association stated: “There is absolutely no doubt that higher levels of viewing violence on television are correlated with increased acceptance of aggressive attitudes and increased aggressive behavior. Children’s exposure to violence in the mass media, particularly at young ages, can have harmful lifelong consequences.”
Television, in many homes is the electronic fireplace. I would strongly advise parents whose television sets have grown up with, and are now members of, the family to analyze the hours spent in front of the tube versus the minutes spent in real, heart-to-heart conversation. Then, turn that around: Spend minutes in front of the tube but hours in each other’s faces involved in engaging talks, stimulating discussions, and resolutions to problems.
Since last year, how many of you parents, or other parents across America, have increased the amount of time you talk to your children about moral principles, right and wrong behavior, good and bad choices? If you leave it up to the schools to do it, you’re copping out…big time. Moral education, moral direction, and moral intelligence begin at home. It has always been that way, and it will always be that way. It seems that schools would rather teach the right and wrong of Driver Training, or the right and wrong about fouling in basketball or clipping in football, than teach children good, safe, sane behaviors based on the “M” word: Morality. Some schools think that teaching morality is teaching religion. Yet, few people are ever hear complaining about how “straight-laced” and moral the Driver Training rules of the road are, or how strangulating the character-and-moral-development regulations that govern school athletics and other team sports are.
Is there anybody complaining about the smear that 6-year old Elian Gonzalez’s father made about American schools on “60 Minutes” last Sunday? Mr. Gonzalez, a self-admitted communist who embraces the communist regime of Fidel Castro, in a country where bread lines are so long they have “Stop” and “Go” signs and modern medicine got lost in the Bay of Pigs, said American schools are where kids go to get shot. Now, wait a minute. We don’t like to use the words “moral” or “moral education” because they are too closely-aligned with religion, with God. Yet, all of the nation’s state constitutions—and that’s 50—unabashedly acknowledge and otherwise refer to God, in reverential, devout and gracious terms. Are we going to declare those state constitutions unconstitutional?
Mr. Gonzalez’s belief system prohibits that he acknowledge a Supreme Being. Our country was built on freedom of religion. Yet, somehow, that cherished concept has eroded into freedom from religion—or moral teachings, or spiritual guidance. The result is a moral vacuum that breeds immoral children whose god is a gun. And from a backward country where it takes people like Mr. Gonzalez an hour-and-a-half to watch “60 Minutes”, he, who professes no belief in a Supreme Being, calls it like he sees it: “American schools are where kids go to get shot.”
Somebody once asked me if America’s turning its back on—and not fearing—God has put us in the position of now having to fear our very own children, as punishment. That is a very important question. And while I am not suggesting that we turn our schools into seminaries and monasteries, I am suggesting that we begin immediately instituting right-and-wrong concepts, character development frameworks, and life-ethics training in our nation’s kindergarten through 12th-grade school curricula. And some states already have. Incidentally, let’s not throw our hands up and join with Elian Gonzalez’s father in championing Cuba’s educational system.
But what you can do right away is suggest to your school administrators that World History can wait and children ought to be taught how to stop the bloodshed flowing over their modern history today. Tell school leaders that dry Mathematics and arid Algebra might be brought to life if students were repeatedly asked to link raw numbers, equations and theorems to the national daily child homicide death toll.
Tell them also that the Language Arts program might produce more scholarly, articulate, and effective journalists if they were given field assignments in visiting the morgue where juvenile corpses lay; observing court proceedings on juvenile homicide; and interviewing homicide cops in the local precinct.
Don’t forget to tell them that Social Science might be more relevant if students created their own Teen Court, under the watchful eye of a local judge, and heard cases on a variety of campus behavioral infractions, and levied fines and discipline sanctions. If you don’t begin all of this today…when would you?
In the meantime, instill principles of honesty and integrity in your child. Children appreciate knowing what the standard is and reaching it. Knowing right from wrong clears up heir thinking and develops their moral intelligence. Children lacking in moral intelligence do not have the capacity to make moral decisions. If no moral teaching has been instilled in them, there exists a void that will be constantly filled with anti-social thoughts and actions. There is a direct link between a child’s ignorance of life-ethics, his disregard for right and wrong moral behavior, and his decision to kill another child or other human being.
Help your child set clear attainable objectives and thus have the satisfaction of controlling his own future. That’s what really produces genuine self-esteem. Children who lack the capacity for self-love and self-esteem can never realize their full possibilities. One of the most important gifts you can give your child is to teach him to be “response-able”—able to respond.
Teach your child to seek and become aligned with a spiritual purpose. You may find that a church or house of worship can help you to dot his in an organized, efficient, and consistent way. You are the ultimate model for your child, whether you know it or not. You were his first teacher. From you, it is important that he learns there are more good people than bad people and more reasons to be happy and optimistic than sad and sullen.
Teach your child nonviolent communication strategies and peace-building skills. Repeatedly emphasize that a gun or other weapon is never, ever an acceptable alternative to nonviolent interaction and positive communication.
Your child is exposed to you but a fraction of the time, in contrast with his exposure to ideas, people and events outside the family. Try to make each of your interactive moments with him joyful, meaningful, rewarding, and loving experiences. Parents who are in touch with themselves and their loving attitudes and inclinations are more effective parents.
All children who make the decision to kill somebody else are alienated and isolated from important adults in their lives. We must constantly give our children a sense that they are loved and valued and safe. A recent study of students in grades 7-12 showed that teenagers who feel “connected” to their schools and families are less likely to engage in risky or violent behavior. This is hardly a surprise. We cannot underestimate the importance of family, teachers, and faith communities, and we must nurture that feeling of “connectedness” very early. Parents’ voices are the ones children recognize first and fastest. And parents, especially fathers, need to express their love to their children verbally and often. Silence may be all right for strangers, but not for families. Bad kids can happen to good parents, and it is better to take time and lovingly persist in coaxing your son to “talk out” whatever’s on his chest, so he won’t put a bullet into your or somebody else’s chest.
Emotion often drives behavior. Always consult your child’s feelings; how he feels will tell you how he is coping. Children’s emotions are dynamic and their flare-ups illuminate their feelings. Addressing the emotional needs of your child should be a constant priority. Teenagers appreciate and admire parents who patiently stick it out with them, no matter what they throw at their parents, in terms of behavior. Parents who never give up, no matter the emotional “weathers” of their teens, are highly-praised (yes, teens often praise their folks to others), highly-valued and –loved parents.
Parents, you should be able to say to your children: I am your parent, you are my child, and I vow, as of this moment and until time is no more, to love you. You are the best part of me. I hold you, hug your, touch you, teach you, and shine my eyes upon you in love. With patience, I joyfully share my strength with you. With kindness and praise, I show you right from wrong, good from bad. When you fall, I gently pick you up and the feather of my kiss brushes your tears away. The rhythm of our hearts is the beat of our love. It is with pride that I am your model of gentleness, your mirror of sensitivity. I am the grownup you will become. You are my joy and it is with total love that I touch and teach you, guide and lead you.
I promise you a home in which your spirits will lift you to newer and greater heights and where you are free to dream and express the full palette of your talents on the canvas of your personality. I will show you how your desire gives you the energy of angels; you will learn to soar with your enthusiasm. I will show you how to live well—with hope and vision, the confidence to climb any mountain, the trust to reach out and touch. You will learn to help others with a heart that heals. For you I must, and will always be, the sum of patience, the temple of goodness, the soft winds and silent springs of compassion.
I will teach you to love life fully, give to others generously and let your light shine. Perfect love replaces fear, and you will learn how to greet each day with love, salute the Universe with joy and thanksgiving, and to let the quiet night comfort your soul. We are one with this gift called Life, and heirs to the blessings of our grand and glorious Universe. The Universe is filled with abundance and I will teach you to desire only good from the Universe and give only good back to the Universe. You will learn the importance of sharing the blessings the Universe pours upon you. I will teach you to never look back upon yesterday, nor pine away for tomorrow. You will learn that virtue comes from being thankful for the nowness and newness that is today, for it is the gift we call The Present.
You will learn that the mind is a great source of strength, love is the root of your character, and that life is filled with goodness. I promise to let your talents guide, cheer and support you, for that which you love is where your heart is; and where your heart is, there you will thrive. Through peace, you will learn to negotiate; through love, to communicate; and through respect, to articulate. For by giving to others what they need, you thus build the bridge to what you need. Thinking of others is a virtue you will always value. You will learn that laughter is often the best medicine. I promise you days filled with laughter and learning so that your sleep will be filled with dreams of joy. Life is not a lullaby but you will know that your humor is a music that gives life flavor.
You are an important, vital member of this family, a very necessary member of the human race. You help to make family and community strong. From this moment on, until time is no more, I promise to love you.
Thank you for teaching me what the truest treasure in life really is.
