Posts Tagged ‘schools’

“Who needs a bad teacher when you can get a worse judge?”

The Economist (Nov. 25) on the paralysis of our schools, with special reference to the legal consent decrees that tie up public education in New York City (via Right Coast). And as Jim Copland reports at Point of Law (Nov. 29), “Over at Phil Howard’s Common Good, they have collected all the laws and regulations governing a typical public high school in New York City. On their new website, ‘Over Ruled,’ you can access explanations and commentary by type of regulation as well as follow interactive flow charts explaining the labyrinthine process for, e.g., suspending a student.”

Dodgeball unsafe for 7-year-olds, suit says

Looks like all those school districts that banned dodgeball, and the professor who described the popular kids’ game as “litigation waiting to happen” (see Jun. 13, 2001), were on to something. A New York appeals court has rejected a request by the Vestal Central School District to dismiss a suit demanding compensation for the injury that seven-year-old Heather Lindaman suffered when she “became entangled with another student during the game, fell on a hardwood floor and fractured her left arm”. The school said the players were adequately supervised, but the court said a jury should decide whether second graders are too young for the game. (Yancey Roy, “Vestal lawsuit could put dodgeball on trial”, Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin, Nov. 20) David Giacalone comments.

School blamed for class-cutters’ drunken binge

Montana:

The parents of two 11-year-old boys who died of exposure and alcohol poisoning last winter after cutting class to go drink have sued Ronan Public Schools for $4 million.

They allege the school district failed in its duty “to follow its policy and protect and safeguard children that were entrusted to their care.”

The lawsuit also alleges that [the school district] has discriminated against American Indians by “failing to properly select, train and implement Native American staff who are sensitive to the disability of alcoholism,” thus making Pablo School District partially responsible “for the actions of children who were allowed to leave school and die of alcohol and hypothermia.”

(John Stromnes, “Parents sue Ronan school over deaths of their sons”, The Missoulian, Nov. 6). Update Mar. 2, 2006: jury renders defense verdict.

Annals of zero tolerance: Civil War replica musket

“A student who took part in a Civil War re-enactment was arrested and could get expelled after a replica musket was found in his car at school.” Joshua Phelps, 17, attends Pine Bush High School about 70 miles north of New York City. “Crawford town police confiscated the musket, handcuffed Phelps and charged him with misdemeanor criminal possession of a weapon, punishable by up to a year in jail.” (“Civil War musket has teen in jam with the law”, AP/South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Oct. 14)(more on zero tolerance).

Connecting the dots

Childhood obesity is up, in part, because, while 90% of kids who lived within a mile of school walked to school a generation ago, that figure is now 31%. (And, ironically, the tendency of parents to drive kids to and from school has increased traffic near schools, increasing the chances of pedestrian-auto collisions.) An article in Salon discusses the Safe Routes to School program. SR2S hopes to encourage more kids to walk to school by assuaging parents’ safety concerns by using elderly volunteers to create “walking school buses,” but the program has found trouble getting off the ground because of liability concerns. Don’t expect John Banzhaf to bring a class action against lawyers for their role in the obesity epidemic–or Salon to remember this problem the next time they fulminate against tort reform. (Linda Baker, “Walk to school, yes, but don’t forget your lawyer”, Salon, Oct. 13).

Medical education constricted

Symptoms of the medical liability crisis are less severe in North Carolina than in many other states; “Dr. Edward Halperin, vice dean of Duke’s medical school, said the issue is not cited as a major factor in Duke students’ decisions to pick a medical specialty,” which is not the case in some other parts of the country. “The malpractice issue has had a negative influence, however, in the kinds of learning opportunities medical schools offer. In years past, Halperin said, schools routinely let students do training stints at hospitals around the country. Now this practice is being curtailed, because medical schools are leery of carrying the liability for students working outside their hospitals.

“Such subtle problems seldom get mentioned in the debate, but Halperin said the effect is long term. ‘It’s inhibiting access to educational opportunities,’ he said.” (Sarah Avery, “Malpractice debate hides subtleties”, Raleigh News & Observer, Sept. 7) (via Common Good).

Choosing our school? Remember we’re the schoolmaster

Under a new clause added to handbooks distributed earlier this month at the 289 schools run by the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, parents and students “must agree to not sue the archdiocese, their parish or school over disciplinary and academic measures such as expulsion or being held back.” (David Andreatta, “Holy Outrage”, New York Post, Sept. 15)(via Amy Welborn, who comments).

U.K.: compensation-culture roundup

It isn’t just the fox-hunt ban: “According to the British Horse Society, dozens of pony trekking centres and riding schools are being forced to close because of spiralling insurance costs and customer claims. Some riding schools have seen insurance costs increase five-fold in the past five years.” (Richard Alleyne, “Injury claim culture ‘is killing off our riding schools'”, Daily Telegraph, Jul. 14). “Children’s charities have been forced to cancel activities and shut down centres because of a big rise in insurance premiums as a result of the fear of parents making compensation claims for trivial incidents,” reports the Daily Telegraph; the prospect of U.S.-style litigiousness spreading to Britain is widely blamed (David Bamber, “School trips and charities hit by soaring insurance costs”, Daily Telegraph, Aug. 29). A sanitized childhood without cuts and scrapes is too dire to contemplate, thinks Quentin Letts (“A child has a right to dirt and bruises”, Daily Telegraph, Aug. 22). David Davis, shadow Home Secretary, sounded the alarm last month in the Spectator (“Victim nation”, Aug. 28). And insurance broker AON has published a report on the problem entitled “Blame, Claim and Gain” (PDF). For more, see many entries on our U.K. page. P.S. More from the Telegraph, from May (Joshua Rozenberg, “Is there a compensation culture?”, May 20). And from September (Liz Lightfoot, “Adventure pursuits ‘too risky for schools'”, Sept. 28).

Human subjects protection regs

Federal regulations require universities to maintain something called an Institutional Review Board which preapproves research on human subjects to make sure it is not improperly injurious to the persons being studied. There is a certain kind of logic to such requirements when it comes to, say, invasive medical experiments. “Yet the human subjects protection racket has been able to extend its claws around social science research, subjecting it to the same rigmarole as demanded of the medical types,” writes Mark Kleiman (Sept. 8). “This is stupid, because almost no social science research actually poses important risks to its subjects that couldn’t be handled perfectly well by an informed-consent system audited retrospectively rather than a pre-approval system”. He adds:

Worse, since social-science research is often controversial, the risks of censorship are much more prominent, especially given diversity requirements demanding, for example, that a representative of prisoners be involved in clearing any study involving prisoners.

Any collection of data from an identifiable person counts as “human-subjects research,” even, for example, interviewing a group of judges about how they handle probation revocations. How answering such questions puts the judge at risk is more than I can figure out. And heaven help you if you submit a proposal saying “I intend to ask judges what happens in probation cases.” That’s far too vague: you have to submit a questionnaire for review, as if you knew in advance what questions were going to turn out to be relevant.

Update: for more, see Point of Law, Dec. 7, 2006 (paper by Dale Carpenter).