District Administration - April 2007 - (Page 33)

You in Court!” By Ron Schachter The words every administrator hates can be avoided if you know how to play the game. Here’s how. A lmost every school attorney—and plenty of school administrators—can tell you about a lawsuit that seems right out of a Franz Kafka novel. In one case, “a girl’s father sued because she wasn’t allowed to sit at the lunch table she wanted,” says Tom Hutton, the staff attorney for the National School Boards Association. Another suit charged that a teacher had assigned too much summer homework. “It’s a huge problem,” adds Florida attorney John Bowen, who has practiced school law since 1973 and says that at any one time he has to deal with as many as 10 lawsuits against his district of Manatee County Schools. “In Florida, we’ve spent millions and millions of dollars defending against lawsuits,” he says. “We’ve had lawsuits on who should be the valedictorian of one high school, and we’re sued over dress codes … We’ve even been sued over what we serve in our cafeteria,” he adds. Two years ago the South Orange and Maplewood School District in New Jersey was taken to federal court for excluding traditional Christmas music from holiday concerts. The list goes on, from litigation over workers compensation and unlawful ﬁ rings, to personal injuries on playgrounds and school buses, to searches and arrests of students on school property. In a society plagued by more and more lawsuits, some educational experts say that merely the prospect of legal action is altering the way schools do business, especially in the areas of discipline, special education, and free speech rights. “Even if there’s not a court case, the threat of one can have a very chilling effect on school practices,” claims Richard Arum, associate professor of sociology at New York University and the author of Judging School Discipline: The Crisis of Moral Authority. “The threat of litigation is where the real action is,” agrees Hutton, whose NSBA Council of School Attorneys program serves 3,000 school attorneys with legal updates and research, seminars and an online community. “That imposes great costs on schools,” he continues, especially for educators and administrators who must seek expensive legal advice. “The system is set up to be very litigious,” Hutton says. “It’s premised on children and their guardians having legal rights It puts schools and parents in adversarial positions.” The Age of Student Rights Lawsuit-driven student and parental attitudes date back almost forty years, notes Arum, when liberal-leaning courts of the 1960s challenged some of the fundamental tenets of teaching. “Courts established that juveniles were entitled to due process, and the same logic extended to schools, where you could no longer assume that administrators were acting in the best interests of the child,” Arum explains. “The logic of in loco parentis was seriously eroded.” In the 1969 case of Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, for instance, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that students had constitutional rights as minors and ruled that the district had violated the rights of three high school students punished for wearing black armbands protesting the Vietnam War. Also in 1969, in Sullivan v. Houston Independent School District, a federal court ruled that two students expelled for publishing an underground newspaper had been April 2007 33 www.DistrictAdministration.com http://www.DistrictAdministration.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of District Administration - April 2007

Editor's Letter
Update
Inside the Law
Curriculum Update
District Profile
Administrator Profile
“See You in Court!"
Lost in Translation
Bonding Agents
Certifying AP Courses
Hunting for Talent - Part 2
Buying Power
The Musty Bookshelf
New Products
Leadership
Speaking Out
The Online Edge
Problem/Solution
Calendar of Events
Overheard On The Pulse

District Administration - April 2007