While America is not currently at war with any foreign power, we must know—by our presence here—that our children have declared war on each other. There are millions of children who are depending on us—for protection, for guidance, for the basic necessities. Before one more child is lost, we must promise ourselves that we will do all that is necessary to make our homes safer, our children more secure. For home is where the hate is. Children who kill are homegrown. There is no such as unsafe schools, only unsafe homes. Schools are only as safe as the homes they must serve. Children are throwing the family gun into their school backpacks along with their peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and hauling this lot of problems to school to “share” their pain. We need to mount an all-out campaign, which the Centers for Disease Control might appreciate: We must vaccinate our children against violence; immunize our children against intolerance; and humanize our children with love. That is the only way we will re-unite the United States in peace.
When a ship capsizes at sea and life boats are heaved overboard, the rule of rescue is “women and children first.” Our great ship of state is capsizing before our very eyes, and our children are drowning in their own bloodshed. When was the last time you heard anybody say, “Children first”? We need to become instantly and actively involved in the greatest rescue effort this country has ever known, saving our children from adolescentcide. Far too many children’s lives are being lost by the love of force, expressed through violence. The only way we can rescue them is with the force of love.
May God save the children. May the nation’s victims of adolescentcide rest in peace, for we, the living, must not. Our mission of saving our children has scarcely begun.
Dr. James E. Shaw
Address for the “Day of Commemoration and Change” Ceremony for Columbine High School, April 20, 2000
Littleton, Colorado
Good evening: My remarks are dedicated to all the victims of adolescentcide: children slain in acts of homicide committed by other children. We are a poorer nation bereft of: the leadership they might have provided; the cures they might have discovered; the books they might have written; the verses they might have penned; the songs they might have sung; the journeys they might have taken; and the voices they might have raised. May they rest in peace, for we, the living, must not.
We mourn the horrific deaths of 12 students and a teacher in Littleton, Colorado, and the two teen-aged student shooters who killed them before committing suicide themselves. But in our hours, days weeks, and years of mourning, we must require of ourselves that we do more than grieve over the tragic losses of Littleton’s “bright promises” and the other fallen children in the nation whose young lives and gleaming promise were extinguished when they fell victim to children-terrorists. Columbine High School is regarded by some as the Pearl Harbor of school violence. Yet, there are countless isolated, alienated, confused, depressed and angry children throughout the country who, in the last year, have tried, in their own words, to “out-columbine Columbine.”
Although it is only the second quarter of the new millennium, it is awfully late in the day, to use a figure of speech. We must act with a sense of urgency that gives us a truer perspective of “national security” when seen from the point of view of children so viciously and abruptly denied it. For when our children are not safe, neither, then, are we. Guns killed 75,640 children between 1979 and 1996 and injured over 340,000 more. These statistics mean there were more children who suffered gun injuries than Vietnam war veterans injured in combat.
The Centers for Disease Control estimates that since the Columbine High School tragedy last April 20, guns have killed 4,745 children. Death’s clock continues ticking and, at the rate of 0.54 deaths per hour—as we are comfortably ensconced here in the Hilton Hotel—I must inform you that 10 children will not be safely tucked into their beds tonight or any night hereafter. By midnight, tonight, three more will have joined them in death, too.
What kind of inspiration, motivation, or direction do we need to make us protect our children against violence at home, in school, and in their communities? For the past nine years, since 1991, I have been studying what I call “adolescentcide,” a word I coined and mentioned earlier, meaning the phenomenon of children killing children. I spent four of those nine years inside the prison cells of boys and girls incarcerated for murder and homicide. And during those four years, 103 children tracked the trail for me as they graphically described their odysseys from life at home to life in prison. Despite their wide diversity of ethnicity, economic status, and social standing, all of these children were “united” in one respect: They had shown a dominant preference for violent behavior. They had all chosen to “solve” their problem by pointing a gun at “it”—usually another kid.
I figured that by talking to these kids, over and over, they might tell me the ways parents and teachers could have made a difference in their lives. You see, in 1991, when I began my research, in the country’s 75 largest counties, 370,424 juvenile defendants were formally processed through the juvenile courts; 22% of them were murder defendants, and 1,638 of these were prosecuted as adults! As a former teacher who had been threatened, attacked, whose classroom exterior had been strafed by gunfire, and who had to command my elementary school charges, playing outside, to take duck-and-cover maneuvers whenever screeching tires and gunshots were heard, I saw, with my own eyes, school yards being turned into grave yards.
A number of the incarcerated children I interviewed had been cradled in a culture of violence. Resorting to it was as natural as watching their mother, sister, aunt, or grandmother getting smacked around and brutalized by some insecure, ignorant barbarian, otherwise known as husband, lover or boyfriend. Six of “my” kids—as I came to view the 103 children over the years—had killed an immediate blood-relative.
Other children who talked to me from their prison cells and from their hearts, claimed to have grown up in “good” homes where they neither witnessed nor personally experienced violence or brutality. Yet they told stories of verbal and emotional abuse, and lives so bleak, that they desperately wished they could have lived away from their families or, simply, not lived at all.
Still, other children had been physically beaten and tortured, on a regular basis, almost from the time they cut their first teeth. Years of such child abuse conditioned them to be chronically angry, depressed, and waiting for an opportunity to avenge themselves. One of these admitted that, even today, she feels relaxed only “when I see the sight of my own blood.” That had always been her personal signal that whoever was beating her, would finally stop. Today, she regularly injures herself to the point of bleeding.
Still, others of my incarcerated children population stated the coldness, isolation, and indifference that passed for “parenting” in their homes “freaked” them out, drove them “up the wall,” “filled me with hate,” and used other expressions to mean they had been going insane because of the lack of love, warmth, and caring from adults responsible for their care and maintenance: their own parents.
These 103 children told me they killed because they felt alienated, isolated, unloved, unlovable, depressed. They also had experienced verbal, emotional, physical, or sexual abuse by an adult, or some other form of adult betrayal. And they had ready access to alcohol, drugs, and…guns! In 1995 4,236,942 firearms were manufactured. These included pistols, revolvers, rifles, shotguns, and other miscellaneous firepower. Most of these weapons have nothing whatsoever to do with hunting animals. On the contrary, it is people, including children, whose lives have been snuffed out by this tonnage of firearms.
Gunfire killed 4,643 infants, children, and teens in 1996—134 murdered before their 10th birthday. More children under 10 years of age are killed each year by guns than police are killed in the line of duty or U.S. soldiers killed by hostile action. The Centers for Disease Control reports that American children under 15 are 12 times more likely to die from gun violence than their peers in 25 other industrialized nations combined.
As a nation, we have expended Herculean amounts of time, money and effort preparing to meet the twenty-first century by immunizing our ubiquitous computerized-technology systems against the notorious “Y2K Bug.” However necessary that crusade might have been, the larger issue is: How much time, money and effort are we prepared to continue to pour into the real “Y2K’s—Years 2000 Kids—who possess the power to change the course of American history forever? As the Honorable William Bennett, former White House Cabinet member stated, it is only young twenty-first century America that can legitimately be called “history’s most violent ‘civilized’ nation.”
How much longer are we going to put up with the constant magnification and glorification of violence and guns on our movie, television, Internet, and video game screens? Who was asleep at the switch when guns became the only unregulated consumer product in America? Why do we regulate toy guns, but not the real guns that kill a child every two hours? Why are real guns so easy for children to find…in many cases, as easy as toy guns? How much more child carnage and future “Day of Commemorations…” will occur before we decide enough is enough?
Will today be the day when parents across the nation demand changes in the public education format so that mental detectors become as important as metal detectors? If not now, when? Tests for depression, specialized counseling, and behavior monitoring might prove to be positive interventions for those students who are emotionally armed and dangerous.
Is this the day we realize and accept that security cameras take fine external pictures but fail to photograph what is in a student’s heart or what is lacking in his character? If not today, when?
A 1993 report published by the American Psychological Association stated: “There is absolutely no doubt that higher levels of viewing violence on television are correlated with increased acceptance of aggressive attitudes and increased aggressive behavior. Children’s exposure to violence in the mass media, particularly at young ages, can have harmful lifelong consequences.”
Television, in many homes is the electronic fireplace. I would strongly advise parents whose television sets have grown up with, and are now members of, the family to analyze the hours spent in front of the tube versus the minutes spent in real, heart-to-heart conversation. Then, turn that around: Spend minutes in front of the tube but hours in each other’s faces involved in engaging talks, stimulating discussions, and resolutions to problems.
Since last year, how many of you parents, or other parents across America, have increased the amount of time you talk to your children about moral principles, right and wrong behavior, good and bad choices? If you leave it up to the schools to do it, you’re copping out…big time. Moral education, moral direction, and moral intelligence begin at home. It has always been that way, and it will always be that way. It seems that schools would rather teach the right and wrong of Driver Training, or the right and wrong about fouling in basketball or clipping in football, than teach children good, safe, sane behaviors based on the “M” word: Morality. Some schools think that teaching morality is teaching religion. Yet, few people are ever hear complaining about how “straight-laced” and moral the Driver Training rules of the road are, or how strangulating the character-and-moral-development regulations that govern school athletics and other team sports are.
