AD3: school not liable for assault on unsupervised first grader

Geywits v Charlotte Valley Central School District, 2002 NY Slip Op 05992 [3d Dept 2012] [available here]

A school and its teachers cannot guarantee the safety of their students. But teachers do owe their students the same duty as parents, and "liability will be established where the school fails to supervise its students with the same degree of care as parent of ordinary prudence in comparable circumstances and such negligent supervision was the proximate cause of the plaintiff's foreseeable injuries." (Geywits at *4.)

Given that standard, consider the following facts*1:

A K-12 school allows its 6-year-old first-graders to walk from the cafeteria to their classrooms unattended. All of the school's students, from 5-year-old kindergarten students to 18-year-old high school seniors, share the same building, and high school students share the hallways with the much younger students. On the way back from the cafeteria, a couple of the six-year-old first-graders are dragged into a bathroom by a high school sophomore and sexually assaulted.

Is the school potentially liable? Did the teachers' decision to allow the 6-year-old students to walk from the cafeteria to their classrooms fall below the supervision one would expect of a reasonably on-the-ball parent?

A majority of the Third Department held that the school could not be liable under those facts, because the sophomore at issue "was a good student, had no significant or recent disciplinary history, and had no prior instances of sexually inappropriate or physical conduct." (Geywits at *3.) The intentional assault by a third-party, without actual or constructive notice to the school, is enough to break the causal connection and result in the dismissal of the plaintiff student's action against the school.

Justice Stein dissented. He would have held that while teachers "cannot reasonably be expected to guard against every sudden or spontaneous act that occurs between students on a daily basis," in this case a jury should have decided whether the school could have foreseen that its failure to supervise first-graders in transit from class to lunch could result in the children being assaulted or injured by older students.

This is an extremely close fact pattern, involving the application of relatively recent Court of Appeals case law regarding the extent of a school's duty of care to its students. It would not surprise me to see the Court of Appeals take up this case.

*1 The facts are stated in a light most favorably to the plaintiff. Obviously the school, and the sophomore, vigorously disputed that any sexual assault took place. Indeed, the lack of proof that any sexual assault occurred was an alternate ground for the majority's holding affirming the dismissal of plaintiff's claims.