This from Mark Walsh at the School Law Blog: Justices Uncharacteristically Reticent in Title IX ArgumentsWASHINGTON — The parents of a girl who said she had been molested on a school bus seemed poised to win what may turn out to be an empty victory, judging from the justices’ questions on Tuesday at the Supreme Court.
The case was filed in 2002 after the girl, a kindergarten student in Hyannis, Mass., told her parents she was being sexually harassed by an 8-year-old boy every time she wore a dress or skirt to school. Two or three times a week, the girl said, the boy would force her to lift her skirt and pull down her underwear, provoking mocking laughter from the other students on the bus.
Her parents were dissatisfied with the school’s response, which included an inconclusive investigation and the offer to transfer their daughter to another bus. The school took no action against the boy, who denied the girl’s account, and it refused to place an adult monitor on the bus.
The parents sued under two federal statutes, and the argument on Tuesday concerned how those statutes interact.
The federal appeals court in Boston last year ruled that the parents could not win their claim under the federal law known as Title IX, which bars sex discrimination in schools that receive federal money, because they could not prove that the school district had acted with deliberate indifference to the harassment...The question before the court in the case, Fitzgerald v. Barnstable School Committee, No. 07-1125, was whether the parents might also invoke a broader federal civil rights law known as Section 1983.
Several justices appeared ready to accept that Title IX, enacted in 1972, was not meant to limit the ability to sue under Section 1983, enacted a century earlier. But, in this case at least, they also seemed to think that allowing a claim under the earlier law would make no difference.
“In the civil rights area, there are a lot of overlapping statutes,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said. “Yes, you have two claims. But if you lose under IX, you are going to lose under 1983 as well.”
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Parents’ Suit Offers Test of Title IX for Justices
This from the New York Times:
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2 comments:
This situation is one where you begin to question the parents, cause this situation could go either way. There would be no way to prove that the young boy was doing this to the younger girl. Most children at that age are not going to understand what the boy was doing. But if you are the parent of this young girl I can understand why you would be so upset that the school was not doing anything. You would think the least that they could do was to put a monitor on the bus. I know the town that I am from they have the driver and a monitor on each bus, it seems like this is the best way to keep things from happening on the bus such as sexual harassment.
I'm not sure what questions you would ask the parents in a situation such as this - the question to be asked is why the lower courts: ignored the affidavits of witnesses to the incidents on the bus; ignored the ramifications of the principal's depositional statement, whereby he asked the witnesses to tell him they didn't see anything; ignored the police report that stated the boy admitted the harassment occurred (but then denied doing it); and ignored the superintendent's depositional statements regarding placing a monitor on the bus (easily affordable but he just chose not to do it) and why in their final analysis, the lower courts found it reasonable to remove the victim and not the bully from the bus? The main issue in this case was not who did it, but rather what would the school do to prevent it from happening again? Instead of correcting the problem, the school chose to use their resources to create the illusion that nothing happened, while leaving in place the elements that caused the harassment to occur in the first place - thereby leaving the remaining kindergartners at risk. But, as Superintendent Dever said in his deposition, he didn't have a problem with that - we did. Bob Fitzgerald
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