Is there anybody complaining about the smear that 6-year old Elian Gonzalez’s father made about American schools on “60 Minutes” last Sunday? Mr. Gonzalez, a self-admitted communist who embraces the communist regime of Fidel Castro, in a country where bread lines are so long they have “Stop” and “Go” signs and modern medicine got lost in the Bay of Pigs, said American schools are where kids go to get shot. Now, wait a minute. We don’t like to use the words “moral” or “moral education” because they are too closely-aligned with religion, with God. Yet, all of the nation’s state constitutions—and that’s 50—unabashedly acknowledge and otherwise refer to God, in reverential, devout and gracious terms. Are we going to declare those state constitutions unconstitutional?
Mr. Gonzalez’s belief system prohibits that he acknowledge a Supreme Being. Our country was built on freedom of religion. Yet, somehow, that cherished concept has eroded into freedom from religion—or moral teachings, or spiritual guidance. The result is a moral vacuum that breeds immoral children whose god is a gun. And from a backward country where it takes people like Mr. Gonzalez an hour-and-a-half to watch “60 Minutes”, he, who professes no belief in a Supreme Being, calls it like he sees it: “American schools are where kids go to get shot.”
Somebody once asked me if America’s turning its back on—and not fearing—God has put us in the position of now having to fear our very own children, as punishment. That is a very important question. And while I am not suggesting that we turn our schools into seminaries and monasteries, I am suggesting that we begin immediately instituting right-and-wrong concepts, character development frameworks, and life-ethics training in our nation’s kindergarten through 12th-grade school curricula. And some states already have. Incidentally, let’s not throw our hands up and join with Elian Gonzalez’s father in championing Cuba’s educational system.
But what you can do right away is suggest to your school administrators that World History can wait and children ought to be taught how to stop the bloodshed flowing over their modern history today. Tell school leaders that dry Mathematics and arid Algebra might be brought to life if students were repeatedly asked to link raw numbers, equations and theorems to the national daily child homicide death toll.
Tell them also that the Language Arts program might produce more scholarly, articulate, and effective journalists if they were given field assignments in visiting the morgue where juvenile corpses lay; observing court proceedings on juvenile homicide; and interviewing homicide cops in the local precinct.
Don’t forget to tell them that Social Science might be more relevant if students created their own Teen Court, under the watchful eye of a local judge, and heard cases on a variety of campus behavioral infractions, and levied fines and discipline sanctions. If you don’t begin all of this today…when would you?
In the meantime, instill principles of honesty and integrity in your child. Children appreciate knowing what the standard is and reaching it. Knowing right from wrong clears up heir thinking and develops their moral intelligence. Children lacking in moral intelligence do not have the capacity to make moral decisions. If no moral teaching has been instilled in them, there exists a void that will be constantly filled with anti-social thoughts and actions. There is a direct link between a child’s ignorance of life-ethics, his disregard for right and wrong moral behavior, and his decision to kill another child or other human being.
Help your child set clear attainable objectives and thus have the satisfaction of controlling his own future. That’s what really produces genuine self-esteem. Children who lack the capacity for self-love and self-esteem can never realize their full possibilities. One of the most important gifts you can give your child is to teach him to be “response-able”—able to respond.
Teach your child to seek and become aligned with a spiritual purpose. You may find that a church or house of worship can help you to dot his in an organized, efficient, and consistent way. You are the ultimate model for your child, whether you know it or not. You were his first teacher. From you, it is important that he learns there are more good people than bad people and more reasons to be happy and optimistic than sad and sullen.
Teach your child nonviolent communication strategies and peace-building skills. Repeatedly emphasize that a gun or other weapon is never, ever an acceptable alternative to nonviolent interaction and positive communication.
Your child is exposed to you but a fraction of the time, in contrast with his exposure to ideas, people and events outside the family. Try to make each of your interactive moments with him joyful, meaningful, rewarding, and loving experiences. Parents who are in touch with themselves and their loving attitudes and inclinations are more effective parents.
All children who make the decision to kill somebody else are alienated and isolated from important adults in their lives. We must constantly give our children a sense that they are loved and valued and safe. A recent study of students in grades 7-12 showed that teenagers who feel “connected” to their schools and families are less likely to engage in risky or violent behavior. This is hardly a surprise. We cannot underestimate the importance of family, teachers, and faith communities, and we must nurture that feeling of “connectedness” very early. Parents’ voices are the ones children recognize first and fastest. And parents, especially fathers, need to express their love to their children verbally and often. Silence may be all right for strangers, but not for families. Bad kids can happen to good parents, and it is better to take time and lovingly persist in coaxing your son to “talk out” whatever’s on his chest, so he won’t put a bullet into your or somebody else’s chest.
Emotion often drives behavior. Always consult your child’s feelings; how he feels will tell you how he is coping. Children’s emotions are dynamic and their flare-ups illuminate their feelings. Addressing the emotional needs of your child should be a constant priority. Teenagers appreciate and admire parents who patiently stick it out with them, no matter what they throw at their parents, in terms of behavior. Parents who never give up, no matter the emotional “weathers” of their teens, are highly-praised (yes, teens often praise their folks to others), highly-valued and –loved parents.
Parents, you should be able to say to your children: I am your parent, you are my child, and I vow, as of this moment and until time is no more, to love you. You are the best part of me. I hold you, hug your, touch you, teach you, and shine my eyes upon you in love. With patience, I joyfully share my strength with you. With kindness and praise, I show you right from wrong, good from bad. When you fall, I gently pick you up and the feather of my kiss brushes your tears away. The rhythm of our hearts is the beat of our love. It is with pride that I am your model of gentleness, your mirror of sensitivity. I am the grownup you will become. You are my joy and it is with total love that I touch and teach you, guide and lead you.
I promise you a home in which your spirits will lift you to newer and greater heights and where you are free to dream and express the full palette of your talents on the canvas of your personality. I will show you how your desire gives you the energy of angels; you will learn to soar with your enthusiasm. I will show you how to live well—with hope and vision, the confidence to climb any mountain, the trust to reach out and touch. You will learn to help others with a heart that heals. For you I must, and will always be, the sum of patience, the temple of goodness, the soft winds and silent springs of compassion.
I will teach you to love life fully, give to others generously and let your light shine. Perfect love replaces fear, and you will learn how to greet each day with love, salute the Universe with joy and thanksgiving, and to let the quiet night comfort your soul. We are one with this gift called Life, and heirs to the blessings of our grand and glorious Universe. The Universe is filled with abundance and I will teach you to desire only good from the Universe and give only good back to the Universe. You will learn the importance of sharing the blessings the Universe pours upon you. I will teach you to never look back upon yesterday, nor pine away for tomorrow. You will learn that virtue comes from being thankful for the nowness and newness that is today, for it is the gift we call The Present.
You will learn that the mind is a great source of strength, love is the root of your character, and that life is filled with goodness. I promise to let your talents guide, cheer and support you, for that which you love is where your heart is; and where your heart is, there you will thrive. Through peace, you will learn to negotiate; through love, to communicate; and through respect, to articulate. For by giving to others what they need, you thus build the bridge to what you need. Thinking of others is a virtue you will always value. You will learn that laughter is often the best medicine. I promise you days filled with laughter and learning so that your sleep will be filled with dreams of joy. Life is not a lullaby but you will know that your humor is a music that gives life flavor.
You are an important, vital member of this family, a very necessary member of the human race. You help to make family and community strong. From this moment on, until time is no more, I promise to love you.
Thank you for teaching me what the truest treasure in life really is.
While America is not currently at war with any foreign power, we must know—by our presence here—that our children have declared war on each other. There are millions of children who are depending on us—for protection, for guidance, for the basic necessities. Before one more child is lost, we must promise ourselves that we will do all that is necessary to make our homes safer, our children more secure. For home is where the hate is. Children who kill are homegrown. There is no such as unsafe schools, only unsafe homes. Schools are only as safe as the homes they must serve. Children are throwing the family gun into their school backpacks along with their peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and hauling this lot of problems to school to “share” their pain. We need to mount an all-out campaign, which the Centers for Disease Control might appreciate: We must vaccinate our children against violence; immunize our children against intolerance; and humanize our children with love. That is the only way we will re-unite the United States in peace.
When a ship capsizes at sea and life boats are heaved overboard, the rule of rescue is “women and children first.” Our great ship of state is capsizing before our very eyes, and our children are drowning in their own bloodshed. When was the last time you heard anybody say, “Children first”? We need to become instantly and actively involved in the greatest rescue effort this country has ever known, saving our children from adolescentcide. Far too many children’s lives are being lost by the love of force, expressed through violence. The only way we can rescue them is with the force of love.
May God save the children. May the nation’s victims of adolescentcide rest in peace, for we, the living, must not. Our mission of saving our children has scarcely begun.
Friday, February 9, 2007
In Loco Parentis Litigation: the Hot Stock du Juor
In Loco Parentis Litigation: the Hot Stock Du Jour
By James E. Shaw, Ph.D.
