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Discipline: Your Best Investment
What should school administrators immediately begin to do to protect their school districts’ treasuries from being drained dry by negligence lawsuits? Let’s take a page out of New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s "book." Mayor Bloomberg has put the New York City schools on notice by announcing his objective to ferret out and punish disruptive students in the public schools, particularly those in schools with high rates of criminal violence (in previous years thought of as normal), and hold the principals more accountable for reducing disciplinary problems within their schools. My advice is that school administrators should structure their discipline policies along Mayor Bloomberg’s "safety first" principles. Then, if these school officials are ever summoned to the witness stand in court, they will be able to more clearly and convincingly show evidence of a pattern and practice of sound school safety plans and procedures at work.

Zero Tolerance
Likewise, school superintendents should establish zero-tolerance policies against bullying, and against racist, anti-Semitic or homophobic taunts by students. Students engaging in such threatening and harmful behavior should be suspended or expelled. The middle school student whose beating and hospitalization was widely reported in the national press, should have had the satisfaction of knowing that his principal, teachers and counselors who all failed in their job to supervise and protect him, were fired or will be. Personnel policies governing the professional responsibilities of school administrators need to be re-written to include such provisions for firing. The collective dereliction of duty almost resulted in the death of this particular student. That is why in loco parentis is now the new battle cry of litigious parents.

To Sue Or Not to Sue…Parents
Certainly, with an eye toward protecting their purses and public relations, school districts might consider suing the parents of student-terrorists: These bullies, assailants, and other anti-social and hostile beings cause constant pain and suffering and place in jeopardy the lives of other children. But before school superintendents leap to launch litigation against dangerously negligent parents, here are some guidelines they and their school boards can rather immediately turn into active and effective policies for ensuring school safety on their campuses.

• A school safety committee should be formed and composed of the principal or designee; teacher representative of the recognized teacher union; parent of an attending student; classified employee of the recognized employee union; and other members, if desired.
• A comprehensive school safety plan should be jointly written with a representative from a law enforcement agency.
• Each school should have a specific date on which its comprehensive school safety plan is to be adopted and made effective. And each plan should be reviewed every year on that date.
• Before final adoption of the plan, a public meeting should be held by the school safety planning committee at the school site, to allow for input.
• Failure of any school to develop a comprehensive school safety plan should be cited by the school superintendent and sanctions imposed.
• Whether the state legislature has enacted a school safety law or not, every school should forward its completed comprehensive school safety plan to its respective school district office or county office of education for approval.
• At the end of each school year, every school should report on the status of its school safety plan in the annual school accountability report card and to the news media.
  

Strength in Numbers
When engaging in the development of a comprehensive school safety plan, school superintendents should feel free to consult with their counterparts and colleagues in other cities, townships, boroughs, commonwealths, and states. Again, when disclosed on the witness stand in court, such effort will be seen as equivalent to "due diligence" in the gathering and sifting and sorting of facts, information, and violence prevention strategies and programs, and may favor the superintendent and the school district with the court’s or jurors’ perception of them as concerned and responsive, not careless and negligent.

In addition to the perennial question of accountability, "What did you know and when did you know it?", school officials must today prepare to confront safety negligence lawsuits by coming to terms with the query, "Do you now and did you then have a school safety plan in place?" This will be the presiding question whose answer predicates whether the school district’s treasury will be plundered by grieving and furious plaintiff-parents seeking revenge and relief, or preserved by the court as untouchable domain, protected by a comprehensive school safety plan in no less the same way than the school district’s driver education curriculum protects the district from lawsuits in the aftermath of errant or reckless student drivers who commit vehicular manslaughter.