Rochester, New York (NewYorkInjuryNews.com) — You hope that when you send your child off to school that they will come home as healthy as they were when they left. Unfortunately, there are risks at school just like in any other walk of life. We have seen that some of the scariest and most horrifying things can happen at school – witness the random and barbaric shooting of students by kids armed with guns.
The law states that when your child is in the control of the school that they are acting in “loco parentis” – that is they are acting in your place as a parent, which means that they must act reasonably. The most typical case occurs when your child is hit or injured by another student – sometimes the class bully.
The key to proving this case is to show what we call “notice.” That is, that the school officials knew of the violent propensities of the other student and did nothing about it. How this works is during the course of the litigation is that your lawyer asks for records regarding the assailant’s history in the school and whether there have been any prior reported incidents. If there were previous events that is good for your case, if not, that still may not be the end of the road. Assume a teacher leaves a group of kids unattended in a room and a fight breaks out –it was not very good judgment on the teacher’s part to leave the students unsupervised and that can lead to the school being liable.
There are other situations as well that may allow you to recover. If in an industrial arts class, a machine injures your child because they were not given the proper safety protection such as goggles, you could bring a lawsuit. A home economics class can be no less dangerous – if your child has loose clothing on and leans over a stove, catches fire and gets burned. That is a horrifying scenario – but certainly not out of the realm of possibilities.
A word of caution: School injuries can be a trap. You must first serve a Notice of Claim on the correct legal entity within 90 days (or other applicable time period) of the accident otherwise you lose the right to bring a lawsuit. Be careful as schools districts have their own legal entities that need to be named in a Notice of Claim. The “trap” does not end there; there are also limited statutes of limitations. Therefore, your action must be statuted within one year and 90 days from the date of the occurrence (Or other applicable time period).
NewYorkInjuryNews.com Premises Liability Reporter