If there is any school superintendent in the nation who currently operates without school safety plans in place (quite apart from the noticeable but ignored "thou-shalt-nots" festooned on campus walls and fences), s/he needs to regard—as a wake-up scream—the thunderous allegations of negligence, carelessness, child endangerment, a priori evidence of premeditation, contributing to the homicidal acts of minors, and even conspiracy hurled by a passing parade of aggrieved and angry parents, as they now set the pace nationwide in filing lawsuits over the on-campus deaths of their children, who in recent years were victims of school shootings or other violent acts. These are the parents whose sizable judgment awards and out-of-court settlements have turned the concept of in loco parentis into a sort of "boutique" hot stock du jour. In their minds no damage awards could ever compensate for the deaths of their children. Amid and after news footage showing children carrying lunch bags to school and the same day themselves being carried away in body bags, it is the very rare lawsuit alleging "negligent in loco parentis" that has been held by courts as being without merit.
The Parent Invasion
It is a new day in American school governance, and school administrators must recognize that, in our post-Columbine and post-9/11 climates, parents are holding them utterly responsible for ensuring the perpetual safe-keeping and welfare of their children. School officials and their general counsels must also understand that the wrath of grieving, surviving parents is being visited upon not only schools and school districts but also upon others whom parents deem responsible for their victim-children’s injuries or deaths—whether such occurred from homicidal acts or not. Newspaper headlines trumpet the plaintiff-parent lawsuits now approaching the $500-million dollar mark in the aftermath of Littleton, Colorado’s Columbine High School tragedy. In Norwalk, California, an $80-million settlement was reached with the family of a boy left paralyzed when he was struck in a crosswalk by a car driven by a school district employee. Parents of a 7-year old boy killed by a janitor’s utility cart at his Los Angeles school sued the school district for $84 million. Parents of a Westchester county (NY) football player who died after being punched at an after-school drinking party sued 14 teenagers, saying they caused their son’s death through misconduct and negligence. In this case the school was not targeted in the suit, since the party was after school hours and off-campus.
Now Is Not the Time to Wait
Rather than wait for the next violent school tragedy to occur, or for some legislative mandate, educators ought to begin developing comprehensive school safety plans…now! All high school districts in the country have clear and complete standards for the instruction and evaluation of their driver education and training courses. Likewise, school administrators ought to exercise the same diligence and develop comprehensive school safety standards complete with student and staff accountability measures.
It Takes Only One Child to Raze a Village
Following my 48-month in-person/in-prison interviews of 103 girls and boys incarcerated in state prisons for committing homicide and murder, Bobbie Battista, former host of CNN TalkBack Live, invited me onto her show where she publicly took me to task for stating that, today, children are going to school and getting executed, not educated. She said, "Every child who gets bullied does not become a murderer." My response was that "Historically, school violence has never been about ‘every child,’ most children, or the majority. School violence has always been brought to us by the few children in the minority we overlook or disregard, whose needs are greater and graver than we could ever imagine. The students in the minority whose names were Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris made Columbine High School the Pearl Harbor of school violence."
And I told Katie Couric, on NBC Today, "the weak—in a reversal of Darwin’s survival of the fittest—are now going after and taking out the strong." School boards and their superintendents can no longer afford to think their schools are idyllic paradises, immune to the sins and sizzles of the "greater out there." Short-sighted indeed is the school official who wraps herself in the cozy and complacent delusion that every child is simply not suddenly going to throw a gun into his backpack, along with his peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and summarily "announce" his arrival at school with a broadcast of gunfire. Any school official who fails to see that the majority no longer reflects or represents what the FBI now calls the "student threatener," could be playing a deadly numbers game: 1 student can be more dangerous than 100!
Discipline: Your Best Investment
What should school administrators immediately begin to do to protect their school districts’ treasuries from being drained dry by negligence lawsuits? Let’s take a page out of New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s "book." Mayor Bloomberg has put the New York City schools on notice by announcing his objective to ferret out and punish disruptive students in the public schools, particularly those in schools with high rates of criminal violence (in previous years thought of as normal), and hold the principals more accountable for reducing disciplinary problems within their schools. My advice is that school administrators should structure their discipline policies along Mayor Bloomberg’s "safety first" principles. Then, if these school officials are ever summoned to the witness stand in court, they will be able to more clearly and convincingly show evidence of a pattern and practice of sound school safety plans and procedures at work.
Zero Tolerance
Likewise, school superintendents should establish zero-tolerance policies against bullying, and against racist, anti-Semitic or homophobic taunts by students. Students engaging in such threatening and harmful behavior should be suspended or expelled. The middle school student whose beating and hospitalization was widely reported in the national press, should have had the satisfaction of knowing that his principal, teachers and counselors who all failed in their job to supervise and protect him, were fired or will be. Personnel policies governing the professional responsibilities of school administrators need to be re-written to include such provisions for firing. The collective dereliction of duty almost resulted in the death of this particular student. That is why in loco parentis is now the new battle cry of litigious parents.
To Sue Or Not to Sue…Parents
Certainly, with an eye toward protecting their purses and public relations, school districts might consider suing the parents of student-terrorists: These bullies, assailants, and other anti-social and hostile beings cause constant pain and suffering and place in jeopardy the lives of other children. But before school superintendents leap to launch litigation against dangerously negligent parents, here are some guidelines they and their school boards can rather immediately turn into active and effective policies for ensuring school safety on their campuses.
• A school safety committee should be formed and composed of the principal or designee; teacher representative of the recognized teacher union; parent of an attending student; classified employee of the recognized employee union; and other members, if desired.
• A comprehensive school safety plan should be jointly written with a representative from a law enforcement agency.
• Each school should have a specific date on which its comprehensive school safety plan is to be adopted and made effective. And each plan should be reviewed every year on that date.
• Before final adoption of the plan, a public meeting should be held by the school safety planning committee at the school site, to allow for input.
• Failure of any school to develop a comprehensive school safety plan should be cited by the school superintendent and sanctions imposed.
• Whether the state legislature has enacted a school safety law or not, every school should forward its completed comprehensive school safety plan to its respective school district office or county office of education for approval.
• At the end of each school year, every school should report on the status of its school safety plan in the annual school accountability report card and to the news media.
Strength in Numbers
When engaging in the development of a comprehensive school safety plan, school superintendents should feel free to consult with their counterparts and colleagues in other cities, townships, boroughs, commonwealths, and states. Again, when disclosed on the witness stand in court, such effort will be seen as equivalent to "due diligence" in the gathering and sifting and sorting of facts, information, and violence prevention strategies and programs, and may favor the superintendent and the school district with the court’s or jurors’ perception of them as concerned and responsive, not careless and negligent.
In addition to the perennial question of accountability, "What did you know and when did you know it?", school officials must today prepare to confront safety negligence lawsuits by coming to terms with the query, "Do you now and did you then have a school safety plan in place?" This will be the presiding question whose answer predicates whether the school district’s treasury will be plundered by grieving and furious plaintiff-parents seeking revenge and relief, or preserved by the court as untouchable domain, protected by a comprehensive school safety plan in no less the same way than the school district’s driver education curriculum protects the district from lawsuits in the aftermath of errant or reckless student drivers who commit vehicular manslaughter.
By James E. Shaw, Ph.D.
If there is any school superintendent in the nation who currently operates without school safety plans in place (quite apart from the noticeable but ignored "thou-shalt-nots" festooned on campus walls and fences), s/he needs to regard—as a wake-up scream—the thunderous allegations of negligence, carelessness, child endangerment, a priori evidence of premeditation, contributing to the homicidal acts of minors, and even conspiracy hurled by a passing parade of aggrieved and angry parents, as they now set the pace nationwide in filing lawsuits over the on-campus deaths of their children, who in recent years were victims of school shootings or other violent acts. These are the parents whose sizable judgment awards and out-of-court settlements have turned the concept of in loco parentis into a sort of "boutique" hot stock du jour. In their minds no damage awards could ever compensate for the deaths of their children. Amid and after news footage showing children carrying lunch bags to school and the same day themselves being carried away in body bags, it is the very rare lawsuit alleging "negligent in loco parentis" that has been held by courts as being without merit.
The Parent Invasion
It is a new day in American school governance, and school administrators must recognize that, in our post-Columbine and post-9/11 climates, parents are holding them utterly responsible for ensuring the perpetual safe-keeping and welfare of their children. School officials and their general counsels must also understand that the wrath of grieving, surviving parents is being visited upon not only schools and school districts but also upon others whom parents deem responsible for their victim-children’s injuries or deaths—whether such occurred from homicidal acts or not. Newspaper headlines trumpet the plaintiff-parent lawsuits now approaching the $500-million dollar mark in the aftermath of Littleton, Colorado’s Columbine High School tragedy. In Norwalk, California, an $80-million settlement was reached with the family of a boy left paralyzed when he was struck in a crosswalk by a car driven by a school district employee. Parents of a 7-year old boy killed by a janitor’s utility cart at his Los Angeles school sued the school district for $84 million. Parents of a Westchester county (NY) football player who died after being punched at an after-school drinking party sued 14 teenagers, saying they caused their son’s death through misconduct and negligence. In this case the school was not targeted in the suit, since the party was after school hours and off-campus.
Now Is Not the Time to Wait
Rather than wait for the next violent school tragedy to occur, or for some legislative mandate, educators ought to begin developing comprehensive school safety plans…now! All high school districts in the country have clear and complete standards for the instruction and evaluation of their driver education and training courses. Likewise, school administrators ought to exercise the same diligence and develop comprehensive school safety standards complete with student and staff accountability measures.
It Takes Only One Child to Raze a Village
Following my 48-month in-person/in-prison interviews of 103 girls and boys incarcerated in state prisons for committing homicide and murder, Bobbie Battista, former host of CNN TalkBack Live, invited me onto her show where she publicly took me to task for stating that, today, children are going to school and getting executed, not educated. She said, "Every child who gets bullied does not become a murderer." My response was that "Historically, school violence has never been about ‘every child,’ most children, or the majority. School violence has always been brought to us by the few children in the minority we overlook or disregard, whose needs are greater and graver than we could ever imagine. The students in the minority whose names were Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris made Columbine High School the Pearl Harbor of school violence."
And I told Katie Couric, on NBC Today, "the weak—in a reversal of Darwin’s survival of the fittest—are now going after and taking out the strong." School boards and their superintendents can no longer afford to think their schools are idyllic paradises, immune to the sins and sizzles of the "greater out there." Short-sighted indeed is the school official who wraps herself in the cozy and complacent delusion that every child is simply not suddenly going to throw a gun into his backpack, along with his peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and summarily "announce" his arrival at school with a broadcast of gunfire. Any school official who fails to see that the majority no longer reflects or represents what the FBI now calls the "student threatener," could be playing a deadly numbers game: 1 student can be more dangerous than 100!
Discipline: Your Best Investment
What should school administrators immediately begin to do to protect their school districts’ treasuries from being drained dry by negligence lawsuits? Let’s take a page out of New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s "book." Mayor Bloomberg has put the New York City schools on notice by announcing his objective to ferret out and punish disruptive students in the public schools, particularly those in schools with high rates of criminal violence (in previous years thought of as normal), and hold the principals more accountable for reducing disciplinary problems within their schools. My advice is that school administrators should structure their discipline policies along Mayor Bloomberg’s "safety first" principles. Then, if these school officials are ever summoned to the witness stand in court, they will be able to more clearly and convincingly show evidence of a pattern and practice of sound school safety plans and procedures at work.
Zero Tolerance
Likewise, school superintendents should establish zero-tolerance policies against bullying, and against racist, anti-Semitic or homophobic taunts by students. Students engaging in such threatening and harmful behavior should be suspended or expelled. The middle school student whose beating and hospitalization was widely reported in the national press, should have had the satisfaction of knowing that his principal, teachers and counselors who all failed in their job to supervise and protect him, were fired or will be. Personnel policies governing the professional responsibilities of school administrators need to be re-written to include such provisions for firing. The collective dereliction of duty almost resulted in the death of this particular student. That is why in loco parentis is now the new battle cry of litigious parents.
To Sue Or Not to Sue…Parents
Certainly, with an eye toward protecting their purses and public relations, school districts might consider suing the parents of student-terrorists: These bullies, assailants, and other anti-social and hostile beings cause constant pain and suffering and place in jeopardy the lives of other children. But before school superintendents leap to launch litigation against dangerously negligent parents, here are some guidelines they and their school boards can rather immediately turn into active and effective policies for ensuring school safety on their campuses.
• A school safety committee should be formed and composed of the principal or designee; teacher representative of the recognized teacher union; parent of an attending student; classified employee of the recognized employee union; and other members, if desired.
• A comprehensive school safety plan should be jointly written with a representative from a law enforcement agency.
• Each school should have a specific date on which its comprehensive school safety plan is to be adopted and made effective. And each plan should be reviewed every year on that date.
• Before final adoption of the plan, a public meeting should be held by the school safety planning committee at the school site, to allow for input.
• Failure of any school to develop a comprehensive school safety plan should be cited by the school superintendent and sanctions imposed.
• Whether the state legislature has enacted a school safety law or not, every school should forward its completed comprehensive school safety plan to its respective school district office or county office of education for approval.
• At the end of each school year, every school should report on the status of its school safety plan in the annual school accountability report card and to the news media.
Strength in Numbers
When engaging in the development of a comprehensive school safety plan, school superintendents should feel free to consult with their counterparts and colleagues in other cities, townships, boroughs, commonwealths, and states. Again, when disclosed on the witness stand in court, such effort will be seen as equivalent to "due diligence" in the gathering and sifting and sorting of facts, information, and violence prevention strategies and programs, and may favor the superintendent and the school district with the court’s or jurors’ perception of them as concerned and responsive, not careless and negligent.
In addition to the perennial question of accountability, "What did you know and when did you know it?", school officials must today prepare to confront safety negligence lawsuits by coming to terms with the query, "Do you now and did you then have a school safety plan in place?" This will be the presiding question whose answer predicates whether the school district’s treasury will be plundered by grieving and furious plaintiff-parents seeking revenge and relief, or preserved by the court as untouchable domain, protected by a comprehensive school safety plan in no less the same way than the school district’s driver education curriculum protects the district from lawsuits in the aftermath of errant or reckless student drivers who commit vehicular manslaughter.
Saturday, February 3, 2007
Going to School May Be Hazardous to Children's Health
Expert Testimony May Show Some Schools
Hazardous to Children’s Health!
By: James E. Shaw, Ph.D.
Tel: 310-678-6950
Email: Dr. Shaw
Website: www.expertincourt.blogspot.com
Listing on Experts.com
Dr. James E. Shaw is the former Director of Child Welfare for the Norwalk La Mirada Unified School District (Southern California), and the former director of the Truancy Court at the Norwalk Superior Court. He is the author of the media-heralded and nationally-acclaimed book, Jack and Jill, Why They Kill, and the B.R.A.V.E. ("Be Resilient Avoid Violence Everywhere") violence education curriculum. His forthcoming book is GANGrene: Youth Terrorism USA. A Superior Court-certified Expert Witness, he works for attorneys, on behalf of plaintiffs or defendants, in civil and criminal matters. Dr. Shaw is an associate member (No. 00711062) of the American Bar Association and the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges.
One wintry afternoon, a San Francisco-area attorney called me to ask if she could enlist my expertise for an assault and personal injury case involving a large high school where her teen-aged client had been viciously brutalized. After being assaulted, he forced himself to drive to an urgent care facility where the scope and extent of his injuries were staggering. I felt chill bumps as the attorney explained that her client lapsed in and out of consciousness while driving to seek medical aid. There was no doubt that her client had been a victim of a perpetrator whose intent was to inflict great bodily harm. The attack occurred in the student parking lot. The student-perpetrator arrived half an hour before his unsuspecting student-victim; and he waited patiently for him in a driving rain.
The attorney said her client and the perpetrator had had a number of prior confrontations, none of which had gone beyond hostile verbal exchanges. However, each confrontation showed identifiable signs of escalating beyond the heated words and hurled threats made publicly on the campus quad during lunch and between classes after passing bells. Each time, moreover, campus security guards had intervened, and the principal and other administrators had talked to the boys about their public displays of their animosity and the disruption it was causing. Scores of students were well aware of the boys’ hostile relationship and were often witnesses to their loud and relentless verbal exchanges. Among the student body, rumors were rife of an impending fight between the boys.
Following the brutal assault in the student parking lot, the principal interviewed two witnesses to the assault, took their statements, yet later said that he lost them. Then he and his co-administrators said that no threats of violence or physical acts of violence occurred, and that the student-victim could easily have walked away to prevent such from occurring. Equally curious was the principal’s inability to provide a satisfactory reason why the security guard, who was daily assigned the student parking lot to monitor and patrol, was absent from the lot during the attack; he was elsewhere on the campus. For a couple of years, the local police department had one of its deputies regularly deployed to the high school. Following the attack, he wrote up an incident report; however, like the principal, he mysteriously "lost" it afterwards.
Later that week, the principal summoned both boys to his office and informed them that they were being placed on suspension from school for being "mutual combatants." The principal’s handling of the assault case and his disregarding abundant a priori signs that the assault itself was a foreseen event, were not supported by either California state law or case law handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court. Indeed, precedent cases of law place in a harsh and disapproving light the principal’s errors and omissions. Controlling my ire at the irresponsibility and dereliction of the principal, I said "yes" when the attorney asked me to take the case as her Expert Witness. There are several issues (enumerated below) at work here, in this most unfortunate case. Yet there are other cases like it throughout the state. The court held this particular school district responsible for the specific physical injuries the victim-student suffered. School officials must recognize and accept their clear-cut and well-defined responsibilities under the law to prevent these kinds of campus hazards and their mandated duty to care for and protect their students.
1. The High School’s Obligation to Protect Students and Prevent Harm
Courts have long recognized that teachers and school administrators must act to control and protect students—even in the absence of a formal rule. Immediate classroom and campus control of student conduct is conferred upon schools under the in loco parentis doctrine, which conduct is put in perspective in an old Wisconsin case:
While the principal or teacher in charge of a public school is subordinate to the school board or board of education of his district or city, and must enforce rules and regulations adopted by the board for the government of the school, and execute all its lawful orders in that behalf, he does not derive all his power and authority in the school and over his pupils from affirmative action of the board. He stands for the time being in loco parentis to his pupils, and because of that relation he must necessarily exercise authority over them in many things concerning which the board may have remained silent. In the school, as in the family, there exists on the part of the pupils the obligations of obedience to lawful commands, subordination, civil deportment, respect for the rights of other pupils and fidelity to duty. These obligations are inherent in any proper school system, and constitute, so to speak, the common law of the school. [State ex rel. Burpee v. Burton, 45 Wis. 150, 30 Am.Rep. 706 (1878) ]
The high school principal and his co-administrators failed their "in loco parentis" obligation by depriving the student parking lot, in which the assault and attack upon the victim-student took place, of a security guard whose presence, according to depositional testimony, was usually daily, regular, and habitual. Equally unacceptable was the principal’s choosing to rationalize away the assault and battery as the conduct of "mutual combatants." The objective of the school’s administrators ought not to have been to mitigate the severity of the perpetrator’s assault and battery on his victim, or ignore [the facts of] its occurrence at all, but at the very least to exercise due diligence and proceed to find out what could have been done—pre- and post-altercation—in the best interests of the assaulted and injured student.
2. Deprivation of Due Process Rights
"The fundamental requisite of due process of law is the opportunity to be heard," Grannis v. Ordean, 234 U.S. 385, 394, 34 S.Ct. 779, 783 (1914), a right that the student-victim should have been granted and a requirement that school administrators denied him. This right has "little reality or worth unless one is informed that the matter is pending and can choose for himself whether to…contest." Mullane v. Central Hanover Trust Co., supra, 339 U.S. at 314, 70 S.Ct. at 657. At the very least, therefore, students in jeopardy of being suspended and the consequential recinsion, loss or withdrawal of a protected property interest (e.g., berth on an athletic team, credits toward graduation, or merit qualifications) must be given some kind of notice and afforded some kind of hearing. "Parties whose rights are to be affected are entitled to be heard; and in order that they may enjoy that right they must first be notified." Baldwin v. Hale, 1 Wall. 223, 233 (1864).
Suspending the student-perpetrator and the student-victim, under the pretext of "mutual combat," was tantamount to (1) false arrest; (2) administrators perjuring their previous claims that no threats of violence or physical acts of violence occurred; and (3) deliberate indifference, under which the deprivation of due process rights certainly occurred. In Goss v. Lopez, the Supreme Court of the United States (1975, 419 U.s. 565, 95 S.Ct. 729) ruled that "Temporary suspension requires procedural due process." The principal attested that he interviewed witnesses; yet his admission that he failed to document and preserve their statements places certain doubt upon the fairness of the administrative actions he felt compelled to initiate against the student-victim. By establishing as law Education Code § 48900, the California State Legislature’s intent has been, and is, to provide for suspensions and expulsions for acts of violence such as fighting, except in cases of self-defense. It must be noted that the student-victim is quoted in the case record as trying to avoid a fight because "I’m on probation." Unwilling to risk court difficulties by violating his probation, the victim feared to engage in even the allowable act of defending himself. In its denial to the victim of the Fourteenth Amendment protections of due process and, instead, imposing its defective suspension order upon him, the school further injured him.
3. Pre-Meditation and Lying in Wait
Indeed, the perpetrator’s failure to change his mind and disengage from his desire to assault his victim—and instead, to wait outside in the pouring rain for him to appear—is strongly suggestive of the behavior of a perpetrator-student who had a well-formed and deadly plan in mind. Despite inclement weather, he was intent on biding his time and lying in wait to carry out his plan and, with a brutal discipline, see it through. Indeed, his vicious assault on the unsuspecting victim, and the manner and means with which he took total advantage of the hapless boy in the driving rain, has both undertones and overtones of criminal, malicious intent.
4. Duty to Expel
California Education Code § 48900 provides for the suspension and expulsion from school of a student who has "(a)(1) Caused, attempted to cause, or threatened to cause physical injury to another person; or (2) Willfully used force or violence upon the person of another, except in self-defense; (b) Possessed, sold, or otherwise furnished…any dangerous object."
The principal had a duty to expel the perpetrator. The case record made it clear and convincing that the perpetrator not only attempted to cause physical injury to another person, but actually succeeded in that attempt. Further, that he willfully used force or violence upon his victim is very clear: his resolve was reinforced by his well-conceived and previously-arranged plan. The perpetrator’s throwing his victim upon or against the perpetrator’s girlfriend’s car—such that the car sustained bodily damage—rendered the car itself as the "dangerous object" that the perpetrator "possessed" and used against the victim.
5. Mandated Notification of Law Enforcement California Education Code § 48902 ("Notification of law enforcement authorities; liability for making report; failure to notify; penalty"), with language referencing California Penal Code 245, frankly define’s the principal’s reporting obligations when an assault has occurred. Education Code § 48902 must be viewed as an expression of the legislature’s intent to notify law enforcement whenever a student has been assaulted, battered, and traumatized by a deadly force beating of the kind visited upon the student-victim by the student-perpetrator. This statute (Education Code § 48902) reads: "(a) The principal of a school or the principal’s designee shall, prior to the suspension or expulsion of any pupil notify the appropriate law enforcement authorities of the county or city in which the school is situated, of any acts of the student which may violate § 245 of the Penal Code." California Penal Code 245 states:
245. (a) (1) Any person who commits an assault upon the person of another with a deadly weapon or instrument other than a firearm or by any means of force likely to produce great bodily injury shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for two, three, or four years, or in a county jail for not exceeding one year, or by a fine not exceeding ten thousand dollars ($10,000), or by both the fine and imprisonment.
6. Preventive Detention
One U.S. Supreme Court decision has preventive detention as its purpose and upholds the right of a judge to detain a suspect until trial because the suspect is a danger to others or self. The Court found in Schall v. Martin (1984) that it was legal for a student to be detained for the protection of self and others. (104 S.Ct. 2403; 1984.)
California Penal Code § 628.2 provides that the principal of each school submit to the superintendent of his district a complete report of crimes committed on school grounds.
The principal failed to request the detainment of the student-perpetrator by the police officer assigned to the school (the principal could even have summoned other law enforcement) despite the perpetrator’s expellable offense of assault and battery that rendered him a danger to the campus at large. Moreover, the principal’s failure to exercise due diligence in the gathering of evidence, and his failure to forward any resultant reports to the superintendent of the school district, was both dereliction of duty and a violation of law.
7. Standard of Care and Duty to Protect In Hoff v. Vacaville Unified School District (1997) (68 Cal.Rptr. 2d 920), the Court concluded that the status of the victim made no difference and that the duty of supervision protects nonstudents as well as students.
The principal failed in his duty to protect the student-victim.
The standard of care imposed on school authorities in exercising their supervisorial responsibilities is the degree of care that a person of ordinary prudence, charged with comparable duties, would exercise under the same circumstances. Pirkle v. Oakdale Union School District (1953) (Sac. No. 6183. 40 Cal.2d 207.)
Having affirmed his knowledge about the incidents of heated verbal exchanges and shouting matches between the perpetrator and victim, the principal failed to take precautionary and preventive measures that his peers and professional colleagues in other school districts employ as standard procedures. These include but are not limited to: (1) "Safety Net Program" that functions like an in-school suspension program in which students have the opportunity to receive counseling, behavior monitoring, and coursework; (2) In-School Suspension Program: This is a tried-and-true disciplinary program used by school districts since the 1970’s. It has more of an after-the-fact disciplinary component than "Safety Net," yet also allows for students to complete coursework and keep current academically; (3) Counseling: Principals, relying on "campus intelligence," provided by other students, have successfully taken at-risk students aside and talked frankly to them about the costs and consequences of fighting and breaking school rules; (4) Behavior Contracts: In tandem with either frank discussions or counseling about the student’s infractions, the student is presented with a specific set of behavioral standards and conditions, tailor-made to fit his infractions. He agrees, in writing, to comply with these conditions and attests to having been advised of the consequences for violating the contract; and (5) Parent Conferences: Like the aforementioned counseling, this, when used, has often deterred negative behavior and/or prevented a crisis, when "campus intelligence" informed a principal that such might have occurred. Inasmuch as the principal failed to document his post-altercation interviews of witnesses, it is reasonable to question whether and how he availed himself of prevention and intervention strategies, of the kind mentioned above, or others at his disposal.
8. Ineffective or Lack of Supervision
Either a total lack of supervision or ineffective supervision may constitute deficient ordinary care on the part of those responsible for student supervision. (Dailey v. Los Angeles Unified School District supra.) In the Dailey case, a student fractured his skull when he fell when several boys started to "slap box" while walking to the gymnasium during the lunch hour. The boy died and his parents sued, alleging negligent supervision. The evidence at trial revealed that the head of the Physical Education Department had not assigned a staff member to supervising duty. The "slap boxing" contest had attracted some 30 spectators but the teachers had failed to hear the noise due to "talking on the telephone," "working on lesson plans" and "eating lunch." The Court held the school district liable for its employees’ negligence.
By failing to act on reasonable suspicion (campus rumor) that an altercation between the perpetrator and victim might occur, and by downgrading the level of severity of the major and severe assault upon the victim, the principal and other administrators at the high school also failed to exercise total supervision, which fact predicated a dangerously negligent situation in the student parking lot.
In Lucas v. Fresno Unified School District (1993) 14 Cal. App. 4th 866, a 10-year old student watched a group of students throwing dirt clods at one another during recess. He saw approximately 100 clods thrown before he joined in the fun. He had thrown only two clods when, unfortunately, he was hit in the eye with a clod. The parents sued and the district responded by claiming "assumption of risk" as a defense, that is, the child assumed the risk when he decided to play the game. The Court rejected the defense and decided the case in the pupil’s favor based on the duty to supervise. The Court stated:
The standard of care imposed upon school personnel in carrying out this duty to supervise is identical to that required in the performance of their other duties….Supervision during recess and lunch periods is required in part, so that may be maintained and student conduct regulated. Such regulation is necessary precisely because of the commonly known tendency of students to engage in aggressive and impulsive behavior which exposes them and their peers to the risk of serious physical harm.
The high school’s administrators’ assertion that the victim had opportunities to avoid his perpetrator yet chose none of them, is the same sort of indefensible and court-rejected "assumption of risk" claim noted above.
It is a new day in public school administration, and school administrators must recognize that, in our post-Columbine and post-9/11 nation, parents are holding school districts directly responsible for ensuring the perpetual safe-keeping and welfare of their children. In the foregoing case, the victim-student and his mother successfully sued the school district for a seven-figure sum. In these parents’ minds, no damage award of any size could ever compensate them for the school-based violent deaths of or injuries to their children. Television news reporters, amid horrifying film footage, have commented on the tragic irony of children carrying lunch bags to school only to be later carried away themselves in body bags. Many are the school districts and school administrators who belatedly realize that negligence, indifference, breach of care, and dereliction of duty precipitate or create a dangerous campus environment. Sadly, they will find themselves virtually defenseless against, and certainly embarrassed before, aggrieved and injured plaintiffs suing them for financial damages in courts of law. Damage awards are often substantial in these kinds of cases. The lesson for school officials is crystal clear: Errors and omissions in school safety, as well as negligence and dereliction of duty, can cost their school districts staggering sums and derail or destroy their own careers.
See Dr. James Shaw's Listing on Experts.com.
©Copyright 2005 - All Rights Reserved
DO NOT REPRODUCE WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION BY AUTHOR.
Hazardous to Children’s Health!
By: James E. Shaw, Ph.D.
Tel: 310-678-6950
Email: Dr. Shaw
Website: www.expertincourt.blogspot.com
Listing on Experts.com
Dr. James E. Shaw is the former Director of Child Welfare for the Norwalk La Mirada Unified School District (Southern California), and the former director of the Truancy Court at the Norwalk Superior Court. He is the author of the media-heralded and nationally-acclaimed book, Jack and Jill, Why They Kill, and the B.R.A.V.E. ("Be Resilient Avoid Violence Everywhere") violence education curriculum. His forthcoming book is GANGrene: Youth Terrorism USA. A Superior Court-certified Expert Witness, he works for attorneys, on behalf of plaintiffs or defendants, in civil and criminal matters. Dr. Shaw is an associate member (No. 00711062) of the American Bar Association and the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges.
One wintry afternoon, a San Francisco-area attorney called me to ask if she could enlist my expertise for an assault and personal injury case involving a large high school where her teen-aged client had been viciously brutalized. After being assaulted, he forced himself to drive to an urgent care facility where the scope and extent of his injuries were staggering. I felt chill bumps as the attorney explained that her client lapsed in and out of consciousness while driving to seek medical aid. There was no doubt that her client had been a victim of a perpetrator whose intent was to inflict great bodily harm. The attack occurred in the student parking lot. The student-perpetrator arrived half an hour before his unsuspecting student-victim; and he waited patiently for him in a driving rain.
The attorney said her client and the perpetrator had had a number of prior confrontations, none of which had gone beyond hostile verbal exchanges. However, each confrontation showed identifiable signs of escalating beyond the heated words and hurled threats made publicly on the campus quad during lunch and between classes after passing bells. Each time, moreover, campus security guards had intervened, and the principal and other administrators had talked to the boys about their public displays of their animosity and the disruption it was causing. Scores of students were well aware of the boys’ hostile relationship and were often witnesses to their loud and relentless verbal exchanges. Among the student body, rumors were rife of an impending fight between the boys.
Following the brutal assault in the student parking lot, the principal interviewed two witnesses to the assault, took their statements, yet later said that he lost them. Then he and his co-administrators said that no threats of violence or physical acts of violence occurred, and that the student-victim could easily have walked away to prevent such from occurring. Equally curious was the principal’s inability to provide a satisfactory reason why the security guard, who was daily assigned the student parking lot to monitor and patrol, was absent from the lot during the attack; he was elsewhere on the campus. For a couple of years, the local police department had one of its deputies regularly deployed to the high school. Following the attack, he wrote up an incident report; however, like the principal, he mysteriously "lost" it afterwards.
Later that week, the principal summoned both boys to his office and informed them that they were being placed on suspension from school for being "mutual combatants." The principal’s handling of the assault case and his disregarding abundant a priori signs that the assault itself was a foreseen event, were not supported by either California state law or case law handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court. Indeed, precedent cases of law place in a harsh and disapproving light the principal’s errors and omissions. Controlling my ire at the irresponsibility and dereliction of the principal, I said "yes" when the attorney asked me to take the case as her Expert Witness. There are several issues (enumerated below) at work here, in this most unfortunate case. Yet there are other cases like it throughout the state. The court held this particular school district responsible for the specific physical injuries the victim-student suffered. School officials must recognize and accept their clear-cut and well-defined responsibilities under the law to prevent these kinds of campus hazards and their mandated duty to care for and protect their students.
1. The High School’s Obligation to Protect Students and Prevent Harm
Courts have long recognized that teachers and school administrators must act to control and protect students—even in the absence of a formal rule. Immediate classroom and campus control of student conduct is conferred upon schools under the in loco parentis doctrine, which conduct is put in perspective in an old Wisconsin case:
While the principal or teacher in charge of a public school is subordinate to the school board or board of education of his district or city, and must enforce rules and regulations adopted by the board for the government of the school, and execute all its lawful orders in that behalf, he does not derive all his power and authority in the school and over his pupils from affirmative action of the board. He stands for the time being in loco parentis to his pupils, and because of that relation he must necessarily exercise authority over them in many things concerning which the board may have remained silent. In the school, as in the family, there exists on the part of the pupils the obligations of obedience to lawful commands, subordination, civil deportment, respect for the rights of other pupils and fidelity to duty. These obligations are inherent in any proper school system, and constitute, so to speak, the common law of the school. [State ex rel. Burpee v. Burton, 45 Wis. 150, 30 Am.Rep. 706 (1878) ]
The high school principal and his co-administrators failed their "in loco parentis" obligation by depriving the student parking lot, in which the assault and attack upon the victim-student took place, of a security guard whose presence, according to depositional testimony, was usually daily, regular, and habitual. Equally unacceptable was the principal’s choosing to rationalize away the assault and battery as the conduct of "mutual combatants." The objective of the school’s administrators ought not to have been to mitigate the severity of the perpetrator’s assault and battery on his victim, or ignore [the facts of] its occurrence at all, but at the very least to exercise due diligence and proceed to find out what could have been done—pre- and post-altercation—in the best interests of the assaulted and injured student.
2. Deprivation of Due Process Rights
"The fundamental requisite of due process of law is the opportunity to be heard," Grannis v. Ordean, 234 U.S. 385, 394, 34 S.Ct. 779, 783 (1914), a right that the student-victim should have been granted and a requirement that school administrators denied him. This right has "little reality or worth unless one is informed that the matter is pending and can choose for himself whether to…contest." Mullane v. Central Hanover Trust Co., supra, 339 U.S. at 314, 70 S.Ct. at 657. At the very least, therefore, students in jeopardy of being suspended and the consequential recinsion, loss or withdrawal of a protected property interest (e.g., berth on an athletic team, credits toward graduation, or merit qualifications) must be given some kind of notice and afforded some kind of hearing. "Parties whose rights are to be affected are entitled to be heard; and in order that they may enjoy that right they must first be notified." Baldwin v. Hale, 1 Wall. 223, 233 (1864).
Suspending the student-perpetrator and the student-victim, under the pretext of "mutual combat," was tantamount to (1) false arrest; (2) administrators perjuring their previous claims that no threats of violence or physical acts of violence occurred; and (3) deliberate indifference, under which the deprivation of due process rights certainly occurred. In Goss v. Lopez, the Supreme Court of the United States (1975, 419 U.s. 565, 95 S.Ct. 729) ruled that "Temporary suspension requires procedural due process." The principal attested that he interviewed witnesses; yet his admission that he failed to document and preserve their statements places certain doubt upon the fairness of the administrative actions he felt compelled to initiate against the student-victim. By establishing as law Education Code § 48900, the California State Legislature’s intent has been, and is, to provide for suspensions and expulsions for acts of violence such as fighting, except in cases of self-defense. It must be noted that the student-victim is quoted in the case record as trying to avoid a fight because "I’m on probation." Unwilling to risk court difficulties by violating his probation, the victim feared to engage in even the allowable act of defending himself. In its denial to the victim of the Fourteenth Amendment protections of due process and, instead, imposing its defective suspension order upon him, the school further injured him.
3. Pre-Meditation and Lying in Wait
Indeed, the perpetrator’s failure to change his mind and disengage from his desire to assault his victim—and instead, to wait outside in the pouring rain for him to appear—is strongly suggestive of the behavior of a perpetrator-student who had a well-formed and deadly plan in mind. Despite inclement weather, he was intent on biding his time and lying in wait to carry out his plan and, with a brutal discipline, see it through. Indeed, his vicious assault on the unsuspecting victim, and the manner and means with which he took total advantage of the hapless boy in the driving rain, has both undertones and overtones of criminal, malicious intent.
4. Duty to Expel
California Education Code § 48900 provides for the suspension and expulsion from school of a student who has "(a)(1) Caused, attempted to cause, or threatened to cause physical injury to another person; or (2) Willfully used force or violence upon the person of another, except in self-defense; (b) Possessed, sold, or otherwise furnished…any dangerous object."
The principal had a duty to expel the perpetrator. The case record made it clear and convincing that the perpetrator not only attempted to cause physical injury to another person, but actually succeeded in that attempt. Further, that he willfully used force or violence upon his victim is very clear: his resolve was reinforced by his well-conceived and previously-arranged plan. The perpetrator’s throwing his victim upon or against the perpetrator’s girlfriend’s car—such that the car sustained bodily damage—rendered the car itself as the "dangerous object" that the perpetrator "possessed" and used against the victim.
5. Mandated Notification of Law Enforcement California Education Code § 48902 ("Notification of law enforcement authorities; liability for making report; failure to notify; penalty"), with language referencing California Penal Code 245, frankly define’s the principal’s reporting obligations when an assault has occurred. Education Code § 48902 must be viewed as an expression of the legislature’s intent to notify law enforcement whenever a student has been assaulted, battered, and traumatized by a deadly force beating of the kind visited upon the student-victim by the student-perpetrator. This statute (Education Code § 48902) reads: "(a) The principal of a school or the principal’s designee shall, prior to the suspension or expulsion of any pupil notify the appropriate law enforcement authorities of the county or city in which the school is situated, of any acts of the student which may violate § 245 of the Penal Code." California Penal Code 245 states:
245. (a) (1) Any person who commits an assault upon the person of another with a deadly weapon or instrument other than a firearm or by any means of force likely to produce great bodily injury shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for two, three, or four years, or in a county jail for not exceeding one year, or by a fine not exceeding ten thousand dollars ($10,000), or by both the fine and imprisonment.
6. Preventive Detention
One U.S. Supreme Court decision has preventive detention as its purpose and upholds the right of a judge to detain a suspect until trial because the suspect is a danger to others or self. The Court found in Schall v. Martin (1984) that it was legal for a student to be detained for the protection of self and others. (104 S.Ct. 2403; 1984.)
California Penal Code § 628.2 provides that the principal of each school submit to the superintendent of his district a complete report of crimes committed on school grounds.
The principal failed to request the detainment of the student-perpetrator by the police officer assigned to the school (the principal could even have summoned other law enforcement) despite the perpetrator’s expellable offense of assault and battery that rendered him a danger to the campus at large. Moreover, the principal’s failure to exercise due diligence in the gathering of evidence, and his failure to forward any resultant reports to the superintendent of the school district, was both dereliction of duty and a violation of law.
7. Standard of Care and Duty to Protect In Hoff v. Vacaville Unified School District (1997) (68 Cal.Rptr. 2d 920), the Court concluded that the status of the victim made no difference and that the duty of supervision protects nonstudents as well as students.
The principal failed in his duty to protect the student-victim.
The standard of care imposed on school authorities in exercising their supervisorial responsibilities is the degree of care that a person of ordinary prudence, charged with comparable duties, would exercise under the same circumstances. Pirkle v. Oakdale Union School District (1953) (Sac. No. 6183. 40 Cal.2d 207.)
Having affirmed his knowledge about the incidents of heated verbal exchanges and shouting matches between the perpetrator and victim, the principal failed to take precautionary and preventive measures that his peers and professional colleagues in other school districts employ as standard procedures. These include but are not limited to: (1) "Safety Net Program" that functions like an in-school suspension program in which students have the opportunity to receive counseling, behavior monitoring, and coursework; (2) In-School Suspension Program: This is a tried-and-true disciplinary program used by school districts since the 1970’s. It has more of an after-the-fact disciplinary component than "Safety Net," yet also allows for students to complete coursework and keep current academically; (3) Counseling: Principals, relying on "campus intelligence," provided by other students, have successfully taken at-risk students aside and talked frankly to them about the costs and consequences of fighting and breaking school rules; (4) Behavior Contracts: In tandem with either frank discussions or counseling about the student’s infractions, the student is presented with a specific set of behavioral standards and conditions, tailor-made to fit his infractions. He agrees, in writing, to comply with these conditions and attests to having been advised of the consequences for violating the contract; and (5) Parent Conferences: Like the aforementioned counseling, this, when used, has often deterred negative behavior and/or prevented a crisis, when "campus intelligence" informed a principal that such might have occurred. Inasmuch as the principal failed to document his post-altercation interviews of witnesses, it is reasonable to question whether and how he availed himself of prevention and intervention strategies, of the kind mentioned above, or others at his disposal.
8. Ineffective or Lack of Supervision
Either a total lack of supervision or ineffective supervision may constitute deficient ordinary care on the part of those responsible for student supervision. (Dailey v. Los Angeles Unified School District supra.) In the Dailey case, a student fractured his skull when he fell when several boys started to "slap box" while walking to the gymnasium during the lunch hour. The boy died and his parents sued, alleging negligent supervision. The evidence at trial revealed that the head of the Physical Education Department had not assigned a staff member to supervising duty. The "slap boxing" contest had attracted some 30 spectators but the teachers had failed to hear the noise due to "talking on the telephone," "working on lesson plans" and "eating lunch." The Court held the school district liable for its employees’ negligence.
By failing to act on reasonable suspicion (campus rumor) that an altercation between the perpetrator and victim might occur, and by downgrading the level of severity of the major and severe assault upon the victim, the principal and other administrators at the high school also failed to exercise total supervision, which fact predicated a dangerously negligent situation in the student parking lot.
In Lucas v. Fresno Unified School District (1993) 14 Cal. App. 4th 866, a 10-year old student watched a group of students throwing dirt clods at one another during recess. He saw approximately 100 clods thrown before he joined in the fun. He had thrown only two clods when, unfortunately, he was hit in the eye with a clod. The parents sued and the district responded by claiming "assumption of risk" as a defense, that is, the child assumed the risk when he decided to play the game. The Court rejected the defense and decided the case in the pupil’s favor based on the duty to supervise. The Court stated:
The standard of care imposed upon school personnel in carrying out this duty to supervise is identical to that required in the performance of their other duties….Supervision during recess and lunch periods is required in part, so that may be maintained and student conduct regulated. Such regulation is necessary precisely because of the commonly known tendency of students to engage in aggressive and impulsive behavior which exposes them and their peers to the risk of serious physical harm.
The high school’s administrators’ assertion that the victim had opportunities to avoid his perpetrator yet chose none of them, is the same sort of indefensible and court-rejected "assumption of risk" claim noted above.
It is a new day in public school administration, and school administrators must recognize that, in our post-Columbine and post-9/11 nation, parents are holding school districts directly responsible for ensuring the perpetual safe-keeping and welfare of their children. In the foregoing case, the victim-student and his mother successfully sued the school district for a seven-figure sum. In these parents’ minds, no damage award of any size could ever compensate them for the school-based violent deaths of or injuries to their children. Television news reporters, amid horrifying film footage, have commented on the tragic irony of children carrying lunch bags to school only to be later carried away themselves in body bags. Many are the school districts and school administrators who belatedly realize that negligence, indifference, breach of care, and dereliction of duty precipitate or create a dangerous campus environment. Sadly, they will find themselves virtually defenseless against, and certainly embarrassed before, aggrieved and injured plaintiffs suing them for financial damages in courts of law. Damage awards are often substantial in these kinds of cases. The lesson for school officials is crystal clear: Errors and omissions in school safety, as well as negligence and dereliction of duty, can cost their school districts staggering sums and derail or destroy their own careers.
See Dr. James Shaw's Listing on Experts.com.
©Copyright 2005 - All Rights Reserved
DO NOT REPRODUCE WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION BY AUTHOR